Final Fantasy is a Man to Put in Your Pocket

I had a ticket in my coat pocket to see Final Fantasy that night, but I wanted to close my eyes, keep still, and travel back in time to the summer in Montreal, when I first discovered Owen Pallett and his lovely music. We lived in a rundown house and spent the first few weeks of July crammed into the small, hot space painting the walls pink and blue and butter yellow. A good friend mailed me a cassette of Final Fantasy’s intelligent violin pop that filled my brain with pictures from a book I recognized—maybe I’d read it before, or it was something like Alice in Wonderland. I first saw Final Fantasy at La Sala Rosa in Montreal on a sweltering summer night two years ago. Dandi Wind opened for him, and her panther body, Lene Lovich voice and feverish neon music made my heart go too fast. After that little revelation, Owen Pallett stepped in and somehow the juxtaposition between the two melded perfectly. He was alone, seemed scared and shy, and the songs were more like super-homemade versions of themselves, with stains and frayed edges. I adored every second of it. It took a lot to kick myself out the door and down the long orange street to the venue to see him for the second time. At Victoria’s Alix Goolden Hall, I found a large, varied crowd marching into what looked like an enormous sandcastle. Inside, brightly-dressed girls and boys, and the odd old couple or small child, milling about among the pews. I kept my coat on and wondered how this performance would contrast with the last one, thought about how many things had changed over two years. I left Montreal early this spring, and haven’t been able to listen to anything that might trigger a picture of a person or a place from the city I ran away from. Final Fantasy’s music was such a big part of the puzzle. Nifty, a boy who played with Pallett in Les Mouches, opened with three pieces run through a magic box. Layers of fidgety music looped to make a metallic landscape. The sound quality was like a fuzzy home recording, a boy in his bedroom practicing the same old chunk of melody over and over again until the pattern roots itself in the walls. What annoyed me was the invisible wall between performer and audience, how impossible it was to really step across the barrier. I got bored. My mind wandered. I wanted there to be visuals, great globs of colour swirling over the ceiling. Or a slideshow of photographs shedding their skins, one into the next into the next. I wanted to see his face. I wanted to see what he was thinking, or be able to guess at how he was feeling while he was chugging away at this music. The less a performer interacts with the audience, the more I demand pretty pictures. I was making do with the jungle in my mind, but it wasn’t enough. I wondered about the direction we’ll take with gadget-y homemade music, in terms of entertainment, and the limitations of a solo act. How much can one person really give? Changeover between acts was so efficient that Owen Pallett appeared on stage, took off his shoes, and started to play before I had a chance to don my emotional armour. He attacked song after song, mostly from He Poos Clouds with a confidence that had been lacking two years ago. He had a new professionalism that went over well, though I missed the frayed edges. I had the same gut reaction to his presence as before, when I wanted to wrap him up in a leaf and hide him in my pocket. I want for him to be unreal, a character out of a book, some secret little fellow we never heard about in Gormenghast—I don’t care for him to be a human being with human habits. Married to his music, a series of illustrations were projected onto a screen. I liked them best when they were more abstract, very simple cut-out shapes, rather than line drawings. The shapes mixed together with sounds and made a beautiful soup and opened up a bunch of different possibilities. I’d like to see more musicians play with visuals. Why not draw a song across the church wall? Or paint with light and sound? It was hard to take sitting down. There was a jaunty piano song I wanted to hear again, and his piano was just as interesting to hear as his violin, which he played with such vigor. I only started to fade out when he pulled out a few songs from Has A Good Home. I couldn’t wrap my brain around this: how could a few songs make me feel so bogged-down and beaten? How much does it take to invest so much in a piece of music that it isn’t even music anymore? How do you beat it back into music, into entertainment, and wrestle it loose from the blood? I take it this is testament to his artistry, that he can make music that you and I can slide into—like the most comfortable sofa—and open up again and again, like a well-loved library book. Somewhere along the line his songs passed out of sound completely. I’ll have to wait another two years to really be sure though