THAT’S NOT REALLY HOW IT HAPPENS HERE
“I had my friends up from SXSW just as we were about to start NXNE” Michael Hollett, founder of Toronto’s NXNE said in an interview last year. “We were at a show at the Opera House and…at a certain point [I] notice the guys from Texas were gathering in a corner and…they say ‘We just want to be ready when the fights start.’ I said, “What do you mean?’ They say, ‘Well, there’s going to be a fight.’ I ask ‘why?’ ‘Because’ they say, ‘there are black people and white people in the same room.’ I told them, ‘That’s not really how it happens here’…”
NXNE Started in 1994, eight years after its Austin progenitor, the now-famed SXSW. But the underlying song remains the same: These are both tangential antagonists, seeming aimed squarely against modern festival culture. Neither are exclusively single day, militaristically-executed juggernauts with an ever increasing premium on Big Acts. Or at least, not entirely. Like SXSW, NXNE still has a core of shows threaded through Toronto’s local venues—places like the Garrison, the Silver Dollar Room and the Bovine Sex Club.
COLLECTIVE SWEAT
And so it follows that the festival sort of becomes the city’s collective sweat (or something a less repellent) but either way, it is something of its city.
And Toronto is a special place, and far too often overlooked internationally. On approach from the air it has the same darkly insectile skyline as any other city—skyscrapers blooming in clusters through an unusually large palette of green. But on the ground there’s so much to Toronto—a lot more than a Drake album cover and crack smoking ex-mayor. Districts like Little Portugal, Korea Town and Queen West are a jumble of minimalist coffee houses, vegan eateries, cornucopian corner stores, cannabis dispensaries and alluring bars of every stripe. Like someone followed Melbourne’s inner north to its logical conclusion.
MYSTERY (OR AT LEAST THE HOPE OF IT)
But as time has passed and the popularity of NXNE has exploded, the festival has naturally expanded to the point where it not only has its range of club shows (called CLUB LAND) sprayed through the local haunts of Toronto, it has also swallowed a large-scale two day festival (PORT LANDS) and one-day gaming conference (FUTURE LANDS). But Club Land remains at its core—synonymous with the city’s identity of discovery and even mystery (or at least the hope of it).
GUARANTEED GOOD TIMES ™
Whether it’s algorithmically generated movie selections or Name-heavy festival headliners, we seem to have developed a need for a Guaranteed Good Time—for popularly verified Known Quantities. But wasting time and trawling through bars you might not have been to hear bands you’ve never encountered is exactly the kind of ambiguity that seems to be declining in large-scale live music. And it’s NXNE’s greatest asset. In the next two volumes we’re going to spend just a few days scratching Toronto’s underbelly. You should totally come join us.
-Paul Cumming for Cool Accidents
