No Hay Banda – Zihua Tan: what came before me is going after me

Fresh from receiving a prestigious international award, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Award, worth $20,000 a few weeks ago, the Montreal-based No Hay Banda is releasing a new album dedicated to the music of composer Zihua Tan. He is also from Montreal (of Malaysian origin), and his universe is perfectly suited to that of the Banda. Contemporary music, real, very abstract and sonorous, joyfully colourful and feverishly abundant.

The album consists of two long pieces. The first, 16-minute piece is for a percussionist (in this case the excellent Noam Bierstone) who shakes a panoply of amplified gongs, various metal instruments and congas with extended techniques. The result is that Remnants present an unexpected soundscape where rarely does an instrument sound as one would expect. This is also a bit of Tan’s usual method, as he likes to reveal the hidden side of something. Here, these “leftovers” are like ghostly shadows projected, behind which we glimpse another sonic universe waiting to reveal itself.

The second piece lasts almost 35 minutes and is written for voice (Sarah Albu), violin (Adrianne Munden-Dixon), cello (Audréanne Filion), percussion (again Noam Bierstone), and ondes martenot (Daniel Áñez). Here too, the instruments take on sonic guises foreign to their primary nature, at least most of the time. For example, the ondes martenot does not benefit from long singing lines, but rather expresses itself through short, choppy notes, or simply via the resonance of the running motor. It is a surreal landscape that seems to move through surges and retreats, appearances and dissolutions in perpetual motion.