Canadian producer Daniel Lanois hopes to build art showcase at Toronto studio

TORONTO – Daniel Lanois is planning a gallery space in Toronto to showcase his ambitious new multimedia art installation — just don’t call it a gallery.

“I’m not looking to have the usual gallery environment,” said Lanois.

Of course not. The innovative producer, who will discuss his long career collaborating with the likes of U2, Neil Young and Bob Dylan at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on Wednesday night, has decided to devote the second floor of his converted studio in west Toronto — originally a Buddhist temple — for the project.

In concert with his thorny new record “Flesh and Machine,” he commissioned short films from directors Atom Egoyan, Mary Harron and Jim McKay, and received submissions from more than 100 others, projects that were completed “fast and furious” and that Lanois is keen to showcase — in his own, non-sterile, non-usual way.

“I want it to be a little more mysterious and a little more rock and roll,” he said of his ideal environment. “I got a couple pool tables in there because we’re pool players as well, but for the showings, we’ll just cover them up with nice Mexican plastic tablecloths and they can be drink-holders while people enjoy the films.

“I’ll have some nice furniture in there,” he added, “so you might be tempted, on a Friday night out, somebody might prefer to come to Daniel Lanois’s temple, sit on a nice Eames couch, smooch with your girl a little bit and watch the works of rising filmmakers.”

Similarly, “Flesh and Machine” isn’t the sedate piece of ambient one might expect from a relatively songless Lanois project. Instead, it’s “more challenging,” he says, and it has “protest in it.”

It’s noisy headphone music, so it’s surprising the jarring, ever-morphing album grew from something much more conventional.

“It did start as a more conventional song record,” said Lanois, who will perform at Toronto’s Danforth Music Hall on Sunday and Montreal’s L’Astral on Nov. 23. “But I applied a deconstruction technique that I learned from Brian Eno from back in the day. We enter with a plan and we believe in that plan. We provide ornament and support to the centre.

“And then we remove the centre altogether.”

His longtime collaboration with Eno of course helped to yield U2’s “The Joshua Tree,” “Achtung Baby” and “All That You Can’t Leave Behind,” as well as the crucial 1983 Eno-Lanois ambient document “Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks.”

Of course, on his own Lanois helmed Bob Dylan’s masterpiece “Time Out of Mind,” Emmylou Harris’s “Wrecking Ball,” Neil Young’s “Le Noise” and Peter Gabriel’s five-time-platinum blockbuster “So,” which included the chart-topping single “Sledgehammer.”

Given that the Quebec-born, Hamilton-reared Lanois has spent so much of his career devoted to avant-garde experimentation, how does he retain that pop touch?

“I never set out to make hits — we set out to make discoveries and hopefully bump into some magic,” he said. “Anything you’re referencing with Peter, the reason we carried on with those tracks is because they had a bit of magic in the early days.

“It acts as a breadcrumb to follow. … And then if something picks up its hand and says: ‘I have a chance to be on radio or have a broad appeal or be commercial,’ then we pay attention to that once that track has it in it. That’s how that record (‘So’) was done and that’s pretty much how I arrived at all the hits I’ve been associated with.”

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