Read "Breaking the Waves: Wavelength’s Sunday Music Series is Done — is the Community Around it Done Too?"

Interesting reflection on Toronto's avant-indie scene past and present (and the now departed weekly Wavelength series in particular), by Dave Morris for Toronto's Eye Weekly:

For the handful of bands who played Wavelength on their way to making it big, the ones who are playing this weekend’s 10th anniversary festival (and weekly series farewell) are mostly like the hundreds who didn’t: sometimes noisy, frequently experimental and, above all, indifferent to everything but having fun and making art.

Like fellow now-shuttered indie institution Touch & Go Records, Wavelength’s weekly series supported bands who weren’t necessarily courting a mass audience. That some of them found it anyway is now part of the series’ legacy; the Sunday series that will forever be mentioned in the same breath as “Broken Social Scene” and “Torontopia.” But Wavelength wasn’t merely supposed to be the farm team for would-be indie stars; it was a place where lovers of the weird sounds lurking on the fringes could form a community.

“I remember when I was living in Peterborough,” says Jonas Bonetta a.k.a. Evening Hymns. “I’d read the weeklies and look for shows I wanted to go to.” Like many of the newer acts playing the series, Bonetta saw Wavelength’s Sunday series as a “gateway into the Toronto scene,” and after moving here and playing his dusty, subtly magical neo-folk songs at a handful of gigs, he managed to snag a Wavelength show. “I was trying to play Wavelength for a while,” says Danger Bay’s Brendan Howlett, who became both a regular attendee and a performer in various different configurations. “It was just an easy, good way to play shows.”

Now that the Sundays will be no more (the organizers will focus on booking special one-off Wavelength concerts, a number of which are already lined up for the coming months), what happens to that community? Is it online, or in a new physical space? Has it fractured into niches, or is there still a broad interest in new indie music? The answer, according to the mix of veterans and new bands playing the Wavelength 500 festival, is d) all of the above. Read the rest here.