Music

Chilly Gonzales debuts new film and album in Toronto

by Jessica Lewis

Canadian born, European bred Chilly Gonzales has conquered a few of his musical goals already (breaking a Guinness World Record to name one), but the most recent was making a film. It comes hand in hand with his newest album of the same name, Ivory Tower.

The album was almost finished before the writing of the movie, but the two started to blend together naturally. “I heard the music, it was quite cinematic, and I was also shocked at the amount of energy I was going to have,” said Gonzales in a recent interview with AUX. “So with all that energy, I could really think of something that’s going to be bigger than the album, and it turned out to be the movie.”

Gonzales has been in Toronto this week promoting both. There was a special screening for cast and crew on Monday evening at the Camera Bar. Starring Tiga, Peaches and himself, it revolves around two brothers in their fight over chess, a lady and dignity.

Gonzales is Hershell, a “purist” who returns from living abroad to Toronto find that his once creative, now domesticated ex-girlfriend Marsha (Peaches) is engaged to his “pragmatic sell-out” TV personality brother Thad (Tiga). Hershell wants to market an idea he has called “Jazz Chess,” but he finds that the only one who can sell it is Thad. It becomes a battle to reach the bigger meaning in the relationship and “chessence” through the Canadian Chess Championship.

“I thought that chess was the perfect stand-in for music,” said Gonzales. “People can see what they want in music, they can say it’s art or others can say it’s commerce. I say it’s neither of those two things, I say it’s entertainment. The movie tells the story through chess of finding that third way, and saying it’s not a battle of extremes, you can waltz down the middle if you just change your attitude.”

There’s a lot of deep meaning and layers to the film, and to top it off, it’s funny. Though some lines may be cheesy (“Chess we can!”), the three stars pull their lines off and put a sense of ownership to their characters.

“Peaches and Tiga are very inspiring performers,” said Gonzales. “I wrote parts that were custom-made for them, using a lot of personal knowledge about their psychology and I knew they’d be able to find things in the script that they could get to really quickly.”

Understanding the album on its own is much different than seeing it synced to the film, as scenes are brought to life by Gonzales’ electronic excitement. No word on if or when the film will come to Canada, but hopefully it does as there are other cameos to be seen by Feist, Cadence Weapon and more.