City Sonic

One of our preoccupations here concerns the relations between music and the ambiance of a place.  Also, the constellations of people, businesses, networks, and practices that make a scene.  You couldn’t find a better window into those topics than a recent documentary about Toronto’s worlds of music, City Sonic.

City Sonic is an online collection of many short videos.  Each one focuses on a particular artist and some place that was transformative for her or his musical development.  You can also view maps showing the places each film depicts, illustrating powerfully the spatial concentration characteristic of many scenes.

It also is an innovative business and distribution model.  The videos can be downloaded and viewed on phones.  There are links to the bands’ myspace pages as well as to the clubs’ web pages.  The musicians and clubs in turn promote the film.  Perhaps a more distinctively Canadian aspect is that large portions of the funding were provided by public agencies, in addition to some corporate sponsors, notably mobile phone companies Bell and Telus.

Musicians, film-makers, club-owners, media companies, government agencies all working in tandem. Who is missing?  Oh yeah, the record companies.