Kilometre Club :: It Doesn’t Snow In Toronto Anymore (Imaginary North)

Listening, I want the big fat flakes to fall from these dense ambient envelopes and rippling contours. Yet like the snow, these flakes of sound don’t fall, they just hover over the listener with a sense of unknowing dread. Moody isn’t even the half of it.

“The white winters of my childhood are no longer guaranteed.” ~Daniel Field

Now that spring is officially here, let me tell you about this new long EP from Kilometre Club, lamenting the fact that it doesn’t snow in Toronto anymore. I can relate. It doesn’t snow in Cincinnati, Ohio much anymore either. Actually we did get pounded this winter past, but that is now an anomaly, instead of the usual matter of course it once was. I could rely on the winter when I was growing up. I relied on it to provide yearly opportunities for sledding, for snowball fights, for snowmen and hopefully for a few snow days when, when the roads got so bad they shut down the schools. Yet now what I can rely on as an adult is gray winter rain season where I may not even have to bust out the heavy coat and all the layers. The snow isn’t as seasonal as it once was. As Daniel Field writes in the liner notes, “the white winters of my childhood are no longer guaranteed.”

I figure if it is the same for my more northerly neighbors on the far side of the Great Lakes, where even the lake effect could be relied on to produce excessive snow drops, than this climate change thing that some people don’t seem to believe exists, really does exist. You don’t have to convince me. I’ve seen that segue. With that comes a tremendous sense of nostalgia, longing, and melancholy for what has passed. The fact that there are no assurances of snow in a place where it was once a clockwork feature of the yearly climate, creates a sense of heartbreak. This is what Kilometre Club is able to translate into four meditative drone pieces evoking the new way winter is experienced in the province of Ontario, across other parts of Canada and down here across the rusting belt of the Midwest.

The discontents of our civilization ::

The cover of the EP adds to this story, and how we humans have been a part of the process. The CN Tower, a 553.3 meter high communications tower, observation tower, and tourist destination is shown surrounded by billowing clouds. But are those natural clouds? They don’t look so to me. Rather they look like the kind of clouds you see coming out of the smokestacks of industry. It looks like greenhouse gases pouring into the air. For some reason, people can more easily acknowledge the way a factory dumping putrid waste into a stream is a form of pollution than they can when factories do the same to the sky, turning it into an open air sewer. I guess people don’t think about the as much, because the wind dissipates those unnatural clouds. Yet the invisible gases remain in the air setting off a cascade of changes for all of us living in the Anthropocene.

The CN tower itself doesn’t look so ominous, but another way to read it, could be as the Tower card in the tarot, a harbinger of collapse, decline, disruption. The discontents of our civilization.

Yet the music itself is much more like those billowing clouds. The long stretched and sustained tones roll out of the stereo and cover up the man-made structures of our furniture in a thick granular fog, slowly shifting and unfurling. This is atmospheric music that will penetrate your bones, waking up latent arthritic conditions and stiffening the joints. It’s full of bleak condensation and heaviness. Listening, I want the big fat flakes to fall from these dense ambient envelopes and rippling contours. Yet like the snow, these flakes of sound don’t fall, they just hover over the listener with a sense of unknowing dread. Moody isn’t even the half of it.

Looking out the window, the first flowers of spring are starting to pop up. I’m reminded that thunderstorm season is here, with its heavy pounding rains and crashes of lightning. A hot and humid summer will follow, a crisp autumn after that, and then winter again. Will it bring the snow?  Or just gray rain? These are the kind of questions and reflections this music evokes, allowing the listener to mourn the death of snow.

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Music by Daniel Field
Mastering By Chad Skinner
Album art by Mitch Burke (Sentient Design)

It Doesn’t Snow In Toronto Anymore is available on Imaginary North. [Bandcamp]