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On the fringes of the increasingly ill-defined musical genre referred to as "industrial", beyond Nine Inch Nails and Ministry and all the rest, there exist a small number of artists and individuals that are producing music and sounds that are nothing less than "experimental" in every sense of the word. These people create, record, and distribute their works to an equally small, but growing, group of listeners via a unique network of record labels, mail order distributors, and independent music shops. Robert Olver is one of those people. His Toronto-based label, Freedom In A Vacuum (FIAV), has been an important and influential part of the international experimental music scene since it's first release in 1987. I discovered FIAV through early releases by projects like Violence and the Sacred and Electro Static Cat, and I eventually met the man behind the label at one of his FIAV live music series, events at Toronto's Music Gallery that have featured performances by a huge array of international and local artists including Edward Ka-Spel, Dive, Illusion of Safety and Premature Ejaculation. Sheryl and I got together with him on a recent Saturday afternoon, grabbed a spot on the backyard patio at Squirly's, and chatted with him about music, politics, philosophy, and... just where the hell he got the name Freedom in A Vacuum! "It was 1969 or 1970, I had just moved to Toronto, and I was living in my father's basement. It was a Friday night, I'd dropped a couple of hits of acid, and it was just starting to kick in when my dad called me upstairs and sat me down at the kitchen table and started to have a talk with me about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It was a classic miscommunication situation, because I started really tripping right around then, and there was nothing I could respond to him with except for this stupid grin. I felt horrible because he was getting more and more pissed off, and the smile on my face was getting broader and broader. We ended up just sort of parting with nothing really happening except him being really disgusted with me, but one of the things he said which stuck with me was: 'Absolute freedom is freedom in a vacuum'." A motto, and a philosophy, was born.Even before this event, Robert had a self-described "passion for outside music". He was a fan of the seminal Velvet Underground, feeling a particular attraction to their noisy elements, and the soundtrack to his acid trip on that fateful Friday evening was the first album by a Toronto multimedia collective called Intersystems. But as he got older, he found this passion to be increasingly frustrating. "I began to realize that there was a continuum of music that existed out there that I found really fascinating, that really took me places, and it was invisible. If you walked into a record store you wouldn't find it. If you listened to the radio, you wouldn't find it." This frustration led first to Robert's mid-80's university radio show, also titled Freedom In A Vacuum, followed by his release of a compilation LP in 1987 titled - yeah, you guessed it. This release, which included contributions from such experimental heavyweights as Nurse With Wound, H.N.A.S., and Asmus Tietchens was intended to be a one-off release, but ended up spawning a series of vinyl, cassette and CD releases over the next 8 years. But despite FIAV's success in it's unique market niche, Robert is the first to admit that the financial rewards are far from spectacular. And he has been criticised for the somewhat negative and confrontational aspects that appear in much of the music that he releases. So why does he stick with it? For reasons and ideas that go beyond the musical aspects. "To me, it's very much about the empowerment of the individual. These people are making the music because they feel strongly enough about it to make it, and they know damn well that they're not going to get a lot of airplay and acceptance. I like that risk taking. "Somebody once referred to what I was doing as 'the mass marketing of misery', and I disagreed. I think that's a cynical interpretation, and I'm not a cynic - if I were, I wouldn't be doing any of this. I see (this music) as being about acknowledgement and talking about feelings that people have but deny having a lot of the time in mass culture. Whatever moralistic conclusions the artists reach in their work, I see the manifestations of those feelings as a good thing. I think our culture is a miserably repressed culture, but it's also one of the few in the world today where there's room allowed for people to express themselves. It's a very young culture. I see that as a necessary condition for evolution in a personal sense. I write stuff that sometimes really surprises and upsets me. But it's all creation, and I see it as a positive and good thing. I see it as part of knowing yourself." That's not to say that Robert doesn't recognise the problems that exist within the world of experimental music - a genre that supposedly prides itself on having no rules, no limits, and no boundaries. "Ever since I've been in it, I've watched a 'star system' develop in this network of people that I've been dealing with, along with very formulaic, or what I think of as formulaic, ideas about what experimental music is. That, by definition, makes it not experimental music anymore. It's every bit as conventional as say, country and western, but minus country and western's social relevance." Robert has been feeling some direct results of these attitudes and ideas via the response to his recent release by heavy-duty noise forgers Crawl/Child, Principles of Exclusion. "Crawl/Child have been influenced by a lot of power electronics and noise, like Whitehouse and stuff like that, but they've taken it somewhere else. What I'm finding since releasing their disc that just about all of the industrial and experimental distributors that have been with me from the beginning just hate it and won't touch it. And I find that really hilarious in a way, given the fact that the only difference I see between Crawl/Child and what those people do like is that the Crawl/Child release shows development. It's not their sort of 'old school' power electronics, so it's not what they want." So what's in the future for Robert Olver and Freedom In A Vacuum? First up is distribution of the just released debut from Belt, which should once again challenge those who are attempting to put boundaries around what they consider experimental music. He is also working on follow-up to the stunning 1994 compilation CD, To Step Outside and Keep Walking (a co-release with Randy Greif/Swinging Axe Productions), and this summer will hopefully see the release of the first volume in his long-planned 3 volume retrospective of the various FIAV live music series. After that, he says, "I want to stay away from compilations for years". As we prepared to pay the waitress and head our separate ways, Robert gave us these final thoughts: "It's just as true to say this as anything else: FIAV is just me getting tired of there not being anything that I wanted to see or listen to, and trying to do something about it in a non-parasitic sort of way. And anybody can do it, that's the thing. If you want things to change, change them. You have to keep finding alternatives to the alternative. No, not find them - you have to make them. That's what it is, you have to make them." Text Copyright © 1995 Greg Clow Photographs Copyright © 1995 Francoise Duvivier |
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