DESCRIPTION:
Gerard Leckey - Festival Of The Dead (1984) track 2 Kymski

Nerve Magazine, September 1985
One local person who is both prolific and interested in alternative presentations is Gerard Leckey (who will be opening for Chris And Cosey on Sept 28, as well as playing ARC the 7th, and the Rivoli on the 22nd.) Gerard has played for bands but now enjoys the freedom of solo and collaborative work. He has produced a lot of material and several tapes with Ear To The Sky the most accessible and most widely available. The title piece uses found vocals from TV broadcasts and Apollo launches with several musical textures that emphasis inner space rather than the sugary futon music of Kitaro or Vangelis.

Gerard is very much an 80s electronic composer, a post Eno non-musician who relies on trained ears rather than trained fingers. The seminal German groups in the early seventies (Cluster, Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk) each have had a school of music founded on their directions from a common beginning point. The least commercial of this is the post Cluster genealogy which began the aesthetic of mixing ugly and grating industrial atmospheres with pleasing melodies and textures (see Cluster II, 1971). Eno, TG, Cabaret Voltaire, Chris And Cosey and the current generation of electronic groups (Severed Heads, Pyrolator) and others all contrast the hard with the soft.

Gerard follows his own emotional resources and intuitions and has produced music similar to but apart from any kind of musical evolution. His bible is Cage and Tudor's Indeterminacy, a double record of Zen stories and Zen parables which are normally interrupted and or obscured by crashes and obnoxious piano chords. Recorded in 1959 Indeterminacy shows that Cage didn't need a Fairlight to invent sampling.

Gerard Doesn't need a Fairlight either and has explored many different musical applications with a basic setup of synth, guitar, voice and shortwave, He has worked with several collaborators including Wolfe Bolter (Rave Reviews), Dave Taite (Deadbeat) Stephan Pock Helder Santz and members of Groovy Religion and Artsect. With visuals and theatrics Gerard and friends have played several local clubs, but what he prefers now is to provide atmospheres for events at XIPHOTEK, a gallery at 80 Spadina Ave. Gerard is a member of this collective gallery which is open to the public every Saturday and features sound installations and sculpture. With complete freedom to be a performer or a spectator Gerard has done music for such events as the Festival Of The Dead and the recent Cruisewear For The Modern Planet.

Gerard's soundtrack is equally eclectic as his "pop" piece. 'Steady State Theory' is a piece of process music that is as long as your tape can hold. A sequence of notes with a repeating rhythm the work can be subtle or not too subtile trance inducer, depending on the volume. The gallery experience is a completely different mood than a club and here the audience is more open to be taken to 'another' space.

Interactive galleries are not new but are certainly a welcome aspect of cultural diet. The music of Gerard Leckey and others is waiting to be discovered but an effort has to be made by both audiences and artists. The English and European scenes have shown the value of appropriate commercial sense and it can happen here too.

Chris Twomey