The Perfect Pairing

Greville Tapes Music Club celebrate first season with Sappyfest showcase.

“Sappy has been supportive right from the get go,” says Peter Rowan, looking back over the first complete season of the Greville Tapes Music Club. “Lucas [Hicks] and Jon [Claytor] were encouraging from the start, so it’s great that we’re now closing out the festival this year.”

This week, all of the artists involved in the GTMC’s first season will gather together for a celebratory showcase performance at Sackville’s infamous Thunder & Lightning as part of Sappyfest VI.

“Originally we were hoping to just get a couple of the bands play but the interest from everyone involved was tremendous so we’ve actually got everybody on board,” said Rowan. “It’s pretty neat. That’s a lot of people coming a lot of distance for not much more than a meal ticket and a pass to the festival. When we figured it out, it came to something like twenty passes from the festival so it’s not an insubstantial investment on their end by any means.”

The showcase event will include performances by Catriona Sturton & Motherhood, Julie Doiron & Nancy Pants, Eamon McGarth & Little You, Little Me and Jon McKeil with WHOOP-Szo. Dave Trenaman and Colleen Collins, who recorded all the project tracks at their Port Greville studio, The Quarantine, will also perform as the duo Construction & Deconstruction, bringing the total number of acts performing at the revue to nine.

The GTMC kicked off in the fall of 2015 with an aim to bring two artists or groups together into a creative environment, have them record a few of each other’s tracks together and then take the show on the road dubbing cassettes to sell along the way.

“The recording process got some grease on the wheels as they went along and we got an idea about what kind of end result we could reasonably expect.”

“We were able to pick a bunch of really good bands for the first year,” said Rowan. “Everyone we invited were really into the spirit of the whole thing. In most of the situations, somebody from each project was familiar with Dave and Colleen. Each pairing had its own distinct and unique flavor. Each tape and each session has a consistency to it while also being entirely its own thing. And while each session had its own challenges, I’m pretty happy the way it all worked out.”

With the first four GTMC sessions under his belt, Rowan believes he now has a good idea of the time and work involved in completing each session, experience that will help lay the groundwork for future sessions, which are already in the planning stages.

“The recording process got some grease on the wheels as they went along and we got an idea about what kind of end result we could reasonably expect,” said Rowan. “When we first talked about it we planned to do two originals from each band and a classic Canadian cover, but very quickly we realized that we just didn’t have time to fit that into the process and in the end, that was never the point of the project anyway. At the end of the day it was better to focus on the original material.

“You have to be willing to let certain stuff go in these situations,” he said. “Perhaps sooner than some of them might normally do so, which is also part of the charm of it all. Thankfully, all the musicians involved were well versed in the sort of indie-style approach that surrounds this whole thing.”