No Competition, Just Collaboration
Featuring A Textbook Tragedy, Hundred Acre Wood, Savannah, snic, Paris on a Good Day, Vespertine Battle Scene. Fri-Sat, Apr 4-5. Avenue Skatepark (9030-118 Ave). Tickets: $10 (single day)/$15 festival pass, available at the Skatepark. Full festival info at www.avenueskatepark.com. 

The No Competition, Just Collaboration festival (NCJC) was conceived last year, and its goals were lofty ones: organizers set out to do nothing less than bridge the gaps between the city’s otherwise isolated musical genres and scenes.

The goals of Vancouver-based prog-thrashers A Textbook Tragedy (who headline the fest’s Friday night bill) are similar to NCJC’s: their sound, particularly on their latest Distort Records release Intimidator, is an aggressive amalgamation of metal and hardcore, two “heavy” musical factions who battle more often than they collaborate.

“We made a conscious decision to make focused songs with more hooks,” says Kai Turmann, who shreds strings as one of the band’s two guitarists. “More focused than just spazzy, grindy, crazy technical stuff. In every review it gets compared to Dillinger Escape Plan, but I think we’re so far from that it’s not even funny.” 

On A Textbook Tragedy’s previous release, A Partial Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest, their songs were powerhouses punctuated by blasts of guitar, all played at 1,000 miles an hour. For Intimidator, however, the band decided to incorporate simpler parts and brought more song-oriented elements into the fold. 

“When we started touring the last record, all we listened to was hardcore,” Turmann says. “Now we have these technical metal and grind parts, and we’ll have hardcore parts in there as well. This way it’s more fun; people from all genres can find something.”

But with the band’s experimentation setting them apart from both conventional metal and conventional hardcore, it’s been difficult for them to find supportive audiences. Turmann says he’s seen some kids who you’d ordinarily find moshing at a live show suddenly go static and stand, not sure how to move to A Textbook Tragedy’s unorthodox sound. “We’ll tour with a beatdown hardcore band and kids won’t know what to do at all,” he says. “They’ll hear a breakdown, and then they’ll get into it for a second, and then we’ll move on. But it seems to me that the heaviest band always gets the best response.” But at NCJC, they’re hoping to find a crowd demanding to hear some cross-pollinating musical styles.

Turmann says that if nothing else, Edmonton audiences have always been dazzled by their lightning-fast guitar-playing. “Sometimes no one will be moving, but they’ll be so attentive,” he says. “On our first album, kids didn’t have any idea what to do; now they’re actually starting to be able to move, since there’s some hardcore jams. But we still confuse some kids.”