Constellation HHV Records 62 Items

Galaxy Heart is Moss' fourth record for Constellation and the companion album to 2021's Phosphenes. Galaxy Heart features guest appearances by Jim White (Xylouris White, Springtime, Dirty Three) and Thierry Amar (Godspeed You! Black Emperor).

Jessica Moss is a violinist and composer based in Montréal. She uses amplified and processed violin and voice to create intricate works of expressive electronic, drone, experimental and post-classical Minimalism; her distinctive melodic sensibility often channels Klezmer, Balkan and Middle Eastern tropes, combined with an ear for the textural grit and timbral noise of post-punk, industrial and ambient metal. Moss played in cult agit-prop post-punk band Thee Silver Mt. Zion (2000-2015), has contributed to countless albums by the likes of Carla Bozulich, Vic Chesnutt and Matana Roberts, and most recently has guested on albums by Sarah Davachi and Big|Brave. She has released three solo albums on Constellation since 2017.

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.

US original.

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...

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.

Everything Returns reunites the original Black Ox Orkestar lineup following a 15-year hiatus. Arising from the fertile Montréal post-punk agit-prop scene of the early 2000s, the band comprises Scott Gilmore, Jessica Moss and Thierry Amar of Thee Silver Mt. Zion (Amar also continues to compose and play bass for Godspeed You! Black Emperor) and Gabriel Levine of Sackville. Black Ox made two acclaimed albums of roiling acoustic avant-folk in the mid-2000s, exploring Eastern European and North African folkways through the lens of a gritty, resonant indie rock sensibility, juxtaposing interpretations of instrumentals from various Jewish, Romani and Arabic traditions with originals led by Gilmore's politically-charged Yiddish vocals. These early albums have since become lodestars for many among a new generation of Yiddish, Klezmer and radical Jewish diasporic music practitioners and fans. First revealing its resurrection in February 2022 with a surprise flexi 7" single issued by left journal Jewish Currents as a gift to its thousands of subscribers, Black Ox has indeed fully and fruitfully reunited. Exquisitely recorded by Greg Norman (Jason Molina, Nina Nastasia, Electrical Audio), Everything Returns picks up right where the band left off: an incisively atmospheric, melancholic yet resolute album of uniquely modern Jewish folk music, with piano, violin, upright bass, clarinet and cymbalom making up the core instrumentation, and the vocal tunes sung primarily in Yiddish, alongside album centerpiece "Viderkol" and closer "Lamed-Vovnik" where English also features. This is not fusion music, but diaspora music: a cross-cultural call and response of musical lexicons, emerging from the history of Jewish persecution and displacement, the musicology of 19th century repertoire from Jewish shtetls , the improvisational traditions of nusakh in Jewish music and taqsim in Arabic music, and a wider polyglot dialogue of Jewish, Slavic, Arabic, and Central Asian musical traditions. Lyrically and stylistically, Everything Returns connects key current issues_from refugees forced to leave their homes, to the return of fascism and exclusionary nationalism_with the legacy of modernist Yiddish poetry and song. The new Black Ox Orkestar album is a sublime, poetic, politically-informed statement of re-energized diasporic musical intent, where Gilmore's voice and the band's simmering arrangements conjure an ardent, doleful balladry that echoes the sound and sensibility of artists like Tindersticks, The National, Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen. Everything Returns is a haunting, richly textured, darkly sparkling song cycle at once from a vanished world and very much of our time and place. 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...

T. Gowdy has kept up a productive albeit mostly virtual pace since the release of Therapy With Colour (his third full-length album and first for Constellation) which dropped just as things were locking down back in spring 2020: performances at numerous festivals including MUTEK Montréal, Node Festival and NEW NOW; audiovisual pieces exhibited at various European galleries and events; a track andvideo for Constellation's Corona Borealis Longplay Singles Series; sound design for the documentary Atalaya by filmmaker Emma Roufs.Gowdy now returns with Miracles, his second full-length for Constellation, which draws on source materials originally performed in 2018 for an unreleased audio/visual project based around surveillance footage_a precursor to videocapped, monitor-based horizons that soon took on new meanings. Re-immersing himself in those recordings, Gowdy disassembles and deploys them as raw source material for new experiments with vactrols, noise gates and analog-to-digital triggering and aliasing, the original recordings juxtaposed anew amidst their successive textural and rhythmic treatments. Gowdy keeps this re-composition process stripped down, elemental and purposive, guided by an ascetic Aufhebung: synthesis as sublation_subjecting a temporal material/theme to analysis and transformation, reintegrating to form a whole that overcomes what it preserves without erasure, reshaping and intrinsically carrying its origins forward. Where Therapy With Colour was strictly and rigorously a set of stereo live performances, Miracles fuses iterative_though still spartan_layers of performance. "Therapy With Colour was about healing through self-hypnosis; Miracles is about forging a future with memory through subjection to trigger mechanisms" notes Gowdy. The result is a captivating collection of minimal IDM and oscillatedelectronics from the Montréal/Berlin producer, working primarily in a 120-140 BPM zone of tonal percussion and corrugated pulse. Gowdy's sensibility and sound palette gets deeper and dirtier,...

Gap/ Void is the first collaborative full-length album by Automatisme (the Canadian musician and conceptual artist William Jourdain) and Swiss field recordist, ambient musician, visual artist and writer/academic Stefan Paulus. Jourdain and Paulus first metthrough shared projects with Mille Plateaux/Force Inc, each contributing to the Ultrablack Of Music anthology and Paulus going on to make several videos for Automatisme tracks issued by the two labels. In early 2021, Paulus approached Jourdain with a proposal based on his field recordings made during numerous mountain expeditions in the Swiss Alps, the Caucasus, and north of the Arctic Circle _ documenting stormy weather, high alpine winds, avalanches, and sounds emanating from glaciers and from the insides of crevices and caves. Paulus created ambient noisescapes from these recordings by splicing and folding them into hundreds of layers of sound: an analog to the geological strata of their geographic sources. The resulting audio mixes, compounding a multiplicity of spatio-temporal excursions, were then further encased in drones using the natural tone series (the traditional zäuerli or wordless yodels ofnortheastern Switzerland), the monotonic standing drone of Lamonte Young's Dream Syndicate, and the mass chords of early 1970s Kosmische Musik as points of reference. Paulus sent these extended ambient/noise pieces to Jourdain as source material forthe latter's bespoke Automatisme techniques, where variable tempo and glitch systems forge more overt minimal techno/IDM works.Gap/Void leads with five rhythmic tracks (cut to 33rpm LP) that feature Automatisme's trademark interstitial digital synthesis and elastic/erratic signal processing, in combination with his own crate-digging `expeditions' through obscure 1970s-80s disco 12-inches, deconstructing their scores and structures to bring these microsamples and sensibilities back to bear on Paulus' deterritorialized sedimental source material. Five additional tracks are selections of the original ambient/dr...

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.

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.

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...

Hand-Numbered Vinyl Edition Of 500 Copies Is 180gramlp In Window-Cut Artboard Jacket That Frames Eight Different Images From Magid's The Barragan Archives Project, Printed On Four 12"X12" Art Card Inserts Including An Artworked Inner Sleeve. The Original Score For The Acclaimed Feature-Length Artworld Documentary By Multi-Disciplinary Artist Jill Magid: An Exploration Of The Contested Legacy Of The Mexican Architect Luis Barragan And An Art Intervention In Its Own Right. Griffin Wrote, Performed And Recorded The Proposal Soundtrack With An Understated But Wide-Ranging Electro-Acoustic Sensibility That Organically Compliments The Film's Enigmatic Narrative And The Discreet Beauty Of Barragan's Architectural Spaces. Various Acoustic Instruments Combine With Electronics, Sampling And Ambient Treatments For An Ever-Shifting Suite Of Musical Vignettes Across The Album's Thirteen Tracks. Guest Musicians Include Matana Roberts, Reut Regev, Jim White (Xylouris White, The Dirty Three), Jason Ajemian (Helado Negro), And Sophie Trudeau And Timothy Herzog (Godspeed You! Black Emperor) Alongside Griffin's Own Contributions On Multiple Instruments, Field Recordings And Production. Griffin Weaves An Iridescent Musical Tapestry, Threading Various Genres With Sublime Thematic And Atmospheric Coherence, Echoing Magid's Contemplative, Cerebral Journey. The Music Also Works Enchantingly On Its Own As A Subtly Haunted, Evocative And Meditative Album.

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

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.)

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.

Matana Roberts is one of the most acclaimed, socio-politically conscious and aesthetically intrepid avant-jazz practitioners of the 21st century. Following the critical accolades that the first two Coin Coin chapters have thus far received, the past year has been marked by further career-defining recognition for her body of iconoclastic work: Roberts was a recipient of both the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts and the Daisy Duke Impact Award in 2014.

Roberts has long employed the phrase “panoramic sound quilting” to describe the process surrounding her Coin Coin work. The third chapter in her Coin Coin series finds Roberts implementing this metaphor most explicitly, constructing a sound art tapestry from field recordings, loop and effects pedals, and spoken word recitations, alongside her saxophone and singing voices. Coin Coin Chapter Three: river run thee could arguably be considered first and foremost a vocal work, and notwithstanding its experimental and esoteric structure, a deeply narrative work as well.

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.