Constellation Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 5 Items

The follow-up to Kee Avil's acclaimed 2022 debut Crease: "A stunning debut" (The Quietus); "A whiplash style of uninhibited exploration" (The Wire); "Kee Avil's debut is a force" (Foxy Digitalis); "A work of Frankensteinian wonder" (Electronic Sound); "A tightly coiled, finely wrought vision of avant-pop" (Exclaim); "A debut of fiendish creativity" (Bandcamp Album Of The Day / Albums Of The Year) Kee Avil's music is both adventurous and intimate, intellectually challenging and emotionally resonant. The Montréal guitarist and producer's 2022 debut LP Crease garnered plaudits from outlets like The Wire, The Quietus, Mojo and Foxy Digitalis, picking up a Canadian Juno Award nomination and Bandcamp Album Of The Day and Albums Of The Year along the way. Its intricate construction, unnerving atmospheres, and knife-edge take on avant-pop prompted comparisons to early PJ Harvey, This Heat, and Gazelle Twin. A remix EP with work by claire rousay, Ami Dang, Cecile Believe, and Pelada brought collaborative perspectives to four Crease tracks, offering new pathways within those songs. With Spine, Kee Avil strips back her heavily textured compositions, opening up a much rawer sound. She calls it folk… and while traditionalists might scoff, this is urgent music that reflects the precarity of modern life, as well as the jarring mixture of electronic and real-world interactions that have become the fabric of our day-to-day experiences. There's a hypnotic post-punk somnambulance to it all, using the repetition and fracturing of melodic phrases interwoven with delicate electronics to create curious and persistent hooks. While not a concept album, themes of time's passage, remembrance, and decay crop up across multiple tracks. Each track intentionally only has four elements - guitar, electronics, and two other instruments, with Kee's voice and guitar pushed to the front. Within this minimalist framework, the juxtaposition of beauty and discomfort that is key to the Kee Avil sound stands out in skin-prickling relief. "We're shaped by many versions of ourselves," says Avil. "I was looking back at these versions of myself and what could have been, what didn't end up being and what did end up being, and going back like that through time. Seeing the future, the past." Spine was written in Kee Avil's home studio after a lapse in writing while touring Crease and working on other projects. She is a well-known and respected member of the Montréal experimental scene, and formerly ran Concrete Sound Studio with Zach Scholes, who continues to work with her as a producer on Spine. Compared to the three years that went into making her debut, Spine emerged in a matter of months - a process that may also be a factor in its intensity and sharpness: "This record was much harder, like it was really discovering everything from scratch." In her desire to not simply replicate or extend the sound of Crease, she felt she had to rip up the rule book, write in a different way, and pare back songs against her usual instincts. Sometimes, when we work against our ingrained habits, we get to the core of who we really are. Spine is an exercise in that process. Without over-intellectualizing or being didactic, it hits immediately and emotionally, especially if you are a person who has spent much time in the process of self-examination. Kee's voice hisses, whispers, and chants; her guitar bends and rings; electronics skitter and crackle; violin creaks like a door in the wind. There is something so evocative about the atmospheres she creates that it's easy to overlay one's own feelings onto her work, but to do that wholly would be to overlook one of the most important things about Spine: Kee Avil's clear and thoughtful vision. This isn't just the next step forward in her artistic trajectory; it's a stunner of a record that stands on its own, a bracing and thrilling listen that has much to reveal about the contradictions inherent in being human. - jj skolnik

ALL Hands_make Light is the recently minted duo of Ariel Engle (La Force, Patrick Watson, Broken Social Scene) and Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion). Longtime friends, collaborators, and stalwarts of the Montréal post-punk community, this is their first full-fledged project together. Ah_ml weaves these two unique voices through lustrous tendrils of blown-out tones and drones, expanding on Menuck's eponymous modular and analog synth-based work of recent years, now imbued with an additionally searing, soulful warmth and melodicism through Engle's singing. "Darling The Dawn" is a spellbinding album of preternaturally genre-bending sonics and songwriting: a sort of electronic shoegaze suffused with freak-folk, kosmische, darkwave and post-industrial, flowing from ambient minimalism to pulsing maximalism, conjuring traditionals sung in the haze of earliest light accompanied by overdriven circuit boards powered with ungrounded wires. Engle and Menuck see ALL Hands_make Light in a folk lineage traced through the likes of Pentangle and Trees to White Magic and Amps For Christ. While there's no discernable guitar or acoustic instrumentation on the album (warm distorted synths provide the palette, along with signal-processed violin from fellow-traveller Jessica Moss), off-kilter drone incantations like "A Sparrow's Lift" and "A Workers' Graveyard (Poor Eternal)" perhaps sit most overtly within these seams of the skewed-folk substratum. The dichotomic ritualism of Can is an adjacent signpost, where methodical longform soundscaping combines with a feeling of extemporized immediacy. The album's tremendous 10-minute centerpieces "We Live On A Fucking Planet And Baby That's The Sun" and the motorik-driven "The Sons And Daughters Of Poor Eternal" also make this influence explicit thanks in part to the resplendent drumming of guest Liam O'Neil (Suuns), who helps propel both tracks to their spiralling peaks. Above all it's the singing and lyrics, in method and melodic delivery, that conjure certain freak-folk furrows. Engle calls this "music inspired by ancestor music, sea shanties for seas we've never sailed" and the duo have indeed forged a collection on "Darling The Dawn" where vocals often feel strangely rooted in traditionals, while the instrumentation resonates out-of-time, in a liminal space at once glisteningly synthetic and oxidized in analog patina. As the album title suggests, sleepless anxiety/euphoria and a sense of somatic channeling is vital to these songs: "I mostly kept the first thought I had, like a cold read, I wanted the melodies to be immediate and to surprise me, not a laboured process; it's about being a weather vane, guided by preconscious impulses" says Engle. For Menuck, the record started "with an idea of making a long thing about `the Dawn', the different weights of its radiance, the way it kisses our dumb faces when we rise and leave the night behind, the heaviness of that light when you haven't slept." "Darling The Dawn" captures a wholly compelling collaboration between Engle and Menuck in an album of genuine thematic power, thrumming with alternately tender and serrated beauty as only their combined strengths and sensibilities could conjure. Thanks for listening.

Joyfultalk returns with its third album for Constellation; another vibrantly divergent stylistic take on the analog materiality and sensibility of electronic composer-producer Jay Crocker, whose previous two records forged trance-inducing polyrhythmic intricacy, each from a distinct angle and sound palette, each enlisting a single instrumental collaborator. Familiar Science rallies contributions from a larger cast of musicians into a looser, cosmic recombinant combo_still shot through with Joyfultalk's singular mixing desk kinetics, but this time deep-diving into gnarled and twisted, spliced and diced out-jazz. Crocker draws inspiration from 1980s M-Base music and Ornette Coleman's harmolodic funk period, while his own prior history as an improv guitarist also resurfaces for the first time in many years_an element in this polyvalent artist's chemistry set that hasn't appeared prominently in his own music for over a decade. Familiar Science finds Crocker folding time (as lockdown will do), immersed in his present-day kaleidoscope of solitary art and music practices in rural Nova Scotia, while channeling his former life as a bustling jazz collaborator in Calgary, Alberta. Building outwards from roiling resampled acoustic drums, Crocker extracted additional sonic and rhythmic textures, then formed the head of each song using dusted-off archival recordings and his own bass, keys and midi sequencing. Albertan percussionists Eric Hamelin (Ghostkeeper, Chad Vangaalen) and Chris Dadge (Lab Coast, Alvvays) provided improvised drum tracks to be chopped and harvested; Nova Scotia-based Nicola Miller (Ryan Driver, Doug Tielli) laid down resplendent excursions on saxophone and flute; Crocker's own dexterous guitar appears on several cuts. Familiar Science also poignantly features samples from live recordings by the late Calgary saxophonisticonoclast Dan Meichel, catalysing some of the album's heaviest contortions. Crocker weaves all these raw materials into exuberant compositions that blur the line between sizzling corporeal combo and sampledelic futurist jamz, variously conjuring (leftfield) Flying Lotus, (later) Tortoise, Badbadnotgood and Squarepusher's Music Is Rotted One Note. The rubbery hyper-compression of boom-bap opener "Body Stone" initiates the séance, and the album offers a panoply of skittering grooves and soaring melodic pathways thereafter, through quags of heady jazz alternately streaked with dayglo delirium and other more vaporous states of revelry. Crocker's own wordless stacked vocals are the giddy secret sauce on several cuts, and his lead guitar work (in kinship with the lean progressions of Mary Halvorson or Jeff Parker) features on "Take It To The Grave", "Stop Freaking Out!" and the album's title track. More honeyed passages on songs like "Blissed For A Minute" and "Ballad In 9" center around Miller's bouyant alto sax and flute. Familiar Science is a rousing feast of noise-tinged polychrome electronic avant-jazz: richly harmolodic compositions teeming with intersecting textures and turbulences; exploratory, exhilarated and indeed joyful.

Light Conductor returns with Sequence Two, the second album of prismatic slow-burn analog synth instrumentals by the duo of Jace Lasek (The Besnard Lakes) and Stephen Ramsay (Young Galaxy). Expanding on the hypnaogogic ambience of their warm and uncluttered 2019 debut, Lasek and Ramsay add subtle but scintillating structure and electricity to these four new longform tracks. The songs remain predominantly beatless, but burble and vibrate with more ornate, intentional pulses, arpeggiators and control voltages. Light Conductor's analog palette of gently fuzzed-out chordal drone, mesmeric ostinato, sweeping filters and drifting levitational melody continues to colour the glowing atmosphere of this enveloping space/trance music: like sunrise on another planet, with a profoundly satisfying dimension of heightened ceremony and design. Working from recordings helmed by Ramsay in late-2019 and early-2020, made just before and after Light Conductor tours with Spencer Krug an d Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the duo then culled from hours of tape and worked up these soundscapes during isolation 2020-21 (in between Lasek's other recording and mixing sessions for Godspeed's latest AT State's END, Bell Orchestre's House Music, and his own The Besnard Lakes Are The Last Of The Great Thunderstorm Warnings, among others). Light Conductor continues to convey an ineffable sense of meditative discovery and efflorescence on Sequence Two, as if the music was being played and unfolded for the first time: the genuine effect of these songs being sourced from marathon overnight sessions of live playing, marked by immersive, durational telepathy and semi-improvisation. The duo's psychogenic jams are then judiciously overlaid, usually with just one or two more elements, though for brief stretches becoming stacked and maximal - most notably towards the end of 14-minute album opener "Splitting Light" when an ever-refracted sequencer pattern inexorably d evelops towards throbbing cadence and multi-layered intertwining melodies, culminating in a final burst of guitar and vocal-driven operatic space-rock chug that invokes Yes, Spiritualized, and (choral) Bon Iver in equal measure (the only vocals on this otherwise instrumental album). Riyl: Roedelius, Laurie Spiegel, Oneohtrix Point Never, Tangerine Dream, Laraaji.

Jerusalem In My Heart (Jimh) Is A Live Audio-Visual Performance Project, With Lebanese-Canadian Producer/Musician Radwan Ghazi Moumneh And Montréal Based Filmmaker Erin Weisgerber At Its Core. Jimh Is An Immersive Sonic And Visual Live Experience And An Evolving Effort To Forge A Modern Experimental Arabic Music Wed To Hand-Made Visuals Using Analog 16mm Film At Site-Specific Screen Installations. One Of The Most Renowned And Uncompromising Entities Working In 21st Century Avant-Garde Arab-Levantine Art And Music, Jerusalem In My Heart Presents A New Album Of Vital And Haunting Electronics And Electroacoustics, Framed By Founder And Producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh's Spoken And Sung Arabic, Buzuk-Playing And Sound Design. Qalaq Is The Most Distilled, Variegated And Finely Wrought Jerusalem In My Heart Album To Date - Featuring A Different Guest/Collaborator On Every Track, Yet As Cohesive, Emotionally Resonant, Sonically Adventurous And Narratively Powerful As Any Release In Jimh's Celebrated Discography. Guests Across The Album's 13 Tracks Include Moor Mother, Tim Hecker, Lucrecia Dalt, Greg Fox, Beirut, Alanis Obomsawin, Rabih Beaini And Many More. "Qalaq" Is An Arabic Word With Many Shades Of Meaning But Moumneh Particularly Intends It As "Deep Worry" - On Various Obvious Global Levels, But Also Specifically With Respect To Lebanon: Its Collapsing Domestic Politics, Economy And Infrastructure; The Tragedy And Aftermath Of The 2020 Beirut Port Explosion; The Intractable Geography And Geopolitics That Continue To Condemn The Country To Corruption, Disruption, Destabilization And Violence.