We gather, on the record.
I had given up on this city.
I grew up here. My parents were immigrants and Canada is all I know. In the nineties it was the Wellington and the Cameron House, Oz on a Sunday for Peter, Tyrone and Shams, and Club NRG out in Burlington for DJ Francis. Mark Oliver and a handful of DJs from another era taught me how to play music without ever knowing they were teaching me. I started playing records for the kids at my school in grade eight and I have not stopped since.
Record labels after that. Becoming an artist. Writing songs that other people sang. Lately sound bowls and consciousness work. Different rooms, same thread running through all of it, which was always connection through music.
But I had gotten down on Toronto. Then it landed on me that I could not keep complaining about something I was not doing anything about.
So this is my love letter back to the city.
The question I set out to answer was simple. How do I get a room full of people together every week and have them talk about something that matters?
We listen in fragments now. Thirty seconds at a time, alone, while doing something else. We have never had more access to music and never spent less time inside it. So the sessions are one record, start to finish, in a small room with everyone's phones down. Nothing skipped, nothing talked over.
The music is the way in the door. The listening is the point. What we are losing in ourselves, we find again in the music, and in each other.
It started in June with ten people in the room. Within months sixty a week were coming.
What a night does
Come early, eat, sit with whoever the evening puts beside you. Then the room goes quiet under singing bowls until what is left is attention.
Then the story: the artist, the moment, the culture that made the record and why it still matters. Then the album plays, whole.
The night that proved it
In July we played Clube da Esquina. Before a note, I passed the mic around and asked what the record meant to people. One woman said it was what her father played in the house growing up, and he is gone now, so hearing it in a room of strangers brought him back.
Most of the room was Brazilian. They sang and cried and laughed their way through it. Afterwards, nearly every conversation at the booth came back to the same thing, that someone had taken the time to learn their culture before playing it back to them. One person told me her own country's history had been kept from her at school, and she learned it in a room in Toronto.
That is the whole idea. It is why we keep doing it.
Thirty five years of this
Medicine, radio journalism, the halls of Sony Music, then a publishing deal as a songwriter with Sony Music Publishing, and two Juno nominations along the way. Every chapter was another way of studying how sound moves people.
That study turned into a conviction, that listening deeply, together, without distraction, is essential to preserving what is human in us. I carry it into the corporate world as conscious sound therapy through Pause and Expand. on.rcrd is its truest expression: real people in a real room, changed by what the record gives them.
Steven Fernandez
One record, one room, once a week is a small answer to a big thing. But it works on everyone who sits in it.
Come sit in it.
Elsewhere
