Bellbird's The Call is a soaring, visceral new statement from the Montreal avant-jazz quartet of Claire Devlin, Allison Burik, Eli Davidovici, and Mili Hong; their second album and first for Constellation Records. Building on the acclaimed self-released debut Root in Tandem (2023), the group refines it's deeply collaborative practice, merging intricate composition and free improvisation into a unified, muscular sound that bridges jazz, rock, fusion, and folk. Recorded live-off-the-floor at Montreal's legendary Hotel2Tango by engineer Sylvaine Arnaud, The Call channels the collective's empathy, urgency, and raw dynamism. It's title track draws inspiration-and even sonic material-from the piercing cry of the white bellbird, one of nature's loudest creatures, while the album's emotional arc meditates on interconnection, climate crisis, and solidarity. An explosive, humanist record from a band redefining the parameters of modern jazz, The Call arrives as Bellbird prepares a Western Canada tour in January 2026, bringing their exhilarating live energy to audiences across the region.

Post-classical composer, sound artist, and curator Matthew Patton returns with his second album as Those Who Walk Away. Afterlife Requiem is an elegy to friend and collaborator Johann Johannsson. Drone, electroacoustics, and near-silences extracted from unfinished recordings on Johannsson hard drives, underpin two string quintets-Ghost Orchestra (Reykjavik) and Possible Orchestra (Winnipeg)-processed and erased in a doleful durational work. Patton also works again with Andy Rudolph (Guy Maddin) and Paul Corley (Sigur Ros, Ben Frost) on co-production and sound design, to forge a simmering physicality that juxtaposes roiling low-end with haunting movements of ghostly strings. Everything I have ever written is a Requiem. Everything an ending. Death is smeared all over this music. My work is about disappearance-of the present, the past, of everything. Afterlife Requiem gets slower and slower over it's duration, it is one huge ritardando, time is not just slowing down-it is disappearing. Without even thinking, two related tragedies occurred and came to the surface organically while I was writing, recording, and working: the death of my mother and the death of composer and friend Johann Johannsson. When I start writing, I am not thinking of anything in particular, I am just writing, composing, recording, and listening... but something always makes itself apparent or pushes itself through in an unforeseen way. After my mother's medically-assisted death, in clearing out her apartment, I realized that I was also erasing the physical manifestation of her world-and that I was doing the exact same thing with the music I was writing and recording. During this time, Johann's death also kept making itself apparent. For Afterlife Requiem I have taken short abandoned fragments from Johann Johannsson's hard drives and placed these disembodied audio ghosts in alternating sections within my own music, leaving them impure-and in the process blurring the distinction between making and un-making. After his death, I had been given these hard drives from Johannsson's Berlin studio to listen to. This music was abandoned, in various states of formation and dissolution: an index of decayed and dead memories, forgotten and now existing only within a series of interlocking mechanical parts which in time will themselves fail and disappear, like everything else. For months, I listened to these remains of Johann's music obsessively, trying to discover clues about Johann before he died. Many times I would find that he had left the recording device going long after the recorded music was over. He seemed to be unaware that the music had ceased or didn't register this was the end of the music or maybe he was distracted by something else. But I found these long silences profoundly emotional and touching.