FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY You haven’t picked up your guitar in weeks, if not months. You stare at the staff paper and the rows of empty lines burn an impression on your retina. Is this just writer’s block, or is it gone for good?
Many artists have an up-and-down, on-again-off-again relationship with their muse—that cruel mistress, that truant slacker. Clichéd and romantic as the idea of a muse may be, such metaphors may be the only way of talking about the unquantifiable phenomenon of creativity, especially in the abstract, amorphous world of sound. And many artists hang on to a sense of shame when it comes to creative dormancy, as if it’s a sign of failure, that you’ve really lost it—or maybe you never had it to begin with. Damned by the notion of genius, we begin to believe that creativity should just flow out of us.
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Image: Bassist Clint Conley on stage post Mission of Burma reunion. Courtesy of the artist
Jonathan Bunce (a.k.a. Jonny Dovercourt) has been participating in the independent music community in Toronto – as a musician, writer, editor, presenter, organizer and advocate – since the early 1990s. He has been a member of more than a dozen bands and helped co-found Wavelength, a multi-genre music series. He is currently collaborating in the space-improv-punk guitar duo, Hybrid Moments. Jonny has also served as Artistic Director of The Music Gallery, a long-running Toronto concert space, and as Operations & Development Manager at the Images Festival. He has also co-edited two volumes of Coach House Books’ acclaimed uTOpia anthology.