No Hay Banda is a Montreal-based band that explores the still (and always will be) uncharted continents of avant-garde and contemporary experimental music. Notable collaborations with Ida Toninato, alcides lanza and Vinko Globokar are part of their impressive portfolio. Here they are with a selection of ambitious works (the shortest is 17 minutes) by four Canadian composers, two men and two women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An Overall Augmented Sense of Well-being<\/em> is a proposal by Anthony Tan in which noisy drones are occasionally punctuated by detonating projections. Like a great 30-minute sound cloud in perpetual metamorphosis, we are assailed intensely, and often, but a few weather breaks offer us, here and there, fragments of lyricism or episodes of more agitated turbulence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Rubber Houses<\/em>, Vancouver’s Sabrina Schroeder plunges us into a vaguely industrial environment, with echoes of hydraulic machinery. That said, the sonic space, though textural and physical, is gently deployed, as if in the background. It lasts a good ten minutes before radically transforming into an ambient drone with sparse sensory enamels, plunging us into a parallel universe, a sort of negative mirror of the first part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Montreal’s Andrea Young offers perhaps the most “traditionally contemporary” piece of the lot with A Moment or Two of Panic<\/em>. A solo voice (Sarah Albu of No Hay Banda) levitates above a generally quiet but bristling chamber score, where a few bursts of electronic incandescence disrupt the panorama with intensity. A work that Montreal\u2019s NEM would certainly like to take over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n