SEVEN NOISES

It was at the end of nineties that mainly thanks to Constellation Records and bands like Godspeed You Black Emperor, Do Make Say Think or Silver Mt Zion that Canada was put on the map of contemporary music. The attention boom faded out relatively at the same time the language and resources of these bands wereover exploded and overexposed and people returned to more basic forms of pop music. But then Arcade Fire and other pop and rock bands arrived and little by little Canada has regained attention again. And this year we've seen some new bands coming from there and some of them through Fixture Records, a small Canadian label that mainly issues CDRs.
Cresting is one of them, having released last summer their first EP and promising to release more stuff anytime soon. He plays instrumental music that could be gathered as a reflection of that golden Canadian period but he skips improvisation, long landscape music or cathartic noise to condensate the songs in a more classic pop format although never too obvious and with a lack of classic song structure and with a high DIY spirit. It's more an experiment with sounds and the emotions you can get with them than a collection of songs. Anyway, it's maybe too soon to know how his sound is going to develop so we'll just keep an eye to see what's coming next.

Dirty Beaches is Alex Zhang Hungtai, originally from Taiwan, but spending most of his life in Canada, moving from Montreal to Vancouver recently. He's released some records, most of them on Fixture Records and most of them still available for download, combining melodica, guitars, drones, percussion and voice and the recurrent system of using the Lo-Fi DIY as if it was another instrument on his recordings separates this project from other obscure dark ambient bands. The songs are pretty cinematic, if you can imagine a movie using this music as background. Although sometimes it's really dark it's never too dark to be intimidating or uncomfortable. He plays with dub sounds, drones, repetition and textures mixing them to get an hypnotic, floating and original result difficult to tag. On his last release, the unnamed cassette for the prolific and interesting label Night People, Dirty Beaches has moved a huge step forward. Now percussion and rhythm are at the center of the compositions making them slightly more hypnotic and a bit less dark although the essence of his sound is still there and it's even his most Lo-Fi recording yet, and I would say he uses samples and voice in a more present way. It's definitely his best released yet and he's putting out a 7" split single with US Girls anytime soon on Sibling Sex Records, a label that according to their still not launched website it's not on the works yet.

Dirty beaches - White Sand.mp3