PHOTO ZINE: AIDS Wolf, 2003-2012

garbageface's note: i originally put this together and published it on my photography tumblr (LOL) in 2012, just four days after AIDS Wolf's last show. it was a wild time — i was a broke-ass photographer living in Toronto, about to set out on a 5-week tour of the West coast of the U.S. and Canada with my documentary Maximum Tolerated Dose, which i was still in the process of editing. i had spent the previous two years traveling to various ends of the earth working on it, and the prospect of leaving for more touring was both daunting and exciting.

AIDS Wolf was one of the bands that inspired me to start getting serious about touring in the first place, and news of their demise hit me in an emotional spot i didn't anticipate. i never thought the breakup of a noise band that was as inscrutable as they were would ever leave such an heart-shaped void, but it did.

the original article has been lightly edited and has had some links added to provide further context.

As is the case with almost any band worth knowing, the first time I saw AIDS Wolf was by accident. At the time I was obsessed with a band called Daiquiri from Ottawa, and was going to see them every chance I got. On one weird night in early 2004,[[1]] at a completely unironic dive bar in Ottawa called Bumper’s Roadhouse, I saw AIDS Wolf for the first time.

That first show was confusing. To put things in context, 2003 was a big year for me. Up until then, I thought that you always needed Drums, Bass, and Guitar to have a Band (unless you were playing rap, which I was also getting much further into).[[2]] Daiquiri blew that door wide open: their lineup at the time was a vocalist, a guitar player / backup vocalist, and a minidisc player playing backing beats. This weird lineup would have been inconsequential, but the problem was that Daiquiri was fucking amazing live. This meant I had to reevaluate some shit.

AIDS Wolf turned the punchline of the band riddle on its head: they used traditional rock band instruments, but the noise that ensued was almost unrecognizable (and the drummer set up facing AWAY from the audience!). It’s hard to give a really specific review of that show so many years ago, but it was scrappy, weird, and compelling. It wasn’t music for everyone, and that was a good thing because I wasn’t everyone.

A little over a year later, I had relocated to Toronto and Death From Above 1979 was pummelling people all over the damn place. On the day before New Year’s Eve, 2004, AIDS Wolf opened for DFA, and totally fucking confused the entire scene. This was not dance-punk. It wasn’t even punk. It was washes of noise, roiling drums and blistering caterwauls. The people who came to dance just kind of stood there, What-The-Fuck looks combined with fingers-in-the-ears. I loved the noise, and the reaction of the ostensibly adventurous crowd.

[note: i know i have at least one photo from this show, taken with a very terrible early 2000s digital camera. if i find it, i'll add it here.]

In the ensuing years, I got lost down an academic rabbit hole. AIDS Wolf and I lost touch for a while. I’m not sure how life on the road was around then, but the reviews were not kind. Pitchfork (surprise!) hated their debut LP Lovvers (which, at the time, was like a hipster death sentence, or a life sentence with no parole). As they officially stepped out into the realm of criticism by starting to release more and more music, more and more people tried to make sense of it. Reviews generally missed the point.

During that time, AIDS Wolf got really serious about touring. They documented their discipline[[3]] with each release, getting better and better on record and getting tighter and tighter live. The people who didn’t get it continued to not get it, but the people that got it became further and further entranced.

In 2008, on a roadtrip to New York, I saw a listing for a Todd P promoted show in Brooklyn for Hallowe'en. A bunch of bands I wanted to see were on the bill, including AIDS Wolf. It happened in a weird warehouse out in the middle of nowhere in Bushwick, at some place where you wouldn’t even know a show was happening except for the sentinel figure of a big security guy standing out front. Inside, the sound was reverberating like crazy off the high ceilings, the PA pulsating and pounding. When AIDS Wolf took the stage that night, they laid waste to the entire room. Though I had really, really liked them before, that show made it official: I loved this band. That night I picked up the Cities Of Glass record, and when I got it into my earholes, I was floored. It was woozy, spastic, and dangerous, but there were also some really interesting SONGS buried in there. No wonder it was hard to stomach.

[note: i can visualize the photos from the brooklyn show in my mind's eye, but can't seem to find them anywhere, possibly collateral damage in a hard drive death. if found they will be posted here.]

On a cold night in early 2009, I heard that AIDS Wolf was playing at The Boat in Toronto, and my friend Ryan and I went to check it out. Again, it was the kind of thing you can’t really jam into adjectives. I can say though, that the packed room that night fucking GOT IT. It was a room full of art school rejects, messy punks and oddballs (and I should know, because I knew most of them personally, and I was one). When AW took the stage, the room pitched, rolled, and yawed. At least a few people had bloody faces by the end of it. After the show, Ryan and I returned to Ryan’s independent-as-fuck artspace across the street and talked about what we had just witnessed. We decided that night that if AW can tour, we can too. That summer, we would hit the road for a month with a travelling art show. Inspired by AIDS Wolf, fueled by mythmaking and risk. No money, no problem.

It’s now 2012 and it’s been a a few days since AW’s last show. I’m listening to their last album, Ma Vie Banale Avant-Garde and thinking about how appropriate that title was and is. When you take the kinds of risks that AIDS Wolf did, you can expect to be chastised, ignored, or have other people’s musical insecurities projected onto you. You can expect small crowds, and impatience.

Much has been written over the years about whether or not AIDS Wolf was a “good band,” without a hint of irony. To be fair to music journalists (many of whom have rarely produced much of value themselves, and I should know because I've been one), the underground / avant-garde has never been something that they really give a shit about. The thing that always bothered me about people ragging on AIDS Wolf, though, was that it was never clear to me who they were comparing them to. I guess if your frame of reference was DFA 1979 or Ponytail (both bands I saw them play with), or even some slightly more experimental outfit, yeah, AW would be hard to wrap your head around. My frame of reference for AW was something like Throbbing Gristle and Arab on Radar, Jackson Pollack, my personal demons, and to a lesser extent, road construction. In that context, they made perfect sense to me.

Their last show ever was at the Garrison in Toronto. With a couple of years having passed since last seeing them, I was yet again blown away by how much they had progressed. This last show was, sadly and beautifully, probably the best of theirs I had seen. Stripped down to a three-piece but sounding no-less insane, they once again pretty much destroyed the room with the ensuing noise. A lot had changed since 2003 — songs turned and stopped on a dime, they quieted down into jittery solo vocal experiments, and built back up only to fall apart again into a rainfall of cowbell. The room heaved and seethed. They even did an encore. And then it was over.

So I’m sitting here, with a pile of records and a pile of photos and almost a decade to look back on. The story of AIDS Wolf isn’t the story of my life, but I can see how it maps that way. When I first saw them, I was just starting to really explore weird music and just starting to get into photography. As the years went by, I took better pictures and AW got weirder and better too.

Bands don’t last forever, and no one should expect them to. The most we can ever hope for from music, whether on record or in person, is an intangible emotional experience that we can somehow identify with and that gets us through the goddamn day.

Perhaps the best part about AIDS Wolf for me was that they were never didactic. Their music didn’t tell you how to feel about it. They didn’t provide the typical emotional cues that most “normal” music is littered with, they didn’t act in the “normal” ways that bands acted, and they didn’t leave you with the “normal” satisfaction that comes from an evening of musical spectatorship. They were challenging from the first notes to the last, and they generally left it up to you parse it.

I’m sure that all those who saw AW as a huge musical bummer are probably happy (or at least, indifferent, naturally) that they’re done. But for the people who found something to believe in in AW’s work, we’re left with a whole bunch of stuff to think about. And that’s really the best thing you can ever ask for as a legacy.

Ø

[[1]]: HUGE shoutout to The First 25 Years Of Punk In Ottawa 1978-2002: A Gigography for helping me nail down the date of this one (film scans don't contain EXIF data). I fucking LOVE these kinds of homegrown archival projects.

[[2]]: The one exception to this was when I saw Nash The Slash several times in the mid-to-late 90s in Peterborough. But seeing Nash always felt like an encounter with a space alien — seeing Daiquiri felt like seeing the weirdest real people living down the street from you forming a band with what they had lying around.

[[3]]: They also made a point to spread the "9 Principles Of AIDS Wolf" wherever they could — scroll down their Skin Graft Records band page to read it.