Toronto is lousy with music festivals, but for three years now our city has also hosted a clandestine cult: Extermination Music Night. Art-nerd acolytes have followed the irregularly scheduled, mobile concert series into abandoned factories and decaying office buildings, underneath Lansdowne Bridge and towards the lake’s edge — most recently, this past Saturday night (Aug. 16) under the old Eastern Ave. bridge at the Don Valley Parkway.  
Its programming varies (free jazz, conceptual noise, Pat Benatar dance routines), though its ethos does not: site-specific shows that eliminate all “mediating things” between space and event, trespassing both legal boundaries and the bureaucracy that normally surrounds presentation of rock bands or art installations. And if this candlelit veneration of industrial ruins seems irrational, well, the gods would surely approve. EYE WEEKLY tracked down the EMN Politburo’s Mao and Deng (we’ll call them Matt and Dan) for some anonymous insight.

What inspired you to start doing the series?
Dan: I’d gone to these Wasteland events, put on by [artist] Jubal Brown in the late ’90s, that were done in factories… I started going to those when I was 17 or 18 and that had a pretty profound effect on me. Initially for me it was more of an aesthetic thing than a conceptual thing — maybe I thought about the conceptual aspects a bit later, after the fact….

What’s the reaction from the cops been like? Before your event last September [at the WinPak Technologies factory] they found you guys in the middle of setting up and let it happen…
Matt: There was some hemming and hawing and then they said, “You’ll probably get a noise complaint, but good luck to you,” and they left. They react depending on the situation. There’ve been [some] guys who… you look at them and you think they’re kind of into it.

And then the was the situation this past June [at the Tower Automotive building] where the cops showed up and one of them actually knew one of the people at the show.
Matt: Really?
Dan: Yeah, there was a girl in a gold lamé bathing suit and she was like, “Karen?!” And the cop was like, “Kimberly?!”
Matt: That right there is the reason that this should get busted from time to time. That needs to happen on some level, you know? A cop should see — “Oh, a friend of mine is here?” It’s not criminal activity.

Was it conscious on your part to have the series be so geographically widespread? You’ve done one near Keele and St. Clair, another on Leslie Spit…
Matt: Totally. The moment that really took hold was when Dan suggested doing one at the Guild Inn in Scarborough, and my initial reaction was “That’s too far, no one will go.” And then I was like, “Yeah, of course they’ll go!” You can do these anywhere. I’ve been driving around a bit, and it may not even be possible… but I’d really love to do one in Mimico and go in the other direction.

Some writers have argued that the notion of a local scene is dead, because of the internet, or whatever, and I think EMN is a good response to that. It’s like you’re representing the totality of the city, rather than just a few streets downtown.
Dan: I don’t think Extermination Night would be as interesting in a city like Detroit, because abandoned buildings are par for the course there. Whereas here, it’s like stepping out of — not necessarily a comfort zone, but stepping outside of the norm a bit, as far as the venue is concerned, and also as far as the location of the venue is concerned. Because of course the trip to the location is important. And also, just on a purely practical note, most of the locations that we can use happen to be outside of downtown.
Matt: We should be doing this interview in that abandoned house around the corner.
Dan: It would be really funny to do an Extermination Night in the alley behind Sneaky Dee’s.

It almost changes your view of the urban landscape. After a bunch of these nights, you start thinking “Hey, this would be a good place for a show,” instead of “Hey, this is a weird, creepy abandoned building.”
Dan: Yeah, that’s great. I mean, that’s what I always think about when I look at these. My interest in ruins is primarily event-based. And that ties into the fact that it’s unsanctioned. You can use this space, you just have to do it. You just have to do it! That’s it. 

A HISTORY OF VIOLATION

Extermination Music Night organizer Dan trespasses through the past:

EMN1: Don Valley Brick Works, Oct. 28, 2005
EMN2: Buns Master Factory, Aug. 19, 2006
EMN3: Guild Inn (busted before it began, moved to Cherry Beach, busted again after two hours), May 26, 2007
EMN4: under Landsdowne/Dundas bridge, June 22, 2007
EMN5: lighthouse at southern tip of Leslie Spit, Aug. 11, 2007
EMN6: WinPak Technologies factory, Sept. 7, 2007
EMN7: Symes Transfer Station, May 31, 2008
EMN8: Tower Automotive (busted after 1 hour-ish), June 28, 2008
EMN9: old Eastern Ave. bridge, Aug. 16, 2008