Edmonton Journal from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada • 25

EHil Edmonton Alive C3 Sound C5 Showtimes C6 Television C7 Tht Edmonton Journal (C Thuraday, March 13, 1986' V.t l' '-V. I -if I i i fcr i i i a i SMI 1 -Ai i -I i. i Av fT fv PICTURE: Ray Giguere Brian Schultze, left, and Curtis Ruptash studio musicians eager to play live All this serves to give the LP an obsessive, at times trance-like cast (although there's considerable humor, too). Guerilla Welfare is one of those recordings that's simultaneously sophisticated and earthy, slick and human. Schultze, who recently studied with Robert (King Crimson) Fripp at the latter's American Society of Continuing Education, was "sort of surprised, after the fact, at how everything seems to flow together, the way psychological issues keep cropping up.

Believe me, it was pretty unintentional." While Guerilla Welfare is very much a studio band at this point, both Ruptash and Schultze are eager to play live, "perhaps as a multi-media theatre kind of thing" at the Fringe festival. "We'd like to break down that 'we're hereyou're there' dichotomy between band and audience." Even if this doesn't pan out, Schultze and Ruptash plan to keep on keeping on. But at their own pace. "Our parameters are self-imposed," observed Ruptash. "We still have a lot of material kicking around.

Our music isn't some static thing. It's still building. And we're certainly not going to make it into the Billboard Top 10, that's readily apparent." While Welfare's principals initially didn't care if they played live or made a record, they "at least wanted to have a vocalist, someone whose voice had a lot of character," said Schultze. "But we couldn't find anyone we could work with." What takes the place of vocals and the versechorus convention on Guerilla Welfare are tapes tapes culled from radio station and public libraries, then edited, processed and re-contextualized virtually beyond recognition. Chortled Ruptash: "It's kinda like making a rational lecturer sound like a raving maniac." A "tune" like Atom Bomb, for example, has an inebriated Sean O'Casey repeating lines like "There's gonna be no war" and "The atom bomb is a jolly good fella" over the sounds of "squashed guitar," "fission bass" and "plutonium stick." In Thought Breeds Fear, guru J.

Krishnamurti wends his way among fields of fretted bass, "sympathetic guitars" and percussion intoning gems like "Anywhere there is pleasure, there must be pain" and "Thought is responsible for fear as thought is responsible for pleasure." By JAMES ADAMS Journal Staff Writer There's probably never been a record quite like it produced in Edmonton. Everything about the eponymous debut of Guerilla Welfare from the blue-green-yellow silk-screened graphic art to the music, from the labyrinthine packaging to the LP's conceptual thrust is as far removed from K.D. Lang and the Reclines as it is from Darkroom and White Wolf. This is home-made, hometown music with a global perspective, Fourth World sounds from the four- and 16-track basement studios of Wild Rose Country. Produced for $2,700 in a limited edition of 500, Guerilla Welfare is the brainchild and labor of love of Curtis Ruptash, 29, and Brian Schultze, 31.

They've known each other for more than seven years, first as fellow employees in a city music store, then as members of the original Subtle Hints sextet. Ruptash played electric bass, Schultze guitar. When that band split in late 1984, Ruptash and Schultze decided to collaborate. "We didn't really visualize our new thing as just the two of us," recalled Ruptash recently. In 1979 he co-founded Pretty Rough, a power-chord rock combo that managed to record two LPs before folding in 1983.

Ruptash a man for whom the word "slender" was coined is somewhat sheepish looking back at that involvement, especially given the "radical" direction of Guerilla (correct spelling: Guerrilla) Welfare. "The girl I'm going with now, she heckled Pretty Rough. She didn't know I was in it then. "Of course," he said with a laugh, "even if she did know I was in it, she probably would have heckled me." "Right now, with Welfare, I'm doing exactly what I want to do. There are no compromises whatsoever.

Back with Pretty Rough, I swallowed the rock myth. You know: go commercial, make it, then do what you really want to do. Well, that doesn't work." For Guerilla Welfare, Ruptash and Schultze "just had a few ground rules. We wanted to stay within fairly repetitive structures and avoid changes for changes sake. We wanted to stay away from solos.

We wanted to avoid a music with a lot of parts but one that had intensity and strong rhythms, one that would break down ethnic barriers. There was also a desire to avoid using keyboards." CJSR hits fund-raising trail ft i -r- 5 A Helen Metella Ewald Pfleger, Gunter Grasmuck, Kurt Rene Plisner, Hewig Rudisser and Niki Gruber Opus ready to unleash its long suit live performances on North America sometime in May or June Austrian band has audience shouting with CJSR's Mary Watson prior to March 14 will vie for four hours of recording time in CJSR's 8-track studio. March 27, The Limit hosts Mark Korven, and March 29 the drive winds up with Brilliant Orange, The Zamboni Drivers and Colour Me Psycho at Dinwoodie Lounge on the university campus. SPEAKING OF The Ambassador, it's one of two city clubs in which the promoting team of Compulsion and What's His Name (Barry Peters and Gubby Szvoboda) have begun booking independent Canadian acts. Saturday they bring in Winnipeg's Fools Crow, Vancouver's Enigmas and Jr.

Gone Wild. The other club is Flashbacks where the duo plan to make a habit of Sunday afternoon shows for under-age fans. March 23 they've hired Fastbacks, Death Sentence and Entirely Distorted. On March 30 it's The Asexuals and guests. The music starts at 4 p.m.

for these gigs and is over around 8 p.m. SHAKE RATTLE 'N' ROLL: Lively by Vancouver's Studebakers and a decent-sized dance floor make The Boiler Lounge one of the few places in town to shake a leg in pleasant surroundings without incurring a cover charge Edmonton's record collector's mag The Vinyl Exchange has succumbed to the financial squeeze and ceased publication after nine issues Bid-man Productions is a new Edmonton-based rock video production house whose first project is for Calgary singer-songwriter den Dixon. No campus radio station I've ever known is as embarrassingly low-rent as a commercial outlet I worked at briefly, where the amazing owners once gave away a trip for one to Los Angeles. But university and college broadcasters regularly fill the airwaves with serious, intriguing, innovative or unusual programming on budgets that would probably have an all-Macedonian or similarly small-audience format flooded with assistance from three levels of government and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The University of Alberta's low-power FM, CJSR, with its 13 hours per week of both jazz and folk music, and untold hours devoted to independent and alternative music or arcane matters such as fringe-rocker Jonathan Rich-man's ouevre, is one such gem.

To keep up this inspired work they need an extra $30,000 this year, so March 19 through March 29 they're holding their second annual community fund-raiser. Program director Michelle Dawson says the money will be used for several pressing projects, in particular upgrading of their mobile recording equipment (CJSR tapes and re-broadcasts approximately 40 local concerts a year, from classical guitar showcases to hardcore dances) and improving their transmitting equipment to the point that it will be meaningful next year to increase power from 44.5 to 1,000 watts. "But I'm mostly concerned about a budget to buy records," says Dawson, explaining that major record labels often don't acknowledge their diversity of programming with freebie classical or jazz records, and small companies can't afford to. In addition to prizes, including a trip (for two!) to Vancouver and passes to Expo 86, the plea for funds will be spiced-up with offbeat events such as Spyder Yard-ley Jones (son of The Journal's illustrator) drawing to pledgees' specifications, and a possible recreation of the celebrity strip-a-thon which recently raised $900 in one hour for the University of Calgary's FM And as usual, the station will present a variety of live music nights around town. March 19 at the Sidetrack Cafe it's Amos Garrett, March 23 at Flashback's, Death Sentence, The Fastbacks and Entirely Distorted March 26 at the Media Club is folk music talent night.

Eight contestants who must register 1 our music. Our music is a little softer than the German language." That's borne out by the other cuts on the band's Canadian LP, Up and Down, which features songs culled from their last three European albums. They're soft, middle-of-the-road tunes that contrast starkly against Live is Life and illustrate how atypical a tune it is for them. Nonetheless Rudisser professes no nervousness about following up the hit with another as catchy. For one thing, each of the five members compose songs.

And besides, Live is Life sat in the number one position of Canadian charts for several weeks at the beginning of this year and the band hasn't even unleashed its long suit in North America live performance. That's scheduled for sometime in May or June. By HELEN METELLA Journal Staff Writer Like this writer, you've probably shouted along to the rousing single, Live is Life, by a little-known Austrian band called Opus, and wondered, "Why does this corny, grammatically-goofy platitude make me feel so good?" To band vocalist Herwig Rud-disser, the answer is elementary. "It's the feeling of the record," he says, on the phone from Los Angeles, where tie band recently wound up a promotional visit to their American record company. "In 1984, in the autumn, we celebrated the 1 1 th birthday party for Opus.

We had a concert with all our friends in our home city and decided to have some fun, some joking, with that song. When we listened to the tapes we thought, hey that sounds really funny. "Most people thought it meant, life goes on, but that's not the sense of the song for us. For us it is very important to play live. It's our life." He's not kidding.

Contrary to convention elsewhere in the world, where the optimum market is not home but the U.S.A., success in Germany is not tied to singing, as Opus does, in English. "It's different in Austria and Germany. Many recordings use German because Germany is the second or third biggest market in the world. If they sing in German they can make money." That means Opus was by necessity, tied to the club circuit for their bread and butter. For 13 long years.

Which begs the obvious question, why did they commit to singing in English in the first place? "We tried to do German lyrics, but they don't sound very well with.