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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

GYBE returns with another soundtrack for our times, like only this inimitable and venerable ensemble can forge. As the heretical impudence of the anarcho-punk title implies, Godspeed harnesses some particularly raw power, spittle and grit across two riveting 20-minute side-length trajectories of noise-drenched widescreen post-rock: inexorable chug blossoms into blown-out twang, as some of the band's most soaring, searing melodies ricochet and converge amidst violin and bassline counterpoint. Field recordings and roiling semi-improvised passages frame these fervent epics, and two shorter self-contained 6-minute pieces find the band at its most devastatingly beautiful, haunting and elegiac. Poignant atmospherics, noisedrenched orchestration, drone, hypnotic swingtime crescendos, inexorably-layered towers of distorted clarion sound: State's END encapsulates every beloved facet of the band. Twenty-five years on, this new album is as vital, stirring, timely and implacable as any in Godspeed You! Black Emperor's storied discography. Just as State's END summons the gamut of Godspeed's constituent sonic trademarks, so the album artwork spans the entirety of the band's visual history: the grainy monochromatic photography of recent releases finds its way onto the inner sleeves, while the gatefold cover art harkens back to the iconic graphics of earlier classic records like Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada and Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven. State's END features illustrations by William Schmiechen, with the front cover taijitu flowers and back cover tear gas canisters rendered in raised thermographic black ink on the double-vinyl album jacket. The illuminated cross from Godspeed's debut F#a#8 also makes a reappearance on the inside gatefold drawing, in recurrent homage to the electrified hilltop landmark crucifix of the band's Montreal hometown. State's END was recorded and mixed in Montreal in October 2020 at the group's homebase studio Thee Mighty Hotel2Tango by Jace Lasek, the veteran awardwinning indie producer (and co-founder of The Besnard Lakes) who works with Godspeed for the first time on this recording. Thanks for listening. OUR Side HAS TO WIN. (R.I.P. D.H.)

Crease is the debut album by Kee Avil, a project led by Montréal producer and guitarist Vicky Mettler: a singular expression of fractured dream logic concretized in chiselled postpunk guitar, sinuous low-end electronics, a panoply of organic and digital samples creating alternately twitchy and propulsive rhythm, and the anxious intimacy of her finely wrought lyricism and vocals. Bound by an outstanding production sensibility throughout, Crease unfolds one oblique earworm hook after another, with compositional innovation anchored to an inscrutable and compelling voice across 10 songs of tremendous and imaginative sonic detail. Kee Avil brings a contemporary electroacoustic sensibility to bear on traditions and conventions of pop, postpunk, electronic and sound-art songwriting, where touchstones range from Scott Walker and Coil to Fiona Apple, (early) PJ Harvey and (later) Juana Molina to Eartheater, Pan Daijing and Smerz; or Grouper produced by Autechre. Her unconventional alloys also conjure the guitar-inflected deconstructions of Gastr del Sol and the crystalline micro-worlds of Bjork, Matmos and Rashad Becker. Crease is one of those debut records that excites a wide range of peerless references precisely because it's so compelling in its own idiosyncratic authority, originality and execution. Each song on Crease is its own sculpture, meticulously assembled to resemble disassembly: "each of these worlds was built without consideration for the other; it felt impossible to me, once I would enter the atmosphere of a song, to try to start another until that idea was finished." The album nonetheless unfolds in impressive holistic integration through a palette of textures and techniques deployed in recurring but continually refracted ways. Alongside her superb austere guitar work stitched into electro-industrial, dark-ambient and minimal-techno soundworlds, it's her voice and lyrics_confidential, hermetic, implacable_that provide the galvanizing, always captivating through-line. A burgeoning force in Montréal's experimental music community, Mettler has played guitar in a variety of avant, noise and improv combos_including the most recent iteration of Sam Shalabi's acclaimed Land Of Kush_and co-founded Concrete Sound Studio, a recording studio and multidisciplinary production space in Montréal, where she also curates and produces the online concert series Live in Concrete. Her more compositional, exacting, (de)constructed musical identity was first unveiled with the self-titled Kee Avil EP issued by Black Bough Records in 2018 and further honed by pre-pandemic tours in Europe and North America sharing stages with Pere Ubu, Marc Ribot and Bill Orcut among others. Woodshedding since then, Crease presents a quantum leap in Kee Avil's exploration of studio-based experimentation, arrangement and production, signaling the arrival of a brilliantly genre-melding, refined and assiduous new voice in avant-garde songcraft.

First album in 10 years! 180 gram LP in tipped-on gatefold jacket. Includes 7" vinyl + 12"X 48" pull-out poster!

Following the release of Eric Chenaux's last album Say Laura (2022), The Guardian wrote"the Canadian songwriter has one of the all-time great singing voices in popular music, anintensely romantic Chet Baker-ish instrument that seems to float with piercing direction,like a paper aeroplane thrown hard through mist." With Uncut describing his songcraft "asdelicate and lovely as a rare orchid" and Record Collector praising the album's "sublimealien balladry" such are the accolades that have accrued throughout Chenaux's uniqueand consummately uncompromising solo music for well over a decade now.Delights Of My Life opens a new chapter for the singer/guitarist and formally introducesthe Eric Chenaux Trio, with Toronto-based musicians Ryan Driver on Wurlitzer organ andPhillipe Melanson on electronic percussion. Driver is a longtime collaborator, appearingon several of Chenaux's solo albums (even embedded into the very title of the 2010masterpiece Warm Weather With Ryan Driver). Melanson has a long list of involvementsthat include Bernice, Joseph Shabason, and U.S Girls, and a recent release with hisImpossible Burger project on Chenaux's own experimental label Rat-drifting, but thismarks the first fulsome involvement between the two as players on a recording.In many ways Delights Of My Life also picks up right where Chenaux's previous albumleft off, in its subversions of a classic, timeless jazz-inflected balladry, while the interplayof the trio formation indeed unfurls many new delights. Recording together at Chenaux'sspartan home studio in rural France, Driver's harmonically warped organ and Melanson'selectroacoustic sampling and percussion hold time in newfound ways. Where previouslyChenaux relied on a freeze/sustain pedal and minimalist rhythmic triggers to generate bothpulse and chordal foundations, Melanson now paints timekeeping with expressive andintricate colourations, through live deployments of fluid sampled percussion (includingorchestral timbres like timpani, k...

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.

Deluxe 180gram vinyl edition comes in a foil-embossed and die-cut cardstock jacket with printed inner sleeve and additional 12x12 art cards featuring the collages of Maciek Szczerbowski. All the art interacts with the die-cut jacket framing. Edition of 300.Rooted in a distinct and immediately identifiable sound_with the cello of Rebecca Foon (Saltland, Set Fire To Flames, Thee Silver Mt Zion) and the marimba of ex-Godspeed You! Black Emperor percussionist Bruce Cawdron at its core_Esmerine has long embroidered emotive chamber works using threads of post-classical, post-rock, Minimalism, neo-Baroque, jazz, pop and a wide array of folk traditions. Multi-instrumentalist Brian Sanderson, who joined the group in 2012, has furthered Esmerine's melodic and ethnomusicological sensibility ever since, expanding the ensemble's palette as its third core member with guitars, ngoni, ekonting, hulusi, brass horns of all sorts, and more.Since 2003, six stately and filmic instrumental albums have inscribed compositional landscapes through epigrammatic miniatures, longform multi-movement chronicles, and all manner of evocative musical prosody between. Marked by an inimitably turbid yet tempered pastoralism, alternately lit by dappled dawn and disquieted dusk, Esmerine's musical narratives balance asceticism and romanticism, melancholy and hope, stillness and wanderlust.Esmerine now shares Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More, its seventh full-length album and first in five years. The band surprise-dropped the full album digitally on 06 May 2022, with the CD and Deluxe 180gram LP editions hitting stores on official release date 26 August 2022.Following an acclaimed run of mid-career records on Constellation through the 2010s_the last three of which have all been finalists or winners of Juno Awards for Instrumental Album of the Year and/or Album Packaging of the Year_Esmerine began working on new music at decade's end. Under the auspices of a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, and a summer 2019 r...

Musician and sound/video installation artist Steve Batespresents a solo ambient/noise album ofmelodic smear, radiostatic blur, panoramic noise clouds and dissolving tones. Made primarilyunder the self-imposed 'limitation' of a Casio SK-1, this is his first entirely solo full-length albumin almost a decade. All The Things That Happen showcases the more deliberate, intensive, noise-clustered side of Bates' wide-ranging sonic sensibilities and practices. An isolation record (like so many), itcombines an ineffable melancholy with claustrophobictension and simmering political rage.Powerfully composed from layers of glistening distortion-drenched melody, pulsing and droningoscillation, bursts of blown-out chords, sweeps of static and sheets of crackling hiss, Bates hasmade an impressively dynamic, ardent and iridescent noise album of real depth and underlyingdevastation."This was supposed to be an ambient record; quiet, minimal and sad. These tracks all startedoff that way but I kept reaching for more texture and noise. Somehow the noisier the record got,the less sad it was also. I was listening to, and loving, a lot of music by Andrew Chalk and I hadfinished a year-long run of listening to Eno's 1 and 4. I preferOn LandtoMusic for Airportsalthough I love both.On Landjust has a darkness and uncertainty that appeals to me. Addingmore noise also got me excited about ways this material could be played live even though italso felt like that could never happen again.In 2022, I opened for Godspeed You! BlackEmperor in Saskatoon to give it a try and waspleasantly pleased to hear it all live and loud."A fixture of Winnipeg's burgeoning punk and social justice community in the 80s-90s, Batesplayed in hardcore and indie rock bands (Pull My Daisy, Bulletproof Nothing) prior to foundingthe Send + Receivefestival in 1998. A crucial development in putting Winnipeg on the map foravant music and sound art, Bates helmed Send + Receive for seven years, then moved toTiohti:áke/Montréal, became Sound Coordinator at Hexagram (Concordia...

180gLP in 350gsm jacket w/colour flood interior + 300gsm inner + 12"x24"poster + DL card.The new record by Eric Chenaux is his most immaculate and pristine. Say Laura perfectly incarnates the counter-intuitive interplay of instrument and voice that Chenaux has beenrevealing and revelling in throughout the past decade: his gently unhinged juxtaposition of resplendently smooth, seductively assured singing and puckish, frazzled, thoroughlydestabilized guitar could come from no other musician. The five wandering, wondering ballads on Say Laura bring Chenaux's semi-improvised but keenly intentional songwriting to its fullest, clearest, warmest and coolest articulation; uncompromising and generous, hyper-specific and loose, spartan and luxurious, elemental and ornate. Say Laura might as well be a jazz record_certainly as much as his previously acclaimedalbums Slowly Paradise and Skullsplitter tread that genre-adjacent territory_though it also features moments and melodies that come as close to pop flirtation as Chenaux is likely to get. But above all, Say Laura breathes like no other Chenaux album. Voice and guitar are inscribed with elemental clarity in a wondrously open, symbiotic sonic space. His pure tenor croon glides through a crisp, reverberant ether while his fried guitar careens dizzily and giddily, every gesture and timbre captured in unflinching detail by engineer Cyril Harrison. Chenaux has also made his most minimal, controlled, regulated and rhythmic record. Citing a spectrum of influences_Sun Ra, Jeanne Lee, Gang Starr, Charlie Parker, Betty Carter, EPMD and Thelonious Monk_Say Laura expands on a foot-pedal technique Chenaux has previously used here and there, taking things to a more programmatic level: beatscomposed on a Boss drum machine are used as noise gate triggers, slowed down and inserted into his guitar signal path to create tempered pulses. Opener "Hello, How? And Hey" immediately establishes these subtly heightened characteristics of elementalism, dualism and structure,...

A searing, brooding collection documenting the recorded output of one of Montreal's most shadowy, notorious, captivating underground art-rock ensembles of the mid-90s (and the first band to be released on renowned indie label Constellation). In the words of one music writer of the era: "Like Slint and Big Black meeting for a Joy Division reunion." Charting Sofa's febrile evolution through the sonic palettes of North American post-hardcore and slowcore admixed with early UK post-punk, goth and dark lounge, Source Crossfire rounds up the quartet's 1997 album Grey (originally released on CD only) along with selections from two prior self-released cassettes. Record #1 reimagines Grey, newly sequenced to create distinct loud/fast and soft/slow vinyl sides. Record #2 mirrors this, with four tracks of intense pitch-black material on Side One and three early examples of Sofa's sombre balladry on Side Two, culled from the band's 1995 cassette material. Source Crossfire aptly names the unique mix of genres and influences distilled in Sofa's cauldron - a treat for fans from the era and for anyone interested in the fertile crosscurrents of UK + US post-punk, post-hardcore, slowcore, goth and art rock that spawned such a diverse slate of unsung bands with distinct energies, personalities, and hybrid sonic identities across so many local scenes in the 1990s. Newly remastered from the original stereo mixdowns by Jace Lasek, Harris Newman and Sofa guitarist Ian llavsky (also known as Constellation co-founder and ex-Silver Mt Zion member). 2x180gLP pressed at Optimal Germany with gatefold jacket, printed inners, and two 12"x24" art posters, all featuring the photography of acclaimed visual artist (and former Sofa vocalist) Brad Todd.

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.

Audiophile 180glp Pressing Includes Eight 12"X12" Art Print Reproductions Of Analog Film Stills By Renowned Experimental Filmmaker Daïchi Saïto. The First Purely Solo Record By Jason Sharp - Where Every Sound Is Created By His Saxophone, Breath, Heartbeat & Modular Synthesis Rig. Sharp's Customized Electroacoustic Biofeedback System Utilizes A Heart Monitor To Turn His Pulse Into Signal & Tempo Responsively Synthesized In Real Time During Peformance & Recording. Produced By Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Matana Roberts, Suuns, Big | Brave, Eric Chenaux, Jerusalem In My Heart). For Fans Of Fennesz, Christina Vantzou, Tim Hecker, Klaus Schulze, Ben Frost, Gas, Windy & Carl, Colin Stetson.Montréal Saxophonist And Electroacoustic Composer Jason Sharp Presents His Third Album On Constellation. The Turning Centre Of A Still World Is Sharp's First Purely Solo Recordand His Most Lucid, Poignant, Integral Work To Date. Following Two Acclaimed Albums Composed Around Particular Collaborators And Guest Players, Sharp Conceived His Third As An Interplay Strictly Bounded By His Own Body, His Acoustic Instrument, And His Evolving Bespoke Electronic System. The Turning Centre... Is A Singular Sonic Exploration Of Human Machine Calibration, Interaction, Expression And Biofeedback. Using Saxophones, Foot-Controlled Bass Pedals, And His Own Pulse - Patched Through A Heart Monitor Routed To Variegated Signal Paths That Trigger Modular Synthesizers And Samplers - Sharp Paints With Organic Waves Of Glistening Synthesis, Pink Noise Anddigitalia. Melodic Strokes And Harmonic Shapes Ripple And Crest Across Ever-Shifting Seas, Through An Inclement Cycle From Dawn To Dusk. The Album's Six Main Movements Navigatea World Where Placid Surfaces Are Always Roiled And Disquieted By A Deeper Inexorable Gyre: The Gravitational Pull And Tidal Perpetuity Of Our Bodies Made Of Water, Buffeted Byterrestrial Atmospheric Pressures, Wrung Out By Emotions, Coursing With Blood, Sustained By Breath, Inescapably Yearning For And Returning To Ground Aga...

- Deluxe 180g Lp Includes Artworked Inner & 12"X36" Fold-Out Art Insert Of Production Stills From The Dance Piecefl...

Deluxe 2LP 180gram audiophile vinyl includes multiple art inserts and/or poster + digital download coupon.Sam Shalabi's stupendous and genre-defying Land Of Kush orchestra is back with its first album since 2013's The Big Mango (Shalabi's love letter to Cairo, composed during the Arab Spring). The disenchantments of the years since have been devastating, to say the least, and the devastatingly-titled Sand Enigma bristles accordingly - this is Shalabi's most acute and accomplished big-band composition to date, with the orchestra on fire as they stir up a melting pot of Arabic tropes, avant-jazz, modern classical, freaknoise, electronics and sound art. Nadah El Shazly is a featured vocalist on this one."Sam Shalabi's combination of Arabic traditional motifs and instruments with jazz, free improvisation and electronics truly stretch any notion of genre to breaking point." - Brainwashed"Sam Shalabi has raised the bar for modern psychedelic music with the Land of Kush orchestra, utilizing Middle Eastern, jazz, rock, and folkloric sources to weave a seamless montage of styles in a transcendent way that is rarely, if ever, achieved." - Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls / Sublime Frequencies)

C'est ça marks the reunion of Montréal avant-rock quartet Fly Pan Am, who released an acclaimed series of albums in Constellation's early years, from 1999-2004. The band's heady collision of motorik repetition, shoegaze maximalism, punk skronk, tape- and electronic-based interventions and audio sabotage, garnered them a cult following among fans of audaciously deconstructed post-rock. C'est ça is a welcome return to form - an album of undeniably renewed vitality and experimentation where rock structures underpinned by J.S. Truchy's trademark rapid-fire bass and Félix Morel's disciplined, ascetic drumming are submerged beneath waves of processed guitar by Roger Tellier-Craig and Jonathan Parant, with fluorescent noise treatments and sonic vandalisms wrought by all four. Songs variously nod to key influences like MBV and Husker Dü, the intrepid proto-Kosmiche of This Heat and Can, and later style-adjacent torchbearers like Boredoms, Flying Saucer Attack and Trans Am - all the while collapsing into/out of themselves in various ways. But Fly Pan Am have always and reliably been much more than the sum of their influences: C'est ca is terrific new collection of restless, conceptual, viscerally ethereal noise rock that could come from no other band, sparkling with the creative buzz of lifelong artistic intensity, dialogue and friendship.

It took seven years for Sandro Perri to return with an album under his own name, releasing In Another Life ("his outsider pop masterpiece" - Exclaim) in the fall of 2018, as the much-anticipated follow-up to his acclaimed full-length Impossible Spaces (#38 album of 2011 at Pitchfork, among other accolades). But the Perri floodgates have now well and truly opened: the flow of sparkling, eddying music he's been meticulously doling out of late (including two recent volumes of collaborative avant-electronic work with his Off World project) charts another vital, rejuvenating tributary with Soft Landing. Rounding up songs he's been toying with for the better part of the last decade, Perri enters his third decade of music-making with this lovely, langourous collection of subtly detailed soft rock - his most guitar-based album since 2007's Tiny Mirrors. Rightly celebrated as "one of the most singular producers in contemporary music" (Boomkat) for his widely varied electronic work, Perri's foundations as a guitarist have always factored into his `solo' albums in one form or another. On Soft Landing, Perri's guitar is at the calm and expressively rambling heart of these tunes - while his recording and mixing acumen as a (self) producer is, as always, on brilliant display. "God Blessed The Fool" is a splendid stroke of sultry slow-burn soul that finds Sandro busting out his sweet falsetto; "Wrong About The Rain" channels only the choicest tropes of syncopated 70s-era soft-rock, with Perri weaving ornate guitar licks around a succulent interplay of clavinet and trap kit, resulting in one of the most immediately satisfying tunes he's ever put to tape - high praise for someone with such a stellar catalogue to date, but we're confident fans will agree. And as with last year's In Another Life (which comprised two album-length sides of `infinite song'), Soft Landing includes the 16-minute track "Time (You Got Me)", an enchanted mid-tempo excursion anchored by a gently sliding guitar riff and a serene vocal singing a wistfully acquiescent love letter to the fourth dimension. Paced by congas, shakers, claves, impressionistic piano and even the occasional wind chime, Perri wraps up his final vocal refrain by the song's fifth minute and then steers the instrumental theme down a long and winding road in his inimitable style - like a stroll along a country lane where every glint of dappled sunlight catches another rustling, animate micro-detail. Thanks for listening.

The seventh record by Godspeed You! Black Emperor will be released 22 September 2017 on Constellation.

‘Luciferian Towers‘ was recorded during the winter of 2016/2017 at Montreal’s Hotel2Tango, with Greg Norman once again engineering and co-producing (as he did on the band’s previous album ‘Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress‘).

The music on ‘Luciferian Towers‘ took shape over the past two years, amidst GYBE’s collaborative performances with the Holy Body Tattoo dance company’s monumental, and spurred by the commissioning of new compositions memorializing the 100th anniversary of the WWI Battle of Messines, which premiered at a live concert event on the site of the massacre at Heuvelland, Belgium this past June.

‘Luciferian Towers‘ is Godspeed’s third album since the group’s ‘reunion’ in 2011 and their second consecutive single LP-length record (following three double-album releases in 2000, 2002 and 2012).

this, this long-playing record, a thing we made in the midst of communal mess, raising dogs and children. eyes up and filled with dreadful joy – we aimed for wrong notes that explode, a quiet muttering amplified heavenward. we recorded it all in a burning motorboat.

(context as follows:)

1. UNDOING A LUCIFERIAN TOWERS – look at that fucking skyline! big lazy money writ in dull marble obelisks! imagine all those buildings much later on, hollowed out and stripped bare of wires and glass, listen- the wind is whistling through all 3,000 of its burning window-holes!

2. BOSSES HANG – labor, alienated from the wealth it creates, so that holy cow, most of us live precariously! kicking at it, but barely hanging on! also – the proud illuminations of our shortened lives! also – more of us than them! also – what we need now is shovels, wells, and barricades!

3. FAM / FAMINE – how they kill us = absentee landlord, burning high-rise. the loud panics of child-policemen and their exploding trigger-hands. with the dull edge of an arbitrary meritocracy. neglect, cancer maps, drone strike, famine. the forest is burning and soon they’ll hunt us like wolves.

4. ANTHEM FOR NO STATE – kanada, emptied of its minerals and dirty oil. emptied of its trees and water. a crippled thing, drowning in a puddle, covered in ants. the ocean doesn’t give a shit because it knows it’s dying too.

finally and in conclusion;
the “luciferian towers” L.P. was informed by the following grand demands:
+ an end to foreign invasions
+ an end to borders
+ the total dismantling of the prison-industrial complex
+ healthcare, housing, food and water acknowledged as an inalienable human right
+ the expert fuckers who broke this world never get to speak again

much love to all the other lost and wondering ones,
xoxoxox god’s pee / montréal / 4 juillet, 2017

PERSONNEL
Aidan Girt: Drums
David Bryant: Electric guitar, MG-One
Efrim Manuel Menuck: Electric guitar, organ, OP-1
Karl Lemieux: 16mm film projections
Mauro Pezzente: Electric bass
Michael Moya: Electric guitar
Sophie Trudeau: Violins, organ
Thierry Amar: Contrebasse, electric bass
Timothy Herzog: Drums

GUESTS ON TRACK ONE
Bonnie Kane (saxophone, flute, electronics)
Craig Pederson (trumpet)

Back in 2012, the shadowy, majestic Canadian post-rock collective Godspeed You! Black Emperor released Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!, their first album after a decade-plus hiatus, and it was just as thundering and grand and powerful as everything else they’ve ever done. The band won Canada’s Polaris Music Prize for the album, and they issued a statement about the “tone-deaf” ceremony, but that story should not overwhelm the gut-grabbing power of the album itself. And now they’ve announced that they’ll have another album for us in about a month, which is just excellent news. The new album, Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress, clocks in at an overwhelmingly brief 40 minutes, which is pretty surprising coming from a group whose individual tracks often inch past the 20-minute mark. The album only has four songs, but 10-minute songs are still concise by Godspeed standards. The band recorded the album with Electrical Audio engineer Greg Norman at studios in North Carolina and Montreal.

Four-piece post-punk group Ought has been gathering momentum the old-fashioned way, with a humble and deceptively unassuming debut album that's been worming its way into many many ears thanks to its combination of intelligence, authenticity, directness, simplicity and energy; and with live performances in which the band's channeling of genuine passion, politics and charisma are consistently connecting with and exuberantly galvanizing audiences.

Released in April 2014, More Than Any Other Day was showered with accolades. Since then the band has been mostly on the road, racking up tour dates and ramping up the attack on their existing songbook. Discussion of a tour-only release that would grab a couple of the band's self-recorded early tunes and commit them to vinyl shifted by the end of spring towards a realization that Ought might update this material to reflect how the songs have evolved on stage and in concert. An intense weekend session at Montréal's Hotel2Tango in June 2014 yielded new recordings of two early pieces, "Pill" and "New Calm Pt. 2" (the self-recorded 2012 versions of which remain available on Ought's Bandcamp) along with the brand new, more experimental and largely instrumental "New Calm Pt. 3". The fantastic non-album track "Waiting" from the More Than Any Other Day sessions (and the first tune to be given out via Constellation when we announced the Ought signing) rounds out this 4-song, 24-minute, 10" vinyl-only offering, suitably titled Once More With Feeling…

Last Ex is the new instrumental rock ensemble led by Simon Trottier and Olivier Fairfield, both longtime fixtures of experimental/punk scenes rooted in the cross-province hub of Hull/Ottawa (straddling the border of Quebec and Ontario, respectively). In addition to duties in various groups orbiting Fairfield's E-Tron Records (including H. de Heutz, Ferriswheel and many others), the two are perhaps best known as core members of haunted blues-folk ensemble Timber Timbre, which spawned the Last Ex project.

When Timber Timbre’s ambient music for a horror film went unused back in 2012, Trottier and Fairfield began revisiting the sound palette they had built up for the soundtrack at Fairfield's studio in Hull, expanding on their techniques and textures, adding drums, bass and various other instruments. The duo found that they had dug into some very fertile territory, writing additional songs throughout 2013 and bringing their obsessions with sound collage, tape-based music concrète and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to bear on the cinematic lyricism of the initial widescreen guitar- and string-based material. Derived from the title of the abandoned film, Simon and Olivier dubbed their new project Last Ex.

The clutch of demo recordings passed to Constellation quickly grew on us during the Spring of 2014, and it became clear that this compelling, compact, coherent, and highly evocative work belonged in the catalogue. After a few passes at sequencing, Last Ex materialized as an album of superb compositional and melodic sensibility, balancing minimalism and restraint with atmosphere and tone, bound by a refreshingly original approach to production.

SMZ dust off an old chestnut from their 2005 album Horses In The Sky & coat it in glitter & shards of glass; not remixes at all really, but brand new recordings that use set-closing live favorite "Hang On To Each Other" as a launching point for some rather glorious techno-dancefloor excursions. 150gm 45RPM pressing w/ download.

180g vinyl,includes art poster + download.

Sarah Neufeld is a violinist and composer based in Montréal, Canada. Best known as a member of Arcade Fire, she is also a founding member of the acclaimed contemporary instrumental ensemble Bell Orchestre and has performed and recorded with many other groups, including The Luyas, Esmerine and Little Scream.

Off World presents the final album in its trilogy of surreal and spacious leftfield electronics."A stellar project headed by Sandro Perri, one of the most singular producers in contemporarymusic" (Boomkat), this third volume is another distinctive collection of tracks constructed fromsemi-improvised ensemble recordings made over the past decade with a varied cast of coconspirators.Drew Brown, Matthew Cooper, Susumu Mukai and Andrew Zukerman join Perriagain on a variety of synths and machines, along with violinist Jesse Zubot (Tanya Tagaq, FondOf Tigers). Perri also continues to add organ and piano to the mix, while Volume 3 notablyfeatures first-time Off World contributors Nicole Rampersaud on trumpet and Martin Arnoldon guitar, both mainstays of Toronto's vibrant improv and out-music scenes.The Quietus calls Off World "genuinely explorative_the musical equivalent of a Dali-esquelandscape" which through all sorts of genre-defying twists and turns, at times evokes "offkilter,late Miles Davis ambience". Off World 3 doubles down on that jazz-adjacent trope incertain respects, while holding fast to Pitchfork's dictum that Perri "cultivates his own genrelessbrand of futurism." Marked by longer tracks than previous collections, three of the album'sfive songs clock in around the 10-minute mark, where overtly improvised instrumental playingwends its way across alternately bubbling and woozy electronic beds. "Impulse Controller" isa languidly skewed rhumba where ambling melodic undercurrents and dubby electronicpointillism provide a dulcet promenade for Rampersaud's Miles-esque trumpet excursions."Ludic Loop" see-saws along in a slow synthy two-step, punctuated by Perri's restrained pianochords and Arnold's fried electric guitar. "Empasse" is perhaps most reminiscent of earlier OffWorld collections, though again slowed and stretched, with oozing synth bass ostinatoscounterposed by ambient layers of viola and violin filigree from Zubot.These three centerpiece longform tracks e...

The follow-up to his acclaimed Constellation debut Third Album released in lockdown spring 2020, Markus Floats returns with Fourth Album, pushing the Montréal-based artist's distinct abstract electronic compositions into newly evocative terrain (while preserving his record-titling literalism). Faced with another couple of years spent unexpectedly, though not unfamiliarly, secluded and studio-bound, working on both paintings and music, Floats emerged by the end of 2022 with a set of tracks "about 60% finished" and a determined desire to throw off the shackles of distancing and isolation. "I had always thought about Markus Floats as a solo project but I am wrong about that. Fourth Album is about asking for help, inviting in, and making a home. It's about trust, exploration, and the effort of letting go."Sharing his in-progress recordings with a trio of close friends and collaborators from the powerhouse free music ensemble Egyptian Cotton Arkestra, each of these players then spent a day improvising to the tracks at Montréal's Hotel2Tango studio. With violin by Ari Swan, saxophone and mbira by James Goddard, and guitar and drums by Lucas Huang, Floats stitched their extemporized instruments back into his compositional process. The result is a fluid, lustrous, dynamic expansion of his sound and structure that continues to strike the ineffable balance of abstraction and soulfulness rightly highlighted and celebrated in the critical response to Third Album. Fourth Album sustains much of that previous work's enchanting equanimity, while inviting a bit more restlessness, accident and grit, with the incorporation of acoustic instruments and improvisation melding Floats' own background in Electroacoustic Studies and Jazz Performance more than ever before.Signature avant-electronic explorations of arpeggiated and timbral transformation, subtle shifts in harmonic consonance and dissonance, and a through-composed praxis that draws coterminously upon free jazz, musique concrète and modern Minimalism, all continue to sha...