Volume Water

Dragonfly were a Hamilton-area rock band who played through the 1990s and into the early 2000s. Their one surviving CD, Volume Water, came out in 1996 and catches a group working on its own terms in southern Ontario, where college studios, campus radio, small labels and a busy live circuit gave a band everything it needed to make a record and get it out without a major label.

The lineup on the album was George Ceh on electric and acoustic guitars, Joe Cunko on vocals, John Mamone on bass and backing vocals, and Paul Salini on drums and percussion. Mamone took the lead vocal on ‘Big Religion’.

They cut the record at BB10 at Sheridan College in Oakville, with Mark Zsifkovits producing and engineering. All ten songs were registered with SOCAN to Dragonfly collectively: ‘Strobe 13’, ‘Second Coming’, ‘Big Religion’, ‘As I Drive’, ‘Bed’, ‘Understand’, ‘Acidity’, ‘120 Volts’, ‘Rain Dance’ and ‘Mother Nature’.

Volume Water came out on Bionic Bug Records, run out of 15 Erminia Court in Hamilton, with catalogue number DFCD 001. The band handled most of the packaging themselves. Mamone and the group worked up the cover concept and design, Sandy Hum and Nesa Petrovic took art direction, Marianne Cunko shot the band photograph, and Robin Kavanagh made the disc artwork.

The thank-you list inside the booklet reads like a map of the Hamilton scene. CFMU is there, along with local musicians, friends, family, other bands and the people who put on the shows: superGARAGE, Fever, Expose Yourself, and names from the local theatre world. The record grew out of a working network of rooms and players.

Mark Zsifkovits was still a Media Arts student at Sheridan when he made it. He went on to become one of Canada’s established film and television sound professionals, working as a re-recording mixer on entries in the Saw series and on films by David Cronenberg. Volume Water carries one of his earliest production and engineering credits.

Dragonfly kept going after the release. By the early 2000s Mamone was still identified with the band, and he and Paul Salini both turned up in the orbit of the Hamilton progressive-metal group Mastery, Mamone guesting on bass and Salini joining the lineup until he left in 2003. Dragonfly themselves played Hamilton’s Festival of Friends in 2003. The next year’s festival listings carry a band called Volume Water.

Mamone founded that band and fronted it. Volume Water was a Hamilton hard-rock group active from about 2003 into the following decade, carrying the title of the Dragonfly CD as its name. The songs travelled with it. Volume Water’s 2008 album Land of the Greed...Home of the Slave includes new recordings of ‘Second Coming’, ‘Acidity’ and ‘Mother Nature’, all three first heard on the 1996 disc. Whether Dragonfly formally became Volume Water is undocumented. Personnel changed and the newer band built its own identity, though the thread running through Mamone, the name and the songs is clear enough.

Mamone turned out to be the most persistent figure to come out of the group. With Volume Water he developed as a vocalist, bassist and songwriter, worked with veteran Canadian producer Jack Richardson, played the Hamilton and southern Ontario circuit and shared stages with Big Sugar. Afterward he recorded under his own name, releasing Order And Chaos, then took over as vocalist for the Hamilton progressive-metal band Prismind and contributed guitar to Monarch Trail. Paul Salini stayed at the heavier end of the Hamilton scene through his work with Mastery.

The album itself travelled too. A copy reached Winnipeg campus station CKUW, which puts the record well outside its home market, and the booklet’s thanks to CFMU at McMaster point to campus radio as part of how the band moved it.

-Robert Williston