TV Party was born when filmmaker Doug Nayler saw a gap between Toronto's many niche art scenes. Inspired by the recent Long Winter music and art series, he came up with a simple idea to bring the city's artists together: short collaborations between musicians and film makers based on the dead technology of clunky TVs sets and pre-internet television broadcasts.

For TV Party's debut event at SPK Beverley Hall on Friday, Nayler and his team collected half a dozen TV sets and built an enormous television facade to cover the venue's stage, where five films were projected while musicians played below. Each musician had only three weeks to compose music for the visuals: (deep breath) Rae Spoon (Montreal), Laura Barrett, SlowPitch, Vanessa Fischer (Lioness) and Macbeth II collab'd with film makers Leslie Supnet, Daniel McIntyre, Pouyan Jafarizadeh Dezfoulian, Mark Parselli, and Nayler himself.

The night featured macho Saturday morning cartoons paired with a rock band, a sustained autoharp drone matched with emotional close crops of talk show clips, a sensual late-night-TV tribute, experimental turn table rumbles set to b-horror clips, and a creepy exploration of Pentecostal film archives.

During intermissions (longer than the actual performances - hence TV "Party"), wine and beer were handy, VHS tapes played on the TV screens, and the talent and novelty of the collaborations kept the atmosphere light. When asked about future TV Party's, Nayler hinted at something "bigger and ambitious" in the fall, but wouldn't say any more.

View all the photos from the event in our Streams section.

Photos by Denise McMullin.