Fire!/ Brian Ruryk/Völur

Glad to be in a real hockey town”, exclaimed Swedish baritone saxophonist Mats Gustafsson as he paused near the end of what was a blistering set of no-holds-barred Free Jazz at the Tranzac July 3, part of Toronto’s ongoing TONE festival June 24. “We’re going to play a couple more piece for you and then fuck off, back to Europe … after a few pints.” He then proceeded to return to the ferocious tone shredding he and the members of his Fire! Trio, fellow Swedes bass guitarist Johan Berthling and drummer Andreas Werlin were projecting into the air.

Except for a few interludes where Gustafsson projected rugged mewls and flutters by overblowing timbres on his flute or added prestissimo crackles and sizzles from an on-stage electronic mixing board, the set unrolled with the same reed-driven energy. Moving from inflated honks to tongue slaps to extended banshee cries, the saxophonist often crouched or muted the saxophone bell against his knee for maximum expressiveness, with altissimo riffs as prominent as basement-level bellows.

Meanwhile Berthling’s solid thumb pops and repeated percussive slaps ensured that rhythmic intensity was preserved. His strokes were as steady as from a player in a funk band, yet supple enough to keep the tunes advancing steadily. As for Werlin, with the beat assured by the bassist, his slaps, clips, shuffles and ruffs broke up the time and tempo and ironically assured that a shred of melodicism was included within the ongoing triple onslaught. Finally after it seemed that the tripartite rumbles, slaps and honks couldn’t inflate any more, the three left the stage. Heeding the rapturous crowd with an encore, the trio returned to combine repeated shrieks from the saxophonist, power pumps from the bassist and vigorous kit pummeling from the drummer to deconstruct into boisterous shreds what probably started off as a Heavy Metal anthem.

Metal was probably the only solid material not involved in the Dadaist sound and element deconstruction local guitarist Brian Ruryk demonstrated during the evening’s first set. Seated on the dance floor below the raised stage where Fire! would later play, he surrounded himself with the guitars, boxes of add-ons and a mixing board. Introducing each instrumental foray with pre-recorded voices and sometimes adding programmed noises, his interaction involved a lot more than the motifs he occasionally finger-picked. When he wasn’t slapping or pinching the strings of the two electric and one acoustic guitar positioned nearby, he was scratching and rubbing the strings with an ever-changing collection of aluminum foil containers he pulled from nearby boxes. As he played and as musical accents, he hurled these containers, empty beer cans, dolls, metal pizza platters and beach balls around the room. As a climax he upended a large box jammed with rubber balls, and allowed them to bounce throughout the room, lobbing a few aluminum items and one guitar along for extra resonance. Dramatic as it was to observe, Ruryk’s performance was basically extramusical performance art, and a video camera and operator stood at the edge of the floor recordings his antics.

The Völur band which played between Fire! and Ruryk was also theatrical, but its so-called Folk Doom songs seemed to have wandered in from another festival. Based around the repetitious drumming of Justin Ruppel, astringent violin playing of Laura C. Bates and the bass guitar and tanbur plucking of Lucas Gadke plus John Williams clarinets, the set seemed to judder between ProgRock and Death Metal. There was also a slight Middle Eastern turn when Gadke strummed tanbur. Complete with portentous lyric sung solo or harmonized by Bates and Gadke, the package may have been perfect for a Rock festival, but appeared to be rooted in a separate time-space than most of TONE’s genre-defying performers.

Despite some slip ups, one would hope that TONE’s adventurous programming continues in the future years.