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ASADO, live at Old Market Square — one of the photos found in Call*Response (HEIDI KRAHN)

Organizers of a DIY book project inspired by Winnipeg’s live music scene are celebrating its success — and launching the next step in an ambitious, 10-year plan — with a unique, two-day art exhibition.
   
Downtown Underground is being held at Absurd Machine Studios (3rd floor, 72 Princess St.) on Dec. 1 and 2 in support of Call*Response: Present, Past and Beyond, a 64-page collection of concert photos, gig posters, Top 10 lists and other written submissions that immortalizes Winnipeg’s punk and hardcore scenes — the two communities whose members came forward in droves in response to last August’s open call for contributions.   
   
The brainchild of local philanthropic promotional group Be:Cause Industries, the plan was to donate $10 from the sale of each book to Kids Help Phone, a toll-free, 24-hour anonymous phone and online counselling service for Canadian youth.
   
Organizers hoped to raise $10,000 for the organization with the crowd-sourced project. Now, just nine months after Call*Response was released, they’re halfway towards that goal: on Nov. 24, a $5,000 cheque will be presented to a Kids Help Phone representative.
   
In addition to brisk book sales — only 400 or so copies of the 850 originally made available to the public are left — Nathan Terin (Sidelined Productions’ owner/operator and a partner in Be:Cause Industries) credits a series of reunion concerts with the financial success experienced so far.   
   
"Every concert that we put on as a fundraiser for this project sold out," Terin says. "That gave us a lot of working money."
   
Downtown Underground is being presented by Be:Cultured, an offshoot of Be:Cause created last year to expand the scope of the group’s philanthropic efforts.
   
"We were looking for a way to still work within the community but do something a little different than live music," Terin, 33, explains.
   
In keeping with that mandate, the upcoming two-night stand will be a mixed-media event. The work of local photographers — including some whose pictures were featured in Call*Response — will be displayed, gallery-style, as will pieces created by visual artists working in other mediums.
   
"We have some artists from Graffiti Gallery, we have some tattoo artists, we have some painters, we have some air-brushers that are not even known at all. It’s really exposing different groups of people to each other," Terin says.
   
Anyone who shows up is also invited to contribute to a collaborative art piece that will be painted live on location on 11-by-17-inch canvases which will then be joined together. Live music and local food will round out the event; confirmed so far is Greg Rekus, who will be playing acoustic sets, and Deseo Bistro.
   
Running from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. both days, Downtown Underground will also launch the official call for submissions for Call*Response: Volume 2.
   
Like last time, contributions from any era and any genre will be considered. Also like last time, the content and theme of the finished product will depend entirely on the material received.
   
"Our disclaimer’s still and always will be that if it’s not in the book, it’s because it wasn’t submitted — but we’re going to dig deeper, and we’re hoping that people will pull out their show boxes and help us put together a second volume, which we hope will be launched by this time next year," Terin says.
   
"Now that fans have been able to look through (the first book) and see what we were going towards, I think it’ll be a lot easier for them."
   
Submissions can be sent to callresponsebook@gmail.com.
   
The long-term plan is to create four volumes over the next 10 years — a goal Terin thinks is doable, so long as local music fans keep supporting the cause.
   
"The project is self-funded," he says. "It’s all due to public support. If the public wants to see this kind of history documented, or at least displayed, then bring on the benevolency!"