gonna have to do that thing where i'm copying and pasting from my journal again...sorry about the lazyness...
all week they've been advertising this Ghost Bees / Timber Timbre show but not disclosing the location other than the fact that it was going to be at a "secret loft". i've been trying to figure out where the hell it was going to be but i finally put the pieces together, thanks to the guys at zulu records, to find the address, and all i got was the address. vancouver sure likes to keep its underground music scene, well, underground.
when i got there, i found myself right in the heart of the infamous Downtown Eastside, by East Hastings. as in the crime+prostitution+poverty central, the basis for the Godspeed You Black Emporer song about the end of the world, the home of the open air drug market and Canada's only heroin injection site. actually, as it turned out, i've been hanging out in the DTES a lot for a while now, only i didn't clue in that it was *the* DTES...i just thought i was on the outskirts of Gastown. Vancouver is so bizarre in the way that the city's richest and poorest all hang out in the EXACT SAME PLACES.
anyway, the secret loft turned out to be a converted yoga studio, which is so vancouver, and one of the coolest shows i've been to in a long time. you had to just count the numbers on the door till you hit the address you were given, walk to the unmarked door and with blind faith, just go through and there people were. no liquor license obviously, so people were selling beer out of coolers and smoking during the sets. i proceeded to watch the most amazing sets ever, each one completely different from the previous. it was intimate like a house show, and ghost bees ended up doing a shared set with timber timbre, with them taking turns playing their songs and filling in on backup for each other. it was haunting. it was beautiful. i lay down in the middle of the "living room" and was overwhelmed at how perfect it sounded. all day i was feeling homesick for ontario, and wondering if i want to spend more years living here, but tonight might have settled that for me.
if only the nighttime public transportation system wasn't so bloody awful.
