Extermination Music Nights: Reanimating Toronto's Lost Geographies in Sound and Art

This essay analyzes "Extermination Music Nights," a series of guerrilla over-night art and music events that occurred at various locations in the imaginative urban structure of Toronto, Canada between 2005 and 2009. Organized by two independent music promoters, Daniel Vila and Matt McDonough, who were also active as musicians in the art-punk & DIY (Do-It-Yourself) community, Extermination Music Nights (EMNs) happened mostly in spring and summer in abandoned factories, warehouses, under rail bridges, and in other interdictive sites in Toronto's sprawling urban landscape, growing in size, scope, and attendance with each event. EMNs featured a diverse array of musicians, dancers, and visual and performance artists from Toronto's independent music and art scenes. Strachan explores EMNs as phenomena that intervene, chiefly through sound and performance, with the imaginative placelessness of urban experience and the tactile contours of the city's materiality. By appropriating and reanimating parts of Toronto's lost geographies through transgressive cultural repurposing, EMNs engage in a semiotic play with the city's darkened and quieted spaces by attempting to "render fake things in the real world."