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. 

Badge Époque Ensemble previews Clouds of Joy album with "Zodiac"

Check out "Zodiac" off the forthcoming Badge Époque Ensemble's Clouds of Joy album out September 9th.

Here's the scoop...

The Badge Époque Ensemble return to Telephone Explosion Records for the label's 100th release with a new album, Clouds of Joy which is set for release on September 9 – they're today sharing the news alongside the first single, "Zodiac" which features vocals from James Baley. Featuring three vocal-led compositions, three instrumentals and three choral arrangements, this new album presents the Ensemble’s most ambitious, mature and engaging material to date. Clouds of Joy represents a shift from the group’s previous sonic excursions – the worlds of vintage soundtrack grooves and early electric jazz which found critical acclaim at Pitchfork, The Wire, Uncut, Paste, Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan, etc – into a more era-ambiguous, complex and all-encompassing approach to arrangement and production. 

Familiar Badge Époque Ensemble motifs are present through this album’s nine tracks: extended sections of dusty drum & conga breaks, swirling saxophone and flute flourishes, fleet-fingered guitar excursions, hazy Rhodes chords and lashing clavinet stabs, but where Clouds of Joy excels is in its ability to weave tremendous vocal performances and choral arrangements into its dense tapestry of sound. This first single, "Zodiac" which features James Baley’s ecstatic, Stevie Wonder-esque lead vocal performance could light up the midnight sky, turning a nearly eight-minute jazz-funk instrumental odyssey into a sure-shot dancefloor hit. Watch the video below. 

Undergoing a major shift of consciousness upon learning that he was expecting twins, BÉE leader Maximilian ‘Twig’ Turnbull found the spark to initiate the album within his reflections upon the nature of human joy. This shift in mindset also helped shape the record from an operational standpoint: Turnbull stepped away from his fixture on keys, leaving all of the musical performance on this record to his cast of collaborators. With Max assuming a more “directorial” approach to production and arrangement à la Barry White, David Axelrod, or Fagen & Becker, this album finds the Badge Époque Ensemble in its most collaborative mode to date. Vocalists Dorothea Paas, James Baley and guitarist Chris Bezant all have co-writing credits here with Bezant contributing significantly to three compositions, including the album’s title track. The album was mixed collaboratively as well, as another joint effort between Turnbull, Steve Chahley and Tony Price, a trio who have teamed up behind the mixing desk for all previous BÉE albums, as well as U.S. Girls’ Heavy Light LP and records from other members of Toronto's bubbling scene including the likes of Jane Inc, Young Guv (Chahley and Tony Price) and many more.

For the most part, the Ensemble on this record is made up of names familiar to anyone following the Badge cosmology: drummer Jay Anderson, bassist Gio Rosati, flautist Alia O’Brien, saxophonist Karen Ng, percussionist Ed Squires and guitarist Chris Bezant, with the new addition of young jazz pianist Edwin de Goeij, a perfect surrogate for Turnbull’s ideas on keys. (This in-demand collection of musicians represents a scattering of key cogs from a clutch of other premium Canadian exports; The Weather Station, Andy Shauf, U.S. Girls & Marker Starling). Clouds’ emphasis on the sound of the human voice finds its perfect outlet in vocal arrangements by labelmate Dorothea Paas and a return from lead vocalist James Baley. Their contributions are complimented by a choir composed of session vocalists, (including singers from Bernice and Bonjay) who come together to provide a series of show-stopping harmonic acrobatics. 

Clouds of Joy marks the group’s third proper full length of five total releases for the Telephone Explosion imprint in only four years. It represents the Ensemble’s most fully realized presentation of a founding vision to create music as human, organic and alive as it is synthesized, produced and designed; music that transcends the notion of linear time, pulling in influences and ideas from the past and taking them far into the future. 

You can pre-order the Clouds of Joy album via Bandcamp right here. Check out the video for "Zodiac" followed by the track listing below.  

 

Badge Époque Ensemble – Clouds of Joy

1. Conspiring With Nature

2. Clouds of Joy

3. Let Breath Be The Sum

4. Badge Époque Ensemble

5. Joy Flows

6. Zodiac (ft. James Baley)

7. Don't Touch A Hair On His Head

8. The Greatest Joy

9. All Same 2 Each, Each Same 2 All

 

Frank Hatchett's dance class funk compiled for Sensational! 2LP

Toronto's Telephone Explosion label gathered 22 tracks for their survey of choreographer Frank Hachett's 80s output for Statler.

Here's the scoop...

Sensational! – that’s Frank Hatchett! These words can be found on many of the 16 albums credited to the legendary jazz dancer, choreographer, and teacher to the stars. At the height of his fame in the 1980s, Hatchett’s classes in New York City at the wildly popular Hines-Hatchett studio (now renamed the Broadway Dance Centre) attracted celebrities including Madonna, Brooke Shields, Olivia Newton-John, and Naomi Campbell. Though he hated flying, preferring to cruise in a Corvette from Massachusetts to Manhattan, each week saw Hatchett jet setting for classes and performances around the world.

In the highlights compiled on Telephone Explosion's expansive double LP set, the sounds of Hatchett’s albums run the gamut from disco and funk in the 1970s to electro and proto-techno as they glide through the ’80s. Like many albums in the dance instruction genre, nearly one third of the songs are covers (Prince, Paul Hardcastle, Earth, Wind & Fire, Billy Cobham) and most clock in at a brisk 2:30 – the ideal length for Hatchett’s classes or his students’ recital performances. Fans of library music will find a similar focus on immaculate performances, while the tightly coiled drum breaks, Afro-Cuban rhythms, and thumping 808s will send rare groove collectors into a state of head nodding bliss. –  Jesse Locke

You can order a digital or vinyl copy of Frank Hatchett's Sensational! compilation directly from Telephone Explosion right here. Listen to a couple of tracks below. 

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. 

 

Badge Époque preview Self Help album with video for "Unity (It's Up To You)"

"Unity (It's Up To You)" is off the Badge Époque Ensemble's forthcoming album, Self Help out Nov 20 on Telephone Explosion.

Here's the scoop...

Self Help 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 & 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.

Self Help is out November 20. pre-order a copy directly from Telephone Explosion right here. Watch Alex Kingsmill's entertaining animated clip for "Unity (It's Up To You)" feat. James Baley below. 

 

Listen to Badge Époque Ensemble's "Zealous Child"

"Zealous Child" is off the forthcoming Nature, Man and Woman 12" EP from Toronto's mighty Badge Époque Ensemble. 

Here's the scoop...
It’s been a few short months since Badge Époque Ensemble released their self titled debut, an ambiguous collection of woozy, narcotized funk. And yet already we have Nature, Man & Woman - a simmering new platter containing 3 songs, producing 26 minutes of dank flute-oriented atmosphere due December 6th from Toronto's forward looking Telephone Explosion label. Get it right here.

The disco-sleeved 12” EP provides a revealing glimpse of a musically omnivorous approach. On Badge Theme we find the group upping the ante of the sound of their debut, unspooling 14 minutes of sensual Ike Hayes indebted oomph, sure to thrill future generations of loop diggers (cut live off the floor no less!).

The A side contains 2 songs, which seem to hint at diverging future directions this eclectic combo might take moving forward. Opener “Zealous Child” comes as something of a sequel to the debut LP’s sole vocal featuring track “Undressed In Solitude”. This go round BÉE have teamed up with Toronto singer Dorothea Paas to ruminate on notions of spiritual wisdom overtop a progressive and climactically bombastic homebrew. Title track “Nature, Man & Woman” closes out the side with 6 ominous minutes of mysterious provenance. Somewhere between a live performance and a collaged tapestry, the group make more explicit than ever before their affinity for beat-centric loop music. Sounding like Lonnie Liston Smith gone trip-hop for a broadcast prohibited episode of Law & Order, BÉE posit themselves here as amongst the moodiest of contemporary instrumental collectives. Little wonder that library music enthusiasts around the world have made emphatic note of the Ensemble.

The group will be returning to the studio, refining new arrangements in 2020. Until then we have a generous and unusual second serving to help us puzzle over what sounds Badge Époque Ensemble may investigate next. See them live with André Ethier at Lula Lounge on December 12.





BADGE ÉPOQUE ENSEMBLE:
Jay Anderson - Drums & Percussion
Chris Bezant - Guitar, Electric Sitar
Alia O’Brien - Flute Ed Squires - Congas, Percussion
Giosue Rosati - Bass
Maximillian “Twig” Turnbull - Clavinet, Rhodes

Jack Name, Isla Craig duo, Andre Ethier @ Tranzac Tiki Room, Monday

L.A.'s Jack Name will be joined by Toronto's own Isla Craig, Andre Ethier and the Époque Selector on Monday night. 

New Fries 10" Release Party @ The Garrison, Thursday

New Fries launch their More 10" with Carl Didur, Private Joy, Fountain and tunes courtesy of Absolutely Free.

Roy Orbison Garage-style

Based on Roy Orbison's ill-fated big screen bid playing a post-Civil War singing Southern spy trying to steal back the Confederacy's gold with his ingenious guit-gun device in the nutty 1967 musical western The Fastest Guitar Alive, it's entirely understandable why Orbison never got a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame for his acting ability.

However, the fact that he hasn't already received the acknowledgment for his significant contribution to popular music is an enormous oversight which is finally being redressed. There's a sidewalk star with Roy Orbison's name on it being unveiled tomorrow (Friday, January 28) at a ceremony with his wife Barbara Orbison and their sons Alex and Roy Jr. expected to attend.
And just as though it was carefully planned, a suckerpunch of a Roy Orbison tribute collection Our Boy Roy has suddenly appeared out of nowhere – well, Toronto actually – assembled by Telephone Explosion Records. The 11-track set features covers of songs made popular by the Big O performed by the favourite garage rock, punk and psychobilly delinquents of label honchos Steve Sidoli and Jon Schouten and some other fuds they knew who could be roped into their high concept recording scheme.
Along with Telephone Explosion-associated artists Holy Cobras battering Domino completely unrecognizable, Teenanger tearing up the Johnny Cash-penned You're My Baby, Charlie & The Moonhearts blasting an oddly ferocious version of the goofy novelty tune Chicken Hearted and Demons Claws caterwauling through an appropriately weepy It's Over, Our Boy Roy has some other surprises in-store from out-of-towners.

 While the Cheater Slicks' dirgy demolishing of Crying is unexpectedly forgettable and ditto for the dead-ass take of Running Scared by Montreal's unholy Red Mass (who probably should've gone with Devil Doll instead), fast-rising garage star Ty Segall manages to knock out a nasty-but-nice Pretty Woman, New York no-count Camero Werewolf finds a perfect vehicle for his snotty charm in Problem Child and Florida's finest, the Jacuzzi Boys bust out the full-on backing vocals what sound like oil can drums for an entertaining crack at You Got It.

Somewhat sadly, no one took a shot at Roy's overlooked originals from The Fastest Guitar soundtrack but then, there's only so much you can do with an 11 track album. Consequently Rock House (belted out by Haunted George) is as far off the beaten path as anyone here dares venture. If there's a second volume, I'd bet The Sadies could go to town on Rollin' On and the song Best Friend seems custom made for Calexico. Just sayin'.
It should be noted that Telephone Explosion pressed up only 1,000 vinyl copies of the Our Boy Roy LP in the first run so they won't be around long at Rotate This or the Telephone Explosion site.

LINKS
Telephone Explosion http://www.telephoneexplosion.com
myspace http://www.myspace.com/telephoneexplosionrecords