No Luck Club

A lot of this Festival is about listening. So is the instrumental hip hop created by no luck club. That's why brothers Trevor and Matt Chan, and Paul Belen were part of last year's Collaboratory. For a group that had never worked with acoustic musicians before, or even attended a folk festival, agreeing to take part was a great leap of faith that says a lot about their creative approach as artists and music lovers.

Their parents watched Trevor and Matt, and Paul, head off to university, hoping they would apply themselves studiously to becoming doctors, lawyers or accountants, but didn't factor in the unique attractions of campus radio. Trevor and Matt started spending more and more time around the station, working on shows and listening to the latest hardcore, hip hop and every other kind of music on offer. Ultimately they fell under the spell of the Bomb Squad, the production team of Public Enemy, who were in the process of changing the sound of hip hop forever.

You can still hear some Bomb Squad in their work today. nlc's music is a dense sonic wonderland where scratches, samples and melody lines roll together with a love of old-school funk. It's smart, it's fun and it kicks. There's a big difference between a beat and a groove, and nlc draws on a groove 40 years long, reaching back to Stax, Sly, Say It Loud, and all the way up to the state-of-the-art right now. It's a groove that has never forgotten its roots in the rise of hip hop: the sound of the dance parties in the Bronx that went out to all kinds of chocolate cities and those vanilla suburbs.

You'll also find other history in nlc, rare sounds plucked out of a North American popular culture where Asians appeared only as caricatures drawn from racist ignorance. Having grown up in that hyphenated-Canadian way, they can also drop Asian film and other popular culture into the mix to create instrumental hip hop that has a lot to say about our city in 2006.

Lal

Lal's music generally comes with a lot of hyphens. Even by the standards of a poly-cultural country where everyone's got one or two already, "funky-jazz-Desi-dub-urban-ambient-colder than Bristol kind of thaang" stands out.

It's not surprising that old-world labels don't fit and can't get a grip. The old world is just that and comes with a lot of fait accompli, especially when it comes to identity. In Canada, identity is a process. Those hyphens of ours reflect our great, unspoken, inalienable right and opportunity to define our own identity and contribute our own sense of what it might mean to be Canadian. Everyone in this group knows where they're from, but that's not where the journey ends. It's where it begins.

Their sound is stripped down to the essential audio to create a mood or a groove. There's much more space in it than most Bangladeshi or Desi music, to the point where one magazine accused them of misrepresenting themselves as a South Asian group. That perspective says a lot about stereotypes, outside and inside communities, but precious little about their music. Lal's music is global and it's personal. It's a musical leap of imagination and a meditation on change. It's made and played down on the corner where history dances with the right now, reflecting their roots and expressing their passions for hip hop, jazz, Bangladeshi music, and then some. It's cool in a way hipsters from the '50s would recognize, and hot like anybody who likes to go out dancing wants to hear it. It is city music for people who really do work all hours, the ones who are getting home from church, when others are just waking up for theirs.

In True North 'us on a good day' style, Lal are listening globally, hanging locally and jamming on a future that's about everybody. It's no surprise they don't fit in a musical box, but if we have to have one, how about 'Downtown Canadian'? As to what that sounds like, well, that's what we're here to find out.

Collaboratory 2.9

Listen to four brand new hours of word, sound and music created by Barbara Adler, Ganesh Anandan, Curtis Clearsky, Neelamjit Dhillon, Cris Derksen, Kytami, Alex Maher, Allison Russell, Rupinder Sidhu, Kinnie Starr, Mario Vaira and Timothy Wisdom.

This is Collaboratory 2.9, the sixth time that artists from different traditions and communities have sat down together and explored music, strings and other instruments,words spoken and sung, and now laptops and turntables. It is a chance for them to spend more than a minute playing with what is different, and the time we give them comes with a commitment to share what comes out of their explorations.