FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY They weren’t going to speak with me. Maybe it was just a he or a she, rather than a they. I didn’t know. An e-mail exchange was possible, but I wanted to meet face to face. I tried cajoling the members of the online musical project with the idea that they could don Richard Nixon masks and meet me at a secret location. I thought it would be fun and would let them maintain their anonymity, which was key to their project.
The project is called LoK8Tr. It’s part of the Canadian Music Centre’s New Music in New Places series and it will be the first in the series to explore performance for the Web 2.0 space. It will include music, poetry, graphics, and video, which will appear on Facebook, Twitter, and Skype. The themes they hope to explore through it, as stated in a CMC press release, are “identity/self, location, loneliness/facelessness and virtual interconnections that can be amplified or obscured by the distortions and dissonances that mediated relations create.” The person or persons behind LoK8Tr will remain anonymous until after the conclusion of the project sometime in March 2010. The plan is to archive the performance online for those who miss the March event. LoK8Tr takes anonymity so seriously that no more than six people at the CMC know who is behind the project.
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Image by: Lucinda Wallace
Matthew Pioro is a Toronto-based editor and writer. His works have appeared in the National Post, Canadian Home Workshop and explore. He has found that an early immersion in classic-rock radio can lead to a more varied musical palette.