Brennan McCracken
Roxanne Nesbitt / Ben Brown / Marielle Groven. Play Symbiotic Instruments A brief note accompanying the latest record from Montreal free-jazz purveyor Small Scale Music highlights things before players: The titular “instruments,” we read, represent “a collection of resonant objects and systems played by an ever-evolving group of musicians.[...] Read more
Markus Floats. Fourth Album Montreal composer Markus Floats’ dynamic new LP moves between free jazz, musique concrète, and minimalism. Whereas his previous records were largely individual endeavours produced solo with MIDI instrumentation, Fourth Album welcomes contributions from Ari Swan (violin), James[...] Read more
All Hands Make Light. Darling the Dawn. All Hands Make Light, a collaboration between Montreal mainstays Ariel Engle (Broken Social Scene, La Force) and Efrim Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion), follow up their self-titled cassette release of 2021 with a cosmic debut LP for Constellation Records. Like their[...] Read more
Joseph Shabason and Vibrant Matter. Fly Me to the Moon. Woodwinds whiz Joseph Shabason joins former Diana bandmate Kieran Adams (aka Vibrant Matter) for a new EP of slippery ambient surfaces. Fly Me to the Moon was born out of a collaborative routine at Shabason’s Toronto studio, where Adams regularly practised drums and the two would[...] Read more
Tess Roby. Ideas of Space. Montreal dream-pop composer and songwriter Tess Roby follows her promising 2018 debut with a perceptive self-produced LP, the first on her new label SSURROUNDSS. Ideas of Space is a pristine collection of songs about envelopment—by architecture, by colour, by emotion—that tempers[...] Read more
Joyfultalk. Familiar Science. Crousetown, Nova Scotia’s Jay Crocker revs up Joyfultalk for another kinetic record of rhythm and ooze. Whereas previous Joyfultalk outings have grown out of Crocker’s singular, often solitary practice of instrument-building (he calls his creations “compositional systems[...] Read more
New Chance. Real Time. Last night I held my finger to the sky and stood still long enough for the moon to shift one degree and crest my fingertip. This observation—that we feel the Earth’s axis in the vector of gravity’s pull—may verge on axiomatic, but to witness the Earth’s rotation[...] Read more
Intersystems. #IV. On Ghost—the first track on the new recording by the late ’60s Toronto exploratory psychedelic group Intersystems—a fragmented series of vignettes concresces over the irregular pulse of an analog synth patch. The lyrics, like the music they share space with, are unsettling[...] Read more
Désolee. Enter Here. After nearly five years of dormancy, revered Toronto tape label Craft Singles has re-emerged from the underground with a bruised treasure: a cassette edition of Enter Here (also available on digital format), the debut album of avant-garde noise outfit Désolee, a recording project[...] Read more
Colin Fisher. Reflections of the Invisible World. Colin Fisher is busy. For nearly two decades his musical output and collaboration have touched many corners of the Canadian experimental scene—he is known as one half of psych duo Not The Wind, Not The Flag, as a frequent collaborator with artists such as Caribou, and as a solo artist[...] Read more
Kind Mind. Kind Mind. Near the end of the eighteenth century, the German theorist Friedrich Schlegel proposed the fragment as an emergent refashioning of the form of criticism. Inherent to the short form of the fragment was a questioning of wholeness: for Schlegel, the fragment was not a recovered piece of some[...] Read more
Olivier Alary and Johannes Malfatti. u,i. If you were asked to choose a record to capture the spirit of 2020, you might make a compelling case for u,i, a new album by composers Olivier Alary (Montreal) and Johannes Malfatti (Berlin). The collaboration is an emotive and yearning exploration of distance, recorded using VOIP (voice[...] Read more