Toronto electro goddess Jennifer Parkin's new band is called Ayria, a play on one of her favourite words -- aria -- but pronounced "area."
That "aria," an elaborate vocal solo in opera, plus "area" equals Ayria is just one of the unusual ways things add up for Parkin. She must be the only University of Waterloo math grad with marketing experience and 11 years of dance classes who loves to sing and write electro-industrial rock.
The fans know Parkin is a rare gem.
"'I've never seen a Waterloo 'mathee' that's kind of attractive,' " they'll say.
Parkin brings the dark fun of her Ayria project to downtown London's Rage club tonight. Six designers, five from London, will display and sell clothing at the show.
The idea for Ayria began to take shape in January 2003. Soon, Parkin was collaborating with Seattle-based Shaun Frandsen. Ayria's Debris (Alfa Matrix) was released late in 2003. The title track and such songs as Disease and Horrible Dream are the perfect Ayria mix of energetic, poppy tracks with Parkin's flatly cheerful delivery of her bleak lyrics.
At tonight's show, Toronto keyboardist Joe Buyer of V01D steps in for Frandsen.
With its computers, electronic sounds and instruments, the industrial genre in rock takes in bands all the way from Germany's Kraftwerk to America's Nine Inch Nails to British Columbia's Delerium.
"It's like a poppier side of industrial. A lot of industrial is rooted in angry and aggressive lyrics," Parkin says of Ayria's area in the genre. A critic mentions Ayria's combination of dance sounds and down words. "Someone else just said that, 'The music's so poppy but the lyrics are so melancholy,' " she says.
The melancholy goes with the genre. Industrial and electro music can be produced in isolation, by musicians in close touch with each other via computers, but cut off from live audiences.
For Parkin, a live show is "the payoff. It shows you that all the time I sat in front of my computer, working on music, you people cared," she says.