Badge Époque Ensemble shares Meg Remy's video for "Conspiring With Nature"

"Conspiring With Nature" is off Badge Époque Ensemble's new Clouds Of Joy album due Sept. 9th via Telephone Explosion. 

Listen to Badge Époque Ensemble's "Just Space For Light"

"Just Space For Light" (feat. Jennifer Castle) is off Badge Époque Ensemble's forthcoming Self Help LP out Nov. 20th. Get it here.

Here's the scoop....

Recorded live in the months before lockdown, Badge Époque Ensemble's new Self Help album on Telephone Explosion Records is an exploratory record that dances across time and genre, guided by fidgety miniatures and jazz inflected collage. While constructed from the inspiration of soul, funk and film music, BÉE mediate those influences having first digested them through the productions of Madlib and the RZA. Throughout, the band pool together their instrumental chops, moving from fluid and serpentine R&B to meditative, minimalistic piano, evoking a contrast of virtuosity and self-surrender.

BÉE – Self Help

A sticker on the sleeve tells us Self Help “combines jazz-funk and mysticism,” a signpost to where its musical and spiritual concerns align. The jazz-funk component translates to arresting hooks in sideways song forms: echoes of Gainsbourg spooled through Azymuth-style Brazilian jazz and punctuated by the whip and snap of Steely Dan. “The Sound Where My Head Was”, the instrumental centrepiece, exemplifies present-wave jazz but also ancient sounds, giving off the mothballed air of a Hiroshi Yoshimura record in a library-music archive.

Self Help’s mysticism emerges in broad and specific ways, denoting not only a search beyond cliché and intellect but also an inquiry into the beat, the spirit, the one will. This isn’t new territory for them: Turnbull – the artist formerly known as Slim Twig, who writes and performs with U.S. Girls and various other Toronto concerns – named the group’s Nature, Man & Woman EP after the Alan Watts book. Building these songs from his drafts over three weekends at Toronto’s Palace Sound studio, the ensemble was free to tap out of the city and into some other place, taking up residence in a collective mind maze.

The album produces, in equal measure, familiar surprises and the surprisingly familiar. Intoxicated jazz riffs swerve left at phantom intersections. Rhythms cut loose and tie you in knots. But wired into each song is a sense of gentle accumulation, making every featherlight flourish weigh a ton.

The soul shimmer of “Unity (It’s Up to You)” lets the players pool their R&B chops into something fluid and serpentine while, on guest vocals, the musical performance artist James Baley issues urgent declaratives: “Water must pool, as a rule, before tasted/Or else the water is wasted.” The words throughout the record complement the ensemble music while riffing on the precarious nature of unity itself. Then, closer “Extinct Commune” finds Turnbull deserted at the piano, playing phrases of meditative minimalism taking after the composer Joanna Brouk. For all the record’s reach, it is these contrasting quiet moments that bring Self Help’s communal spirit into focus.

A note on personnel: Badge Époque Ensemble now has a seventh member in Karen Ng, the saxophonist and sometime collaborator of Do Make Say Think, Feist, and others. In BÉE, Ng joins Chris Bezant and Giosuè Rosati, her bandmates in the Andy Shauf live band, as well as U.S. Girls co-conspirators Turnbull and Ed Squires, and other Torontonian cross-pollinators listed below. Guest vocalists across Self Help include Meg Remy, who sings with Dorothea Paas on the opener, James Baley, and Toronto singer-songwriter Jennifer Castle on the remarkable “Just Space for Light”. – Jazz Monroe

Badge Époque Ensemble is: Jay Anderson: Drum Kit / Chris Bezant: Guitar / Karen Ng: Saxophone / Alia O’Brien: Flute / Ed Squires: Conga, percussion / Giosuè Rosati: Bass / Maximilian ‘Twig’ Turnbull: Fender Rhodes, clavinet, synthesizers. 

Listen to "Just Space For Light" below. 

 

U.S. Girls preview Heavy Light @ The Paradise Theatre, Saturday

Meg Remy and her U.S. Girls unveil their new "Heavy Light" album (out March 6) with a sold out show at Toronto's Paradise Theatre tonight. 

U.S. Girls on tour
Feb 15 Toronto, Ontario - Paradise Theatre
Feb 16 Montreal, Quebec - Le Ministère
Feb 18 New York, NY - The Dance
Apr 4 Detroit, MI - MOCAC
Apr 5 Chicago, IL - Lincoln Hall
Apr 6 Madison, WI - Majestic Theatre
Apr 7 Minneapolis, MN - Cedar Cultural Center
Apr 9 Omaha, NE - Slowdown
Apr 10 Kansas City, MO - Record Bar
Apr 12 Denver, CO - Bluebird Theatre
Apr 13 Salt Lake City, UT - Metro Music Hall
Apr 16 Vancouver, British Columbia - Imperial
Apr 17 Seattle, WA - Crocodile
Apr 18 Portland, OR - Mississippi Studios
Apr 20 San Francisco, CA - The Independent
Apr 21 San Jose, CA - The Ritz
Apr 22 Los Angeles, CA - Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever
Apr 24 Phoenix, AZ - Valley Bar
Apr 25 Tucson, AZ - 191 Toole
Apr 27 Austin, TX - Antone’s
Apr 28 Dallas, TX - Club Dada
Apr 29 Houston, TX - Continental Club
May 1 Memphis, TN - The Greenroom at Crosstown Arts
May 2 Nashville, TN - Exit/In
May 3 Asheville, NC - Grey Eagle
May 5 Washington, DC - U Street Music Hall
May 6 Brooklyn, NY - Music Hall of Williamsburg
May 7 Boston, MA - Sinclair
May 8 Philadelphia, PA - World Café Live

Darlene Shrugg w/ Biblical @ Hamilton's This Ain't Hollywood, Tuesday

Watch the clip for "Inherit The Wind" off the self-titled debut from Slim Twig & Meg Remy's band Darlene Shrugg.

U.S. Girls, Cindy Lee @ The Tranzac, Saturday

Here's Meg Remy and crew performing Island Song and 28 Days at The Bookshelf's eBar in Guelph back in April. 

Fiver presents Audible Songs From Rockwood @ St. Matthew's United Church on Friday; Array Space on Saturday

Simone Schmidt performs songs inspired by the stories of women inmates at Kingston's Rockwood Asylum. 

Simone Schmidt, aka Fiver, is a Toronto-based musician working within the frame of traditional North American folk music. Her latest album Audible Songs From Rockwood is a series of eleven fictional field recordings, gathered from case files of patients at the Rockwood Asylum for the Criminally Insane between 1854-1881.

The rigour of Schmidt’s writing process is shown through the work: Over the course of two years, Schmidt researched the asylum's primary documents – patient files, architectural diagrams, superintendents' diaries –  spinning her findings into historical fiction and, from there, into song. The voices on the record are crafty, witty, evasive, despondent, and lucid. Audible Songs From Rockwood shapes its subject matter with wit, optimism, sadness, and even joy. Using an acoustic sonic pallet and working with some local heavies in the old time folk tradition – John Showman, Max Heineman, Chris Coole, Kristine Schmidt – and highly skilled instrumentalists – cellist Cris Derksen and Blood Ceremony's Alia O’Brien  – the performances gives voice to  people living in the margins of history.

The album is accompanied by a book created by fictional ethnomusicologist, Simone Carver, written in the style of the liner notes of Smithsonian Folkways compilations.  It includes lyrics and supplemental information about the historical context of the inmates and their songs along with original artwork by Darby Milbraith, Geneva Hailey, Jennifer Castle, Jeff Bierk and Julianna Neufeld. The package carries questions about the archive as an apparatus of colonial power, definitions of sanity and criminality, and the early settler-colonial agenda foundational to those modes of thought still operating in today’s carceral system. Watch the mini-documentary shot by Colin Medley followed by Meg Remy's video for the song Mouser. Audible Songs From Rockwood is available in various formats from idée fixe records which you can get right here.

Fiver is at St. Matthew's United Church (729 St. Clair West) Friday at 7:30pm (now sold out);
also at Array Space (155 Walnut Ave) Saturday at 9:30pm, $15.

Slim Twig's cult classic reissued by DFA

Slim Twig rocks the Silver Dollar on Friday, January 23.

Self-produced by Toronto's own Slim Twig in the fall of 2010, A Hound at the Hem is a suite of songs inspired thematically by Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and musically by Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson. Upon completing AHATH, our man Slim found some difficulty getting his record label Paper Bag to release his epic psych-pop masterwork.

Admittedly, Twig's concept album sounded nothing like anything by Paper Bag's other artists. If you think back to what was being done at the time by bands on their roster – Tokyo Police Club, Rock Plaza Central, Winter Gloves, Cities In Dust, Rural Alberta Advantage, Woodhands, The Acorn, etc. – that's not really such a bad thing.

In any case, Twig went back to the studio and recorded a more conventional set of pop songs which Paper Bag happily put out as Sof' Sike in 2012. But rather than let what he considered to be his best work to date go unheard,  Twig issued AHATH in a limited edition of 300 copies on his own Calico Corp imprint via Pleasence Records in November of that year prefaced by the following explanation on his blog site:

"Two years ago I started work on a narrative album with my friend Louis Percival. We stayed on Toronto Island for a month arranging and recording. I spent a further year revising and overdubbing, mixing and re-mixing, conspiring the narrative in my own head. The result is A Hound at the Hem. The work of this album actually precedes Sof' Sike, and will now finally see release next month as a co-release between Calico Corp. & Pleasence Records.

"I consider this work - which fashions itself as the hard psych flipside to Sof' Sike - as my finest (and certainly densest) musical achievement to date. It features work from the very finest in the Toronto scene - (in the world truly, in my not so humble opinion) - including Louis Percival, Carl Didur, Tim Westberg, Meg Remy, Colin Fisher, & Tilman Lewis. It also features wonderful string arrangements by Owen Pallett, performed by the St. Kitts string quartet. I have a range of very intense memories from the work of this album, and truly the completion of it has changed me as a creative being.

"The album owes a sizable cosmic debt to Lolita, and to Histoire de Melody Nelson (Jean-Claude Vannier's visionary arrangements in particular)."

That miniscule initial pressing of 300 copies vanished soon after hitting the street and was well on the way to becoming one of those prized Canuck private-press curios which collectors speak about in hushed tones. But then some hipster doofus in a Neu t-shirt caught wind of the whole sad AHATH saga, loved the album and ruined everything for vinyl speculators sitting on sealed originals by announcing a deluxe reissue on New York's DFA Records.

You'd think that picking up Calico Corp's brilliant Zacht Automaat 2LP retrospective would make more sense for the trend-conscious DFA but hey, who am I to question the judgment of James "Speedking" Murphy.  DFA have manufactured 600 more copies of A Hound at the Hem in a fancy gatefold sleeve with no extra tracks, 100 of which are on pink wax and available here. Check out Meg Remy's video for the track Maintain The Charade below.

Slim Twig trashes Montreal's fancy PHI Centre for new Altered Ego video

Here's the zany new Slim Twig video for the song Altered Ego from our man's latest opus Sof' Sike (Paper Bag) shot by George Fok at Montreal's multi-disciplinary PHI Centre art space. While Slim is the main focus of the action, he co-stars with the costumes created by Renata Morales who has whipped up similar weirdness for Arcade Fire, Grimes and Zola Jesus among others. See if you can spot which one of the three dancers is Slim's significant other Meg Remy of US Girls infamy.

Slim Twig plays the Great Hall on Friday as part of Paper Bag Records' 10th Anniversary celebrations.



You can get your very own copy of Slim Twig's Sof' Sike album directly from the Paper Bag Records site.