Haunting dive into past
Simone Schmidt speaks up for female inmates of Ontario asylum in meticulously researched album
There’s ambition and then there’s the sort of ambition that requires one’s album to come packaged with 30 pages of scholarly liner notes to properly understand what’s going on in the music.
It’s not lost on Simone Schmidt, the studious singer, songwriter and researcher behind Fiver’s compelling new project Audible Songs from Rockwood — a rustic song cycle that seeks to give voice to some of the female inmates incarcerated at the Rockwood Asylum for the Criminally Insane in Kingston between 1865 and 1881 — that she’s demanding a rather daunting level of commitment from her listeners.
This, in an age when music is increasingly consumed on smartphones and laptops while people are preoccupied with some other task.
Schmidt put a heroic amount of work into Audible
Songs from Rockwood, combing through archives and case files and mildewed newspaper clippings and journals at the Toronto Reference Library for a good couple of years in order to get a feel for the institution and the characters who once walked its chilly halls.
So she has to believe in her heart of hearts that at least a few Fiver fans will rise to the challenge and put in a bit of work, too.
Read, listen, read some more, go back and listen again. Think. Repeat. “I wanted to try that — I wanted to try to expand people’s idea of what music can do because it used to be charged with a whole range of other responsibilities culturally,” Schmidt says.
“Music used to be expected to do a lot, everything from education to medicine. Now it just seems so tossed off.
“I encounter that frustration in any project that I work on but I thought this would be a really explicit way of asking people to engage with the long listen and the repeat listen.”
It’s worth taking the time to dive in. There’s much to chew on within the grooves, and the pages of Audible Songs from Rockwood, released last month on the impeccably tasteful Toronto indie label Idée Fixe Records.
Schmidt — who has shown a deft hand as a lyricist over the years as the vocalist for One Hundred Dollars and the ace psych-rock outfit the Highest Order, but truly flexed her muscles as a storyteller on Lost the Plot, her 2013 solo debut as Fiver — uses the grim backdrop of the Rockwood Asylum as a jumping-off point for discussions of sexism, colonialism, racism, classicism and, in the end, the unknowability of history itself.
Even the liner notes, while thoroughly informative and well researched and footnoted by their “non-historian, non-academic” creator, function as a form of satire, written as they are by a fictional ethnomusicologist named Simone Carver in the dry, pedantic tone typical of a Smithsonian Folkways collection.
Schmidt has a lot to say about the notes’ origins.
“I came to this problem while I was doing it where I was, like, ‘How can anyone know anything?’ . . . The thing that I set out to do was embody these women in song, but they’re only written about (by others), right? So to try to do that means you have to fill in all these blanks and then you come to an understanding that you know nothing and I started to have a lot of trouble with what I was doing, so I started to think about the arrogance of the historical record, in parallel with the arrogance of psychiatrists or the superintendent of the asylum in parallel with the arrogance of the enterprise of ethnomusicology or any of that Smithsonian Folkways kind of stuff.
“So that’s when I came up with the idea that it would be great to write a companion piece to bring up those questions around authority, and bring up those questions around specificity and what is fiction and what is fact and who gets to deter- mine how people are remembered and how things are historicized.”
Schmidt has embarked on a noless-ambitious means of unveiling Audible Songs from Rockwood onstage locally, booking three smallvenue shows around Toronto in three days this week where she’ll be accompanied by Chris Coole, John Showman and Max Heineman from the Lonesome Ace Stringband, the lads who help give the album its traditional bluegrass and folk feel.
The first gig goes down at Likely General on Thursday, followed by another at St. Matthew’s United Church on St. Clair West on Friday — moved from its original location on the flooded Toronto Island “due to climate change” — and a final performance at Array Space on Saturday.
“I wanted to present the material in an intimate environment. There’s no opener, so I’m just asking people to come and listen to these 11 narratives and then leave,” says Schmidt. “I’ve been touring it on my own and I talk a lot in between and tell stories about the women . . . I want to do a onehour show that’s substantial enough for people to go home and think about for a few more hours.
“It’ll end early enough that if people still wanna go get hammed, they can. But people generally have felt very attentive at all the other shows. I’ve done some shows in bars and I always present the first few songs and then I say:
‘OK, if there’s anyone here who needs to self-assess and determine whether or not they can pay attention for the next 40 minutes, this is your time. If you’re here to talk to your friend, that’s awesome, but you guys should leave.’ And then usually three or four people leave.
“If they didn’t know what they were coming for, they leave. And then the show is better for it.”