This album is the first volume of instrumental acoustic pieces centered around the idea of a musical representation of the spectrality of memory. My aim is to represent musically a spacewhere time collapses and our past collective memories haunt our minds, like a ghost. Inspired by hauntology music which relies on the intersections of memories and depicts musically how we are haunted by the past, my process consists of composing evocative pieces smeared by noisy instrumental techniques inspired by audio artifacts from defective recording technologies. (such as hiss / white noise, tape saturation, wow & flutter, glitches). By adding instrumental grime to the sound, my aim is to evoke a deeper meaning from the musical material of the pieces. It’s like a beautiful object that has been unearthed where dirt is an integral part of it and adds more beauty and poignancy as it becomes a trace of time passing. 'Cendres (for 4 vibraphones and marimba)' was performed by Architek Percussion and aims to represent the idea of ​​a memorial "spectral trace" in a sonic way. This phenomenon, observable during the process of recollection, is a "reduction" of the memory where only the most striking details of the lived experience resurface and predominate over the rest of the information which is buried and gradually disappears over the years. It is therefore these "spectral traces" or residues of memory, which often come back to haunt us and which make the memory "palpable."

— Olivier Alary

Call Sign (Patrick Hart, 2019) is a whirlwind tour through the sound world of commercial radio. Sarah Albu and Architek Percussion lead you through promotions, jingles, giveaways, call-in segments, traffic and weather reports, and other radio-ready content, all to a backing track performed by Architek Percussion and Patrick Hart.

Featuring:
"Chad and Kristie"—hosts of your number one morning show,
"Quiet Chris"—he's here to get you through the day,
"Little Jimmy"—with all your traffic needs,
"Sunny Steve"—bringing you today's forecast,
and more of your favourite radio voices.

Call Sign is "radio gold," whenever you need it most.

The colour palette on Six Changes is bold, warm, and saturated and stylistically, the piece channels pulsating minimalism through the sophisticated extroversion found in experimental rock and beat-based electronica of various kinds. Asymmetrical rhythms ricochet off of and drift away from one another while glowing mallet-instrument figures braid together. Long, bowed tones offer their distinctive choral shimmer and dissolving into strident synthetic hues. Robust drum kit often provides a firm and precise foundation but rather than imposing rigidity it offers a base onto which the ensemble lay ever-shifting polyrhythmic surfaces. “Perspective” unfurls a stack of multiple simultaneous temporalities, all of which eventually converge at the piece's climax. Anchored with a stark, insistent groove, the various constituent parts of “Your Definition of Home is Dependent on the Constants in Your Life” seem to slide in and out of focus with one another, only to convene at dramatic tonal shifts in several key moments. On the sparkling “Sitting The Next Few Plays Out,” Duinker takes rhythms that he extracted from an MRI machine and embeds them into a web of different pulses. The closing track “Dark Horse Fan” features similar use of an ostinato Duinker transcribed from a busted café ceiling fan. Throughout and around this iterating figure, the group weaves a radiant bed of synth and gently percolating vibraphone. Each movement of Six Changes manages to exude the propulsive candour and physicality of rock, all the while offering a deliciously elaborate rhythmic profile and subtle ensemble shadings.

— Nick Storring

The Privacy of Domestic Life explores thresholds between temporal stability and instability, human and electronically produced sounds, and popular and contemporary musical idioms. There is something here for listeners of all persuasions: Adam Basanta exploits the interaction between human and machine performers, Taylor Brook alchemizes a kaleidoscope of metallic sounds, Beavan Flanagan finds sonic harmony between drummers playing at different speeds, and Duncan Schouten juxtaposes quasi improvisatory soundscapes and hyper-rhythmic metal drumming.

After the Second World War my grandparents dragged a used 1902 upright piano down the road and installed it in their living room. This is the first instrument I can remember. My grandmother’s collection of yellowing song sheets sat in the piano bench my entire life. A beautiful memory, but eventually the piano had to go, and it would go by chainsaw. When she died, I inherited my grandmother’s musical materials. Beloved music cuts a path through format, technology, and time, an idea that planted the seeds for Metatron.

— Eliot Britton

For the past fifteen years, Ben Reimer has been exploring a new role for the drumset in the context of contemporary art music performance. The music on Katana of Choice – Music for Drumset Soloist, written or arranged for Ben, is a convergence of influences from icons of the past with new performance techniques and modes of musical expression. Through commissions, performances and this recording, Ben aims to stimulate new repertoire which further expands the history of the instrument. With this new repertoire and its resulting techniques and performance practices, he has found his way, like generations of drummers before him, to contribute to this rich history.

Bookburners comprises a collection of Nicole Lizée’s works from the past five years picking up where 2008’s This Will Not Be Televised left off. Bookburners presents a number of Lizée’s fixations and obsessions that have infiltrated the five pieces on the album: a reinterpretation of rave culture, John Cage, Hitchcock, witchhouse meets classical, turntablism, iconography, meticulously notated glitch, auteur theory, voyeurism, malfunction, psychopaths, phantoms, backmasking, crate digging, grave digging and a sonic depiction of the imagination of graphic designer Saul Bass - and their melding with classical, concert, notated music.