Toronto's Iconic Wavelength Indie Music Series Waves Goodbye (and Hello)

Fear not, Toronto concertgoers. The city's vastly influential Wavelength weekly concert series may be wrapping up with this weekend's celebratory 500th show -- but it's only so organizers can move on to bigger, wilder events.

This weekend marks 10 full years since Wavelength's weekly Sunday night concerts helped develop Toronto's DIY indie scene. The first-ever show was held on Feb. 13, 2000 at the now-shuttered Ted's Wrecking Yard and featured Mean Red Spiders and Neck, two bands that will reunite on Sunday night for the grand finale.

But Wavelength organizers Jonny Dovercourt (Jonathan Bunce), Ryan McLaren, Kevin Parnell and Doc Pickles (Duncan MacDonnell) aren't feeling too sentimental about ending the Sunday night ritual that has proudly featured pre-fame performances by the likes of Feist and Broken Social Scene (including Kevin Drew's debut under the moniker "John Tesh Jr. & The Broken Social Scene").

"We're giving ourselves permission to get kinda misty and look back one time and then move forward," Doc Pickles tells Spinner. "This resetting of the clock at 500 is sort of our new canvas, that's why we're kind of excited about hitting 500 and we're not all sad that it's happening. There's so many more things that we can do."

In the 1990s, Toronto's music scene was nothing like what it is today -- Broken Social Scene were yet to become indie superheroes, Crystal Castles (pictured above) hadn't cracked open their Nintendo systems and scavenged the sounds inside and F---ed Up were a decade away from their unhinged, undressed Polaris Prize victory. There was plenty of talent to be found, but, well, no one had quite found it yet.

"There was actually this really great scene of bands in the mid-'90s that were all friends and that were interconnected... and for a while it seemed like any of these bands could blow up big and become the next Pavement," Dovercourt reminisces. "But it kinda never happened. By about '98 or '99 everyone was kind of bummed out -- we'd been doing it a while and not really getting anywhere, everyone had gone on a crappy tour and come back broke and were coming back to Toronto to play for the same 30 people -- it just seemed like this hamster wheel.

"We all had a lot of love for Toronto and the local music scene, but it seemed like we were the only ones who did and no one else cared."

After years of seeing this pool of talent go painfully ignored, a group of friends who had been trying to get their various musical projects off the ground finally had enough. They knew that if they wanted people to pay attention to Toronto's music community they would have to build something unique.


Evening Hymns performs at Wavelength 452

In 1999, Dovercourt, along with Doc Pickles and a slew of local musicians, came together to brainstorm ideas. Out of that session came the idea to start a regular music night -- two bands and a DJ with Pickles as the MC. Wavelength sputtered in its infancy, at times leaving the organizers to wonder if this would be just another failed attempt to bring Toronto's music lovers together. But patience won out -- they built it and, eventually, the people came.

Dovercourt is modest about their role in the series' success. "People wanted something like Wavelength to come along for a long time, we were just the ones who figured out how to make it happen."

Local musician Jeremy Strachan has performed at "dozens of Wavelengths with a number of different bands." He marvels at the longevity of the series and the resiliency of its masterminds. In his mind, "it filled a void when it needed filling, and over the last decade has represented an amazing stability and endurance that music scenes seldom witness. It's one thing to have a series for a year or two, but a decade of weekly shows is, in my understanding, fairly unprecedented."

Equally unprecedented is the list of bands and artists who have performed during the series' 10-year run. The organizers' tally tops out at around 1,100 acts, including local heroes like Tokyo Police Club, Owen Pallett (as Final Fantasy) and Junior Boys, as well as internationally revered names like Sufjan Stevens and Dirty Projectors. But the goal was never to get big names on the bill, or even to try and catch a band on the way up (though that invariably happened). Wavelength's one rule has always been to invite bands they genuinely like.

"I think all of us are just eager to hear new bands all the time," Dovercourt says. "[We pursue] things we want to pursue, [invite] people who we want to play."

"We don't aim to do something special," Pickles adds. "We respect the music and put on stuff we like."