David Baron – The Plan

by Louise Jaunet

Record producer, film composer, musician, arranger, and engineer David Baron is an avid collector of vintage analog synthesizers and recording gear, who worked with the likes of The Lumineers, Lenny Kravitz, Four Tet, and Lana Del Rey. On his new album The ARP 2500 out on November 17 via Here & Now Recordings, the iconic vintage synthesizer ARP 2500, known as a “keyboard legend,” was the only sound source used during the whole process, in order to preserve the original glory of this rare monophonic analog modular instrument within modern settings.

Designed by a NASA engineer on an analog computer model, and not by a musician, the synthesizer was launched commercially in 1970, but was mainly sold to universities and sound labs, as the 2500’s modules were known to be a bit overwhelming to use.

His new track “The Plan” has a more percussive and uptempo beat-driven sound compared to “City of Nerves” and “Distance of Time,” making it more reminiscent of a chase scene in the video game Cyberpunk 2077.

The ARP 2500 exhilarating sounds upload us into the cyberspace of a dystopian future, made of cyberware upgrades, intergalactic communications, neural networks, and consciousnesses stored on cybernetic biochips. David Baron’s creative pursuit results in a truly rewarding and exciting endeavor, to the point of making oneself ask a weird question: what if the next big technology was actually a really old one?

Check out “The Plan” video here :

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the album go to the ARP Foundation.

Ambient / Instrumental / Instrumental Rock

White Latex – Wingfoot (Loud)

by Stephan Boissonneault

White Latex is a mysterious and relatively new experimental soundscape project by one Justin Ensminger, a 23-year-old multi-instrumentalist and songwriter.

His music on the new single “Wingfoot (Loud)” is lo-fi, delving into the instrumental indie psych vibes of someone like Her’s. The video is really just a film static shot of moving water, but it is easy to get lost in, much like the track itself.

Check it out here:

Dark Pop / Darkwave / Gothic

We Are Parasols – My Heart is all Blurred

by Stephan Boissonneault

We Are Parasols— an experimental darkwave meets noisy industrial goth group from Portland, Oregon, has a deliciously evil new video called “My Heart is all Blurred.”

Coming from We Are Parasol’s summer album, Body Horror, and sounding like a combination of HEALTH, Portishead, and Bjork, the new track builds from a twisting noise wall of sound and morphs into more of a dark pop setting.

The animated and multimedia video by We Are Parasols, and Eran Haas features a shifting and mutating humanoid creature that grows various fauna as the track trembles over the speakers. It’s just enough stimulation that feels a bit uncanny valley.

We Are Parasols sounds like the perfect band to get lost in as the winter comes…

Check out the video below:

Art Pop / Psychedelia

We Owe – Illogical Thinking

by Louise Jaunet

“A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.” Neither prophetic nor redemptive, this epigram written in 1982 by the famous computer scientist Alan Perlis is nevertheless somewhat of a foretelling message, since we know that artificial intelligence (AI) is already playing a major role in our lives, and perhaps even more than we might think.

Written as a mental exercise around the apparitions of the Sasquatch or Bigfoot, for which there is no rational explanation, “Illogical Thinking” by We Owe a.k.a. Chris Pravdica (Swans, Xiu Xiu, The Gunga Din, etc.), is a psychedelic pop ballad that reveals elements of dream pop or chamber pop over the soaring percussion and melodic counterpoints from the backing vocals, synthesizers, piano and guitar.

Taken from his forthcoming album, described as ‘post-alternative’ and entitled Major Inconvenience (December 1 via Mothland), the video, directed by Jim Larson, is a kind of caustic mockery created from a host of AI-generated images, showing people merrily celebrating their confident misinterpretation in a church. When human beings are lost on the threshold of death, the belief in a miracle cure for the soul often turns into a collective therapeutic frenzy. However, the specter of a supernatural guardian watching over the land can sometimes be the sign of a good omen.

Watch “Illogical Thinking” Here:
Opening photo by: Phil Puleo

Baïki – Les Boites

by Stephan Boissonneault

What if everything; your job, hopes, fears, loves, joys, apprehensions, came alive as boxes (“boites” in French). Now, what if those boxes were anthropomorphic and took a kind of light-hearted revenge on their creator?

This is the story of the new music video from Baïki, a songwriter from Belgium. On “Les Boîtes,” he uses a punk rock enthusiasm in the same style as someone like The Dropkick Murphys, while a DIY music video unfolds. The boxes are all different colors, and are being controlled by a bearded puppet master who instructs them to dance in unison. But soon, the boxes, no longer wanting to be shackled, choose free will and turn on their master. A great music video with a vague message.

THUNDERCLAP! – The Littlest Monster

by Stephan Boissonneault

Perfect in time for Halloween, THUNDERCLAP!, a talented singer-songwriter from the Niagara region with a penchant for musical and almost show-tune-y songs, has released “The Littlest Monster.”

The song’s DIY music video features THUNDERCLAP! running around the town on Halloween night in a mask (of himself?) with a little ghost wearing glasses, i.e. ‘The Littlest Monster.’

Using thundering drums, vocal effects, and other surreal sounds, the song has an almost Nick Cave flair to it and the video does a good and enjoyable job of showing a bunch of darkened haunted houses throughout the community—while the video decides to take a slightly sinister conclusion.

Electronic / Synth-Pop / Synthwave

Audio 1 – Interstellar Transmissions

by Stephan Boissonneault

Audio 1 is the solo electronic synth wave project of a mysterious man from France named Romain. He travels the world to capture sound with his recording devices and instruments to create spacey electro music. The project was born out of his love for vintage synthesizers, drum machines, electronic music, and space movies.

The latest single “Interstellar Transmissions” looks like it was pulled out of a movie like Interstellar or 2001: A Space Odyssey, as Romain walks on a planet called Teegarden’s Star B to play his synths on the planet. He then hops back into his spacecraft and flies into a black hole while ripping on a guitar solo.

Musically we have a combination between Gunship and the vintage, Giorgio Moroder.

Check out his video below.

Electronic

We Owe – Time Suck

by Stephan Boissonneault

We Owe is the experimental, post-punky/noise solo project of Christopher Pravdica, best known as the bassist of the dissonant experimental rock outfit, Swans, and recently, The Medicine Singers. We Owe’s new single “Time Suck,” is a darkened fever dream. Pravdica chants “No Future, No Future, No Future,” while a wall of electronics crackle and chew the scenery. At times, it feels like a more synthy A Place To Bury Strangers, others like you’re losing your mind in an Eastern European nightclub after consuming too many drugs. The music video is just as bizarre as jump cuts of buzzing, coloured lights that look like they were ripped out of a city tunnel or a Windows 98 computer screen pop into existence. Pravdica could be taking the voice of Father Time himself, reminding the listeners that the entity has no real stake in anyone one’s life but can take it away in moments.

“For the words of ‘Time Suck,’ I was thinking about how I don’t care about wasting time and I think everyone should waste time,” Pravdica says. “I hate when people are uptight about wasting time, cause there probably isn’t anything in the future to look forward to anyway.”

A sobering thought in a chaotic, yet static world.

We Owe’s debut album, Major Inconvenience drops December 1 via Mothland.

expérimental / contemporain / musique contemporaine

SMCQ, tribute series | Sandeep Bhagwati, composer, improviser, “comprovisor”

by Alain Brunet

Sandeep Bhagwati is the Montreal composer to whom the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec’s (SMCQ) prestigious Hommage Series is dedicated. In concert and in exhibition, Sandeep’s works and concepts kick off this Sunday, September 24, 3pm, Salle Pierre-Mercure.

The entrance hall announces “a rare opportunity to bring together two worlds of contemporary art: music and the visual arts”. Over the course of a week, Sandeep Bhagwati’s interactive creation concept allows us to explore the practice he calls comprovisation, a contraction of composition and improvisation.

In it, Sandeep Bhagwati proposes his vision of the division of roles between musicians and composer in a collaborative work. The interactive scores of this comprovisation aim to make exchanges between different musical practices from different cultures more fluid. Thus, 12 visual artists are invited to create in a comprovisation context and express in a pictorial language what the music inscribes in them.

SMCQ’s first major concert, Exercices d’étrangeté , is presented in collaboration with the Vietnamese Cultural Centre of Canada, with this idea as a backdrop: “listen: strange that / too close things deafen us… and yet, from afar, they resound so clearly…” This is a free adaptation of a text by the Vietnamese poet Nguyễn Duy, written when he was thinking of his compatriots abroad.

In this way, Sandeep Bhagwati’s work is inspired by notions of proximity and distance, closeness and remoteness, familiarity and strangeness. The work refers not only to sounds, needless to say, but also to words and images. Musicians from different backgrounds (Vietnam, Sweden, Canada, Quebec) “comprovising” with their respective backgrounds (pop, baroque, jazz, experimental, etc.) interact optimally and adhere to the composer’s instructions. More precisely, short sound segments are aligned and superimposed in this singular journey.

Sandeep Bhagwati was born in Bombay to a German mother and an Indian father. From the age of 5, he grew up in Germany, enrolled from 1984 to 1987 at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg, then studied composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München in Munich, not to mention various master classes with Killmayer, Hans-Jürgen von Bose and Edison Denisov, among others. In addition, he has deepened his knowledge of computer music at IRCAM (Paris), worked on a number of projects in the field of computer music, and is a member of the IRCAM team (Paris), he has worked with Brian Ferneyhough and Tristan Murail, among others.

With Moritz Eggert, he co-founded the A*Devantgarde festival in 1991.From 1990 to 1992, he was co-artistic director of the “AmateurKomponistenWerkstatt” composers’ workshop at the Munich Biennale, where he premiered his own five-act opera and libretto, Ramanujan, based on the life of the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920).From 1995 to 1998, he worked at IRCAM, then as a guest composer at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and at the “Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie” (Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics) in Graz, not to mention his collaboration with the Beethoven Orchester Bonn.

From 2000 to 2003, he taught composition at the Musikhochschule Karlsruhe. Since 2006, Sandeep Bhagwati has held the Canada Research Chair in Inter-X Art Theory and Practice at Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts in Montreal.PAN M 360 suggests an audiovisual interview with Sandeep Bhagwati, in advance of this Tribute Series.

MORE INFOS ON THESE PROGRAMS HERE :

“Comprovisations” for Sandeep Bhagwati, Salle Pierre-Mercure Hall, from Sept 24 to Sept 28,

Amitiés et étrangetés, Salle Pierre-Mercure, Sunday Sept 24 , 3 PM

Art Pop / Avant-Garde / Avant-Pop

Night Lunch – God Bless The One I Love

by Stephan Boissonneault

Music is supposed to be fun right? Nothing in a while has been as fun as the satirical and surreal music video for Night Lunch’s “God Bless The One I Love.” Sitting somewhere in style between the sketch comedy of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and an ’80s John Hughes film, the music video features members of Night Lunch professing their love for nature and the one they love in accompaniment to some weirdo art pop. We have to point out the outfit choices here, especially from the white-clad suit, rosemary bling, and shades-inside man. It’s just too good and he looks like he could be a character in Napolean Dynamite.

It’s impossible to know the goal behind this music video because at first glance it could be religious. But as the video continues and the falsettos (we’re talking like Bee Gee’s level here) soar, we get a clay mountain range and some rotoscopes of trippy hearts, horses, and dolphins morphing into charcoal lava. As the catchy keyboard line continues, there seems to be something wrong and it feels like a strange acid trip. So if that’s what Night Lunch and director Phil Osborne intended, they hit the money. “God Bless The One I Love,” is the first single from Night Lunch’s Fire in the Rose Garden (October 20) out via PAN M 360 favourites, Mothland.

Indie Pop / Indie Rock

STAIRS – As I Reached Out to Touch

by Varun Swarup

Montreal DIY’ers STAIRS first did it themselves in 2021 with the release of Until the Dreams Come Through. Fronted by bassist and singer, Oscar Robertson, the quartet deliver a slick and groovy indie-rock sound with just the right amount of edge to it. Their latest offering is a music video for the last song on Until the Dreams Come Through. “As I Reach out to Touch” is a slow burn on a plaintive theme that is well worth the six minute price of admission. Let them reach out to touch.

Country Folk / Folk

Arielle Soucy – Ottawa

by Stephan Boissonneault

Arielle Soucy is back from slumber with her newest single “Ottawa.” Following up the March orchestral folk single “Promenade,” “Ottawa,” is a light, mystical Francophone folk ode about the simplicity, and sometimes, the disappointment of love. Arielle’s calming voice leads the track with a capo-ed acoustic, country-bluegrass guitar. It’s melancholic and spellbinding.

The video, directed by Karelle Goguen-Bancel, is tranquil, following Arielle in a remote location in the Larentides as she finishes tasks like fixing a birdfeeder in the forest. We see a motorhome, piles of firewood, and locations looking over the water.

“Ottawa” is also announcing Arielle Soucy’s upcoming fall album, Il n’y a rien que je ne suis pas out later this year via Bonbonbon.