Telephone Explosion Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 7 Items

For the good part of the past decade, Japanese composer-musician Masahiro Takahashi has been crafting gently spellbinding pieces that simultaneously embrace electronic abstraction and a palpable, even brittle, humanity. His delicate and evocative landscapes always seem to be illuminated in vibrant magic hour tones as golden synth lines emanate from between soft flickers of acoustic instrumentation.

Since moving to Toronto in 2020, Takahashi has swiftly become a local fixture, enough so that his elegant Not Not Fun tape, Flowering Tree, Distant Moon saw an LP reissue with prominent local imprint Telephone Explosion (home to Joseph Shabason, Mas Aya, Steve Roach, Badge Epoque, Eucalyptus and others).

The forthcoming follow-up, also on Telephone Explosion, is entitled Humid Sun and proudly exhibits connections that he has cultivated in both his new and former homes. Recorded between January and August 2022, the record lives up to its title and sunset-hued cover, unfolding a kaleidoscopic, vaguely tropical calm over ten luxuriant tracks. All but one of the pieces features contributions from guest artists. On one hand he has invited several artists from back home namely Tokyo-based electronic producers H. Takahashi, Takao, and Yamaan, on the other he has brought aboard members of Toronto's rich experimental music community, including his labelmates Joseph Shabason and Brodie West (leader of Eucalyptus), as well as Ryan Driver, Bram Gielen, and Michael Davidson. He also enlisted Sandro Perri of Constellation Records infamy to provide the final mix.

Though bearing Takahashi's personal atmospheric signatures, Humid Sun's warm, saturated colour palette and sunny repose audibly also take cues from the imaginary utopias of vintage lounge and exotica. These tropes offer an unexpected avenue through which Toronto's local influence creeps in again. Takahashi explains that he envisions the record as an auditory tool to cope with the city's harsh winters—and the references are designed to provide a sort of sonic vacation. Indeed he succeeds in achieving this objective; the album's nuanced colours and contours engender a sense of equatorial tranquility, though completely devoid of the kitsch associated with his inspiration.

While it might be easy to imagine Masahiro Takahashi's unique brand of introversion as the product of hermetic solitude, anyone that knows him from the Toronto scene will tell you that Humid Sun vividly captures his true temperament—curious, attentive, and quietly gregarious.

Máscaras is anchored by Valdivia's deft and atmospheric production style that folds together intricate spiraling synths, balmy environments, and crisp drum programming, variously drawing from trap, footwork, early Warp-label gestures, and the digital end of dancehall reggae. Yet it's his love of organic instrumentation that truly cements his commitment to an eclectic, unclassifiable aesthetic. Although he's well-respected as a drummer—particularly in wayward rock and improvised music circles—Mas Aya often serves to showcase Valdivia's prowess as a wind player. His iterative but expressive playing on tin whistle, bansuri, quena (as well as other instruments such as the llamador, and thumb pianos) imbues these compositions with a warm, tactile quality. Lido Pimienta's vocal appearance on “Tiempo Ahora” builds upon this human presence, steering things temporarily into abstract R&B territory. Meanwhile, the sampled voices that Valdivia threads throughout the first side underscore his connection to hip hop production tactics, while referencing key figures within current and historical popular movements in Nicaragua.

Although the record is steeped in both rhythmic electronica and a wide assortment Latin American sounds both contemporary and ancient, according to Valdivia, aspects of it also reflect his training with with noted composer Linda Catlin Smith, whose lyrical quasi-stasis can be heard lurking in its mesmeric, recursive structures.

Melodic Energy Commission is a Canadian gem and an interesting branch of the Hawkwind family tree (featuring Del Delmar on electronics.) Hailing from British Columbia, their unique blend of space rock, progressive and hippie psychedelia began in 1977 as a recording-only project titled "The Melodic Energy Commission of Collected Artists."
In 1985 Ken Man showed up in the studio with this IBM AT computer. It had a 1/2 MB of RAM and some Voyetra software that could sequence music, becoming the duo’s backing band. Fist Of Facts contributors included Mark Cunningham from Mars, Felice Rosser, Genevieve De Monvel Boutet, Carlos Vivanco, Scott Hartley from the Liquids and a whole host of others. Fist of Facts expand the natural groove that Liquid Liquid established over their quick career, with a strong political message combined with abstract dub soundscapes.

Originally a digital-only release, this album carries the Toronto electronic music artist's body of work into a temporal loop of sorts, uniting a bond with Wave Science, his June 2021 EP on Pacific Rhythm. City of Rooms was completed in February 2021 and written as an escape during pressurized times. It invites an abstract style of listening in which any given sound links to various moments throughout the album.

The EP flows like scenery on a long train ride. Track lights pass with a rhythmic certainty as foreground and background twist around each other. Listeners will be transported through a geography of sounds that function as independent parts of a whole. Triangulations occur as elements fall into different forms of relief against each other.

A sense of technologically alienated mystery envelops the wings of this album in the distant clicks and hums that churn beneath jeweled synth extremities. Rings of Roland toms and hi-hats pierce clouds of ambient pads, the signature chaotic truth of acidic 303 patterns cross time kept by a twitching rhythm section rendered in field samples from the local grocery store. Arpeggiated slopes built off of echo and fuzz ascend, a remote whistle answers the syncopated call of a güiro before transforming into a cricket in flight and revealing that there is a latin backbone to much of the percussion on City of Rooms.

In a few instances Emissive hides gemlike hooks beneath minutes of intricate construction.The album opens with Quartz Register, a steady and intricate gallop of servos and circuit noise at times verging on conga.On Natural Springs, an acid riff announces an amazingly perplexing synth güiro solo. Sunset Yellow sees tubular horn-like barks emerge in a flurry before pulling off to form a sparse alternating backbeat that haunts the rest of the track. The final track, Constellation of Friends, is an arrangement of familiar 808 samples treated to an exquisitely measured mix that turns an 808 cowbell sample into an otherworldly clock.

With Cruisin', their second album for Telephone Explosion, Toronto's Bernice distils their playful sense of composition resulting in the most affecting collection of their young career. Across fifteen tracks, a special kind of contemporary, jazz-inflected pop unfolds, miraculous for being both fun and musically adventurous, all in the name of emotional resonance. Each groove in the bassbin is matched by a little scratch at the listener's heartstrings. The album was recorded at home with Phil Melanson (Sam Gendel, Andy Shauf) and Thom Gill (Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Joseph Shabason), led by songwriter and vocalist Robin Dann (Martha Wainwright) and producer Matthew Pencer, with additional contributions from longtime members Dan Fortin and Felicity Williams (Bahamas) being captured remotely.

Throughout their eleven years as a group, working at the intersections of several scenes and spotlights (many of which begin and end at Toronto's beloved Tranzac Club), Bernice have developed an idiosyncratic musical language that feels immediately inviting and wonderfully refreshing. The group's two previous releases, Eau De Bonjourno (2021) and Puff: In The Air Without A Shape (2018) received generous nods from both Stereogum and Pitchfork, who described the music as "unusually mesmerizing". With the songcraft a little more crystalline and the vulnerability notched up, Cruisin' feels like the right record to open Bernice up to a much wider audience.

Development of the album began in Spring, 2021 during a writing retreat at the family farm in Bond Head, Ontario. Members of the band luxuriated in slow time, tinkering with lyrics and melodies, sharing meals, knitting. From this communal gathering, the concept of 'dedication' emerged as a guiding theme. Specifically, developing songs in an almost epistolary form; as love letters or check-ins for friends, community members, pets and other more elusive acquaintances (a longtime working title for the project was 'Songs For People').

Lead single 'Underneath My Toe', one of the first pieces developed under this theme, finds the group at their most graceful and direct. Beginning with songwriter/vocalist Robin Dann singing simply 'Hi / I miss you all the time', the composition proceeds to shift subtly between soft jazz balladry and low-bit funk, revelling in the intimate beauty of a long-time-no-see letter to a dear old friend.

Though being a band that so deeply values the art of fartin' around, Bernice couldn't settle on such a straightforward approach. During the creative process, a clarifying question arose: 'Can you cruise to it?'. This somewhat ambiguous aesthetic criteria became a guiding light for the album. 'Sure, it's a beautiful song about building trust with a new nonagenarian friend... but can you cruise to it?'.

Case in point, both follow up singles, 'No Effort To Exist' and 'Second Judy', fall into a more nebulous, bewildering category of song. Undoubtedly affecting, emotionally charged, existentially searching, yet also undeniably juicy. Drum patterns skitter into place while synth tones shift on a dime to meet thematic twists. There's errant whistling and curious overdubs. Then in come elegant backing vocals, elevating the narrative while an unlikely, left-field groove is established. Miraculously, the listener is not just moved, but Cruisin'.

Therein lies the marvel of Bernice: they remind us that the rec room funk of Mario Kart 64 need not exist in mutual exclusivity to a rich tapestry of human emotions. Even as we live through this most cursed timeline, we can look into the heart of things, dwell on the challenges we're called to witness, and find a little levity to carry us through; grab a lil' mushroom and cruise the existential soup.

Before forming outer limits jazz-rock outfit Badge Époque Ensemble, Max Turnbull masterminded the oddball pop persona Slim Twig, wrote and performed with U.S. Girls, and moonlighted in varyingly experimental groups across his native Toronto. While this was going on, the devout crate digger had his third eye trained on another project—one that would span the breadth of his mercurial creativity. This “journal album,” as he puts it, is titled Scroll, and it collages together the pearls of Turnbull’s eight-year dive into his songwriting imagination. Sprawling across 90 audacious minutes, Scroll—released simply as Badge Epoch, a tidy distinction from the collective Époque Ensemble—sounds unearthed from a lost musical Atlantis. Turnbull calls it “a cosmic hodge podge of funk, jazz, ambient techno, aggressive guitarmonized rawk, musique concrète, and hip hop.

Since stepping into the overflow of coastal dance music currents with a remarkable liquidity of buoyant basslines and undulating rhythms, Active Surplus have stripped back and refined their process. The duo’s lush, singular sound has undergone vaporization. And where there is vapour, there is heat.

The compositions on Mirroring have a subliminal quality. It is as though new elements and sections simply develop out of the ether while the listener is entranced by the interplay of percussion and arpeggiator that defines the first side of the album. They say a watched pot never boils.

The rolling simmer of the album’s first half reaches peak percolation in the midst of Emote Control’s spritely electro shuffle. Even at this energetic height, AS are unafraid to demonstrate masterful restraint, dropping everything out but the drums before we finally hear the bassline for the first time at the 3min mark. It’s the group’s matured sensibility for pacing that begets the hypnotic euphoria abundant on Mirroring.

Cerulean Blue initiates the meditative condensation phase of Mirroring. Rhythms remain propulsive under luxuriating pads which feel like a contemplation on the water’s surface, to which molecules begin to reintegrate. Layers of shimmering synth reflect like sun droplets off the crystalline plane of Silencer while a gentle tide pulses. Docking listeners with a sense of closure, Slow Horizon delivers on its title in mood and atmosphere.

Mirroring is a beautifully contained work from a duo whose musical identity has clarified through intention and ritual. Active Surplus craft compositions that leave space for listeners to be in the room with them as they create. Because mirroring, in essence, is a form of relating.