Reverie is a soundtrack of atmospheric chamber music for violin, cello, and piano by sisters Rebecca Foon and Aliayta Foon-Dancoes, and marks the first full-length album collaboration between the two players/composers. Reverie melds cellist Rebecca's post-rock and semi-improvised sensibility forged from over two decades playing in DIY/indie bands like Esmerine, Thee Silver Mt. Zion, and Set Fire To Flames, with violinist Aliayta's more recent trajectory from award-winning virtuosic performer to academically-shaped explorations of interdisciplinary composition. Following several years in London at the Royal Academy and Royal College of Music, Aliayta's move to Princeton in 2023 for a Composition PhD put the sisters back on the same continent, regularly meeting and collaborating at Rebecca's Lost River studio in Quebec's Laurentian mountains. Working with co-producer Jace Lasek (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Patrick Watson, The Besnard Lakes), the result is an immersive suite of thematic variations that balances intimacy and detail with wide-spectrum spatial lushness. Subtle electronic interventions and gently blown-out acoustics ebb and flow throughout, further conveying Reverie's overriding mission to weave a meditative pastoralism with the underlying anxiety, sorrow, and tragedy of ecocide.
Mark Molnar has been a linchpin of the Ottawa experimental music scene for over two decades, spanning contemporary classical, electroacoustic, industrial/noise, and improv. As a string player in a wide range of projects, an organizer and curator of innumerable shows, and via his own avantgarde label Black Bough Records, Molnar's unflagging contributions to independent music culture in Canada's capital city have been significant. EXO is his Constellation debut: a remarkable and bracing suite of post-classical composition on which Molnar plays every instrument. Meticulously self-recorded, primarily with strings, harp, and piano, EXO balances thematic melodicism, polytonality, and dissonance across three elegiac pieces of exquisitely expressive dynamism. This is exacting modern chamber music that blends formal and harmonic complexity with a solemn emotive sensibility accessible to a broad audience. Listeners that yearn for some edge and disquietude in a landscape of often all-too-approachable post-classical music should find EXO eminently worth their time and attention. While Molnar is a highly trained string player, and studied music under Aubrey Wolfe, microtonality with James Tenney, and composition with R. Murray Schafer, his trajectory has been entirely and intentionally outside the academy, signalling a socio-artistic commitment to DIY culture, forged from an early passion for the sonic worlds of post-hardcore, post-punk, no-wave, free improv, power electronics, and other independent/underground musics. His classically-informed works have been described as "tense currents of musical modernism invigorated with punk's raw vitality." EXO carries an undercurrent influenced by dark industrial and ambient metal in particular, with microphones purposely placed to pick up the low-end frequencies of the piano body, and of a bass drum positioned as a resonant skin in the acoustic space; an electroacoustic strategy organically meshed to the crisply defined and pristinely recorded pointillisms and polychords of strings, harp, and piano, which feed into this noisefloor of crepuscular sub-bass disquietude and decay. It's a production aesthetic that lends EXO a distinct undertow of tension and feeling, a sort of roiling maximalism where the chamber instrumentation traces arcs and waves of form and flow as if drawn from a dark, impervious ocean below. It also reinforces the profound hermeticism of Molnar's process, as a forbiddingly solitary creative act of immersion and navigation. The album artwork, featuring semiabstract stills of the sea by British photographer Ed Allen, further reifies this metaphor.
Unfolding is Jessica Moss' most meditative and plaintive solo album, and perhaps the first in the Montreal violinist/composer's decade-spanning discography that might properly be called ambient. The ex-Silver Mt Zion and Black Ox Orkestar member draws from post-classical, drone, minimalism, industrial/metal, power electronics, Klezmer and other folkways. This is not abstract ambient music; layers of violin melody, electroacoustic processing, intermittent voice, and percussion from The Necks drummer Tony Buck, bring forth deeply emotive genre-defying compositions guided by a spirit of searching and summoning that unfold in a prevailing atmosphere of incantation and mournful restraint. The inseparability of the personal and political has wrung ever tighter for Moss over the past two years. As a core member of the Montreal chapter of Musicians For Palestine, she's co-organized and played several benefit shows, and released the solo album For UNRWA in spring 2024 (garnering over 800 supporters and raising thousands of dollars). Later that year, her long-term long-distance relationship melted down over politics. Working closely with producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart), Moss notes "Unfolding was made slowly, over the last 12 months, the second full year of genocide in Palestine, in direct response to our collective witnessing, our collective grief, as a portal to collective mourning, as a searchlight through our internal weather systems, seeking one another out in the dark." Moss was already moving towards heightened fragility and deep listening, her music becoming increasingly durational and ceremonial. Despite the plummeting financial viability of touring, her devotion to holding space, conjuring entanglement, and connecting with intimate live audiences became her creative lodestar, her solo praxis shaped by committing to and communing in these rooms. Recent political and personal upheavals have only intensified these ritualistic, reparative musical processes. The two longform tracks on Side One of Unfolding embody this sensibility. "Washing Machine" weaves layers of string drone and filigree, gently noised by distortion pedals and amplification, with indecipherably blown-out spoken voice intermittently enveloping the mix as fragmentary palimpsests of shrouded recitation and ineffable feeling. The piece traces it's origins to a phone recording of a European laundry machine, captured by Moss as she sat next to it, heartbroken on the bathroom floor, finding solace by humming a melody along to the mechanical harmonics of the washer working through it's cycles. Album centerpiece "One, Now" begins as a delicate invocation, with bass pulse, chimes and bells, plucked strings, and doleful lead violin lines influenced by Jewish and Arabic modes. Ambient noise, field recordings, and wordless vocals are added to the brew, as violin melodies layer and coalesce towards a mesmerizing dronescape: a semi-improvised living composition further vitalized by Tony Buck's paintbrush drumming throughout, and Moumneh's "yell into the void" at the end... Side Two is a work in four parts titled "no one / no where / no one is free / until all are free" that moves through ambient noise, elegiac post-classical strings, and distorted harmonic drones, towards a denouement of liturgical organ, ritual bell, and shimmering electronic tracers that set the stage for the album's closing song: the devastating choral composition "until all are free", a secular hymn comprised of Jessica's multi-tracked vocals (but which she looks forward to singing with others in concert). Unfolding is dedicated to "a free Palestine in our lifetime." Thanks for listening.
Matana Roberts is one of the leading lights of contemporary African-American experimental music, combining her widely recognized gifts as an alto saxophone player and improviser with an intensely engaged re-definition of American Jazz traditions. While it may sound trite, we truly feel this music speaks for itself. It rallies adventurous improv, experimental voice and narrative, a wide array of black folkways, and Matana's impassioned lead playing to tremendous emotional and conceptual effect.
Matana Roberts is one of the most acclaimed, socio-politically conscious and aesthetically intrepid avant-jazz practitioners of the 21st century. The critical accolades for her multi-chapter Coin Coin work place her at the vanguard of stylistic innovation and radicalization, while confirming the deep substance and soul that guides her compositional agenda. Roberts has long employed the phrase "panoramic sound quilting" to describe Coin Coin, and with this third chapter in the series she implements this metaphor most overtly.
Matana Roberts returns with the fourth chapter of her extraordinary Coin Coin series - a project that has deservedly garnered the highest praise and widespread critical acclaim for it's fierce aesthetic originality and unflinching narrative power. The first three Coin Coin albums, issued from 2011-2015, charted diverse pathways of modern/avant composition - Roberts calls it "panoramic sound quilting" - and ranged sequentially from large band to sextet to solo, unified by Roberts' archival and often deeply personal research into legacies of the American slave trade and ancestries of American identity/experience. Roberts also emphasizes non-male subjects and thematises these other-gendered stories with a range of vocal and verbal techniques: singspeak, submerged glossolalic recitation, guttural cathartic howl, operatic voice, gentle lullaby, group chant, and the recuperation of various American folk traditionals and spirituals, whether surfacing in fragmentary fashion or as unabridged set-pieces. The root of this vocality comes from her dedication to the legacy of her main chosen instrument, the alto saxophone. On Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis, Roberts convened a new band, with New Yorkers Hannah Marcus (guitars, fiddle, accordion) and percussionist Ryan Sawyer (Thurston Moore, Nate Wooley, Cass McCombs) joined by Montreal bassist Nicolas Caloia (Ratchet Orchestra) and Montreal-Cairo composer/improviser Sam Shalabi (Land Of Kush, Dwarfs Of East Agouza) on guitar and oud, along with prolific trombonist Steve Swell and vibraphonist Ryan White as special guests. Memphis unspools as a continuous work of 21st century liberation music, oscillating between meditative incantatory explorations, raucous melodic themes, and unbridled free-improv suites, quoting archly and ecstatically from various folk traditions along the way. Led by Roberts' conduction and unique graphic score practice, her consummate saxophone and clarinet playing, and punctuated by her singing and speaking various texts generated from her own historical research and diaristic writings, Coin Coin Chapter Four is a glorious and spellbinding new installment in this projected twelve-part Gesamtkunstwerk. Says Roberts: "As an arts adventurer dealing w/ the medium of sound and it's many contradictions I am most interested in endurance, perseverance, migration, liberation, libation, improvisation and the many layers of cognitive dissonance therein as it relates to my birth country's history. I speak memory, I sing an American survival through horn, song, sadness, a sometimes gladness. I stand on the backs of many people, from so many different walks of life and difference, that never had a chance to express themselves as expressively as I have been given the privilege. In these sonic renderings, I celebrate the me, I celebrate the we, in all that it is now, and all that is yet to come or will be... Thanks for listening."
Matana Roberts is one of the most acclaimed, socio-politically conscious and aesthetically intrepid avant-jazz practitioners of the 21st century. The critical accolades for her multi-chapter Coin Coin work place her at the vanguard of stylistic innovation and radicalization, while confirming the deep substance and soul that guides her compositional agenda. Roberts has long employed the phrase "panoramic sound quilting" to describe Coin Coin, and with this third chapter in the series she implements this metaphor most overtly.
Matana Roberts is one of the leading lights of contemporary African-American experimental music, combining her widely recognized gifts as an alto saxophone player and improviser with an intensely engaged re-definition of American Jazz traditions. While it may sound trite, we truly feel this music speaks for itself. It rallies adventurous improv, experimental voice and narrative, a wide array of black folkways, and Matana's impassioned lead playing to tremendous emotional and conceptual effect.
Limited 180gm vinyl LP pressing including digital download. Coin Coin Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchild is the much-anticipated 2013 installment of Matana Roberts' unique and forward-looking project and it finds Roberts conjuring some of the most nuanced, thoughtful and substantial American liberation music of the 21st century.
Coin Coin Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchild is the much-anticipated 2013 installment of Matana Roberts' unique and forward-looking project and it finds Roberts conjuring some of the most nuanced, thoughtful and substantial American liberation music of the 21st century.
Matana Roberts returns with the fourth chapter of her extraordinary Coin Coin series - a project that has deservedly garnered the highest praise and widespread critical acclaim for it's fierce aesthetic originality and unflinching narrative power. The first three Coin Coin albums, issued from 2011-2015, charted diverse pathways of modern/avant composition - Roberts calls it "panoramic sound quilting" - and ranged sequentially from large band to sextet to solo, unified by Roberts' archival and often deeply personal research into legacies of the American slave trade and ancestries of American identity/experience. Roberts also emphasizes non-male subjects and thematises these other-gendered stories with a range of vocal and verbal techniques: singspeak, submerged glossolalic recitation, guttural cathartic howl, operatic voice, gentle lullaby, group chant, and the recuperation of various American folk traditionals and spirituals, whether surfacing in fragmentary fashion or as unabridged set-pieces. The root of this vocality comes from her dedication to the legacy of her main chosen instrument, the alto saxophone. On Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis, Roberts convened a new band, with New Yorkers Hannah Marcus (guitars, fiddle, accordion) and percussionist Ryan Sawyer (Thurston Moore, Nate Wooley, Cass McCombs) joined by Montreal bassist Nicolas Caloia (Ratchet Orchestra) and Montreal-Cairo composer/improviser Sam Shalabi (Land Of Kush, Dwarfs Of East Agouza) on guitar and oud, along with prolific trombonist Steve Swell and vibraphonist Ryan White as special guests. Memphis unspools as a continuous work of 21st century liberation music, oscillating between meditative incantatory explorations, raucous melodic themes, and unbridled free-improv suites, quoting archly and ecstatically from various folk traditions along the way. Led by Roberts' conduction and unique graphic score practice, her consummate saxophone and clarinet playing, and punctuated by her singing and speaking various texts generated from her own historical research and diaristic writings, Coin Coin Chapter Four is a glorious and spellbinding new installment in this projected twelve-part Gesamtkunstwerk. Says Roberts: "As an arts adventurer dealing w/ the medium of sound and it's many contradictions I am most interested in endurance, perseverance, migration, liberation, libation, improvisation and the many layers of cognitive dissonance therein as it relates to my birth country's history. I speak memory, I sing an American survival through horn, song, sadness, a sometimes gladness. I stand on the backs of many people, from so many different walks of life and difference, that never had a chance to express themselves as expressively as I have been given the privilege. In these sonic renderings, I celebrate the me, I celebrate the we, in all that it is now, and all that is yet to come or will be... Thanks for listening."
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.
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.
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.
