1-Speed Bike
Alternating between humour and homage, Droopy Butt Begone! opens with a medley of 80's techno/hip-hop references (shameless filtered synth swells, BPM doubling, scratch samples and a shout-out dedication of sorts), giving way to delicate glockenspiel underpinned by head-bobbing beats. Aidan Girt
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Black Ox Orkestar
Evenly split between instrumentals and vocal tunes, this debut album is a compelling blend of originals and new arrangements for pieces pulled from various Eastern European songbooks. The band aims to expand the definition of Jewish diasporic music, by learning and reinterpreting songs and rhythms
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The second record by Montreal's Black Ox Orkestar places the group at the forefront of a 'new Jewish music' that rejects contemporary fusion and musty nostalgia in equal measure. With backgrounds in folk, punk-rock and free jazz, the group's four musicians distill Balkan, Central Asian, Arabic
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Carla Bozulich
"Evangelista is a sound that you can open your chest with, pull out what's inside and make it change shapes. Make it open more times and, even more... til the sound inside has finally sealed the hole where your vile/beautiful heart belongs... loved and safe even when you think you're totally
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Clues
This is the wondrous debut record from Clues. Co-founders Alden Penner and Brendan Reed have been quietly nurturing this project in Montreal since the demise of their respective bands, Unicorns and Les Angles Morts. As a member of the short-lived Unicorns, Penner’s songwriting prowess was unveiled
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Do Make Say Think
Do Make Say Think self-released this debut album in Toronto in1997, and we heard it the following spring. The band's infectious spacerock-cum-swing approach to sweeping instrumentals, and their brilliant realization of the potentials of 8-track recording, hooked us instantly. Rhythm syncopation,
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This follow-up to their scintillating self-titled debut captures the evolving and evocative sound of Do Make Say Think in all its newfound subtlety and sophistication. Recorded in an old wooden barn outside their hometown of Toronto, the new album is swaddled in late-night, late-summer ambiance,
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The third full-length by Do Make Say Think marks another quantum leap by this Toronto-based instrumental rock band. Their space- and drone-rock foundations continue to serve as the launching pad for experimentation with jazz-inflected motifs, but with this third album, the group's pop sensibility
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Do Make Say Think have fashioned a fourth full-length album of tremendous beauty and depth, more loosely woven than previous records and played with a dark, wistful restraint throughout. These new songs are eerie and iridescent, composed and captured with mesmerising attention to detail, guided by
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Since Constellation issued their self-released debut record in 1998, Do Make Say Think have made one critically-acclaimed album after another. They are one of the most consistently inventive instrumental rock bands of the past decade, and one of the most self-realised: DMST members themselves have
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The sixth full-length from Do Make Say Think defiantly features four long-form tracks, three of which clock in at over 10 minutes, and all of which trace the inimitable musical arcs that have made this band justly celebrated for their unique sonic palette and vibrant distillation of compositional
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Elfin Saddle
Elfin Saddle is the musical project co-founded by Jordan McKenzie and Emi Honda. Partners in life and in art, Jordan and Emi have been building a wonderful body of visual, installation and video art that combines organic living materials with found and scavenged objects to create enchanted
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Elizabeth Anka Vajagic
With this debut recording, Elizabeth Anka Vajagic sets her vocals against a backdrop led by ragged guitars, moving from harrowing, dry-as-a-bone intimacy ("With Hopes Lost", "Iceland") to reverb-soaked torch-song balladry ("Around Here", "Sleep With Dried Up Tears"), and the odd explosive
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Elizabeth Anka Vajagic follows up last year's debut full-length with two long-form incantations channeled through the full range of her blistering, astoundingly intimate voice. As the title suggests, Vajagic cuts deep into a couple of timeless themes, with both title pieces featuring extended
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Eric Chenaux
Eric Chenaux has been a creative force in Toronto underground music for fifteen years. He played guitar and sang in Phleg Camp and LifeLikeWeeds through the early 1990s, released his first solo record in 1996, and has recorded and performed tirelessly in Toronto for the last decade, both solo and
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Sloppy Ground is Eric Chenaux's strongest, most accessible and most dynamic work in years. We have long been champions of the man's inimitable talents – as a songwriter, arranger and mind-bending guitarist – and this new album should make these talents clear to the nominally attentive listener.
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Evangelista
We can call this a debut record of sorts, as it is the first album to be released under Carla Bozulich's new band moniker, Evangelista. Bozulich's first record for Constellation, issued in 2006, was released under her own name, and bore the album title Evangelista. That album title has now
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Evangelista / Carla Bozulich
Beginning with her first Constellation release in 2006, Carla Bozulich’s Evangelista project has steadily been gaining recognition for its complex beauty and fierce, raging appeals. Bozulich has been knocking these and many other ideas into form for two decades (Neon Veins, Ethyl Meatplow, The
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Exhaust
The self-titled album by Exhaust was recorded to 3- and 4-track at the Hotel2Tango and Mom and Pop Sounds in 1997. Originally a vinyl-only release in 1998, we issued it on CD in 2000. Anchored by drummer Aidan Girt (later drafted by GY!BE), Exhaust tore up live rooms around Montreal with Gordon
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Recorded at a cabin in the country, all the original Exhaust elements -- ultra-low-end bass moan, loping breakbeat trapkit, live reel-to-reel tape scratch -- remain at the core of this new studio work. Spliced and diced at the Hotel2Tango during mixing, the record is an excellent slab of
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Feu Thérèse
With Fly Pan Am on indefinite hiatus, fans of that band will find much to like with Feu Therese. Channelling the explosive noise-rock collage of their brilliant live performances, this debut album pits a determined, careening rhythm section against a palette of pumping organ chords, shards of
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Feu Therese caught spark from the embers of Fly Pan Am's break-up in 2005, when FPA guitarist Jonathan Parant joined forces with longtime collaborators Alex St-Onge (bass, electronics) and Stephen de Oliveira (synths, voice) to form the new group. Painter turned drummer Luc Paradis completed the
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Fly Pan Am
This debut record by Fly Pan Am consists of five long songs clocking in at over an hour of music, spread across three sides of vinyl for the 2xLP format. Chiming, deliberate instrumental rock propelled by insistent motorik drumming and interweaving guitar and bass lines that unfold with obstinate
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Fly Pan Am return with a 3-song EP of fractured, tape-infested experiments on Sedatifs En Frequences Et Sillons, an intransigent slab of self-referential auto-criticism. The band sticks to its agenda of acutely self-conscious musical manipulations, re-working its own materials and assumptions to
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Fly Pan Am sharpen their sonic and conceptual knives to shiny surgical points on this second full-length. Having gradually moved from long, reverb-drenched repetition to concise, bone-dry repetition in their live shows over the past couple of years, these new songs are marked by a full embrace of
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A collection of songs pushed to maximum density, marked by dark shoegazer guitars, distorted organ stabs, rubbery basslines, motorik drumming and various shrouded voices whispering, screaming and singing along the way -- this album contains Fly Pan Am's most intense sounds yet. While each side of
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Frankie Sparo
The thrilling and mysterious debut by Frankie Sparo is a dark and deconstructed affair, featuring lots of angular guitar, skittish electronics, and a throaty voice offering up the finest lyrical turns of phrase we've heard in a long while. My Red Scare is redolent with film noir atmosphere;
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In January 2001, Frankie Sparo toured Europe with a Silver Mt. Zion. Musicians from the latter group worked on new arrangements of songs from Sparo's debut record, My Red Scare (cst013), adding strings, organ and electronics to Frankie's guitar and beatbox compositions. Some of the results were
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Frankie Sparo's third release is a little masterpiece of highly original, stylistically diverse songwriting. Sparo's debut record, My Red Scare (cst013) was comprised mostly of songs played solo, unadorned, wrought only from guitar, voice and beatbox. The two years since have seen forays into
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Glissandro 70
Beginning in summer 2003 as a one-off commission for audio weblog Muted Tones (from which opening track "Something" is excerpted and re-edited), this debut record is the result of two years of intermittent collaboration between Toronto's Sandro Perri (Polmo Polpo, Continuous Dick) and Craig
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Godspeed You! Black Emperor
U.X.O. is unexploded ordnance is landmines is cluster bombs. Yanqui is post-colonial imperialism is international police state is multinational corporate oligarchy. Godspeed You! Black Emperor is complicit is guilty is resisting. The new album is just raw, angry, dissonant, epic instrumental rock.
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Hangedup
This self-titled debut album is another in a series of raw and intimate sessions recorded on the 8-track reel-to-reel deck at theHotel2Tango in 1999-2000. The powerful live sound of this unique duo is perfectly captured by Efrim (GY!BE), who engineered the record. Eric Craven's inimitable drumming
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Hangedup explodes on this follow-up to their self-titled debut (cst016). On this second full-length, they prove themselves one of the most powerful, hypnotic and relentless duos currently mining the subterrain of instrumental avant rock. Genevieve Heistek's amplified viola screams through a
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This is the third full-length by Montreal-based viola and drums duo Hangedup. They've been mesmerising audiences -- by pushing the boundaries of what a bow and a pair of drumsticks can deliver -- since 1999. The band has steadily expanded its strategies and sonics over their 5-year history and are
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Hrsta
Stem Stem In Electro is a gorgeous collection of songs painted in psych-rock tones and timbres, minor-key progressions, and unsettling invocations of haunted transcendentalism. The opening track, with it's trance-like group chorus of "we climb to the light", conjures up a cultish hymn, with
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Hrsta (her-shta) is the brainchild of founding Godspeed You! Black Emperor guitarist Mike Moya, who is joined on this third album (the band's second on Constellation) by Brooke Crouser (Jackie-O Motherfucker) on organs, guitars and various effects. Brooke has emerged as the core second member of
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Land Of Kush
Sam Shalabi is a musician and composer who has been creating and playing music in Montréal for the better part of 20 years. Unconstrained by genre, Sam’s musical history spans rock, jazz, free music, punk, and most things in-between. A highly truncated list of his projects includes Shalabi Effect,
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Lullabye Arkestra
Lullabye Arkestra are a bass and drum duo who've been playing and self-releasing glorious slabs of distorto-soul for several years. Formed in Toronto by Justin (drums) and Katia (bass), the Ark has played shows throughout eastern Canada as a duo and as a large band, adding horns, voices and organ.
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Polmo Polpo
Building on foundations of multi-layered full-spectrum drones and loops, the music of Polmo Polpo is distinguished by slide guitar motifs that are more naive pop pastoral than spaghetti western. Opening track "Romeo Heart" builds inexorably from silence to jet-engine pink noise squall, coaxed
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Re
This first collection of material recorded and assembled by Re: comprises 11 songs culled and coaxed from an unruly pile of 4-track cassette and DAT recordings made by Boston-based Aden Evens and Montrealer Ian Ilavsky (Sofa, Silver Mt. Zion) during the late 90s. Mnant is an album of remaindered
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The second full-length from this genre-defying duo is a somber and richly-detailed work that constructs a dystopic environment where the 'natural' and 'organic' are inseparable from electricities, radioactivities and the detritus of military-industrial technologies and materials. Through
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Sackville
Sackville released two albums on Montreal label Mag Wheel through the mid-90s, and then brought these five songs to Constellation as the group was winding down. Sackville made wonderfully damaged roots music, charting a path through country and pop traditions while distilling a wider range of folk,
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Sandro Perri
Sandro Perri, aka Polmo Polpo, has been performing under his own name, in Toronto and the surrounding region, for the past couple of years. These performances have ranged from solo voice and acoustic guitar, to duo shows with Eric Chenaux, Ryan Driver, and more recently with 4-6 piece bands. Perri
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This is the first full-length recording by Sandro Perri under his own name, following an E.P. on Constellation last year (on which Perri re-interpreted songs from his critically-acclaimed Polmo Polpo instrumental/electronic project). Working with some of Toronto's finest avant and improv players,
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Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band With Choir
This is the second full-length by the six-piece Tra-La-La-Band, along with guest drummers Eric Craven (Hangedup) and Howard Bilerman (who also recorded the album, at the Hotel2Tango). The band also brought in a couple dozen folks for mass choral duty on the opening and closing tracks (hence the
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Silver Mt. Zion
A Silver Mt. Zion was formed by Efrim, Thierry and Sophie (all of GY!BE) at the beginning of 1999, and after a debut performance at Constellation's Musique Fragile concert series, the trio recorded this sublime debut record on 8-track at the Hotel2Tango in November of that year. Starting with
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This second Silver Mt. Zion album features an expanded band, with a similarly expanded band name. The addition of cello, second violin and second guitar has allowed SMZ to develop richer, denser arrangements while preserving live ensemble playing. The opening instrumental pieces pick up where the
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Originally available (on CD only) at shows during The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band European tour in Winter 2004, this record was officially released on both formats a few months later. The EP contains all new songs, with a total running time of just over 30 minutes. What
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Öwe recorded some of it next to a campfire by the river, and the sleepy birds even chirped a little there beneath the moonlit trees; "yes we are oh yes we are thee silver mt. zion memorial orchestra and tra-la-la band"... troubled fingers strive to knit upward ladders, joyously; THESE SONGS ARE
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Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band have been making a big raw angry tender racket since the 2005 release of their last album, Horses In The Sky. With a focus on live performance and special projects over the past three years, the group proper has logged well over 100 shows in
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Sofa
Sofa's five-year run culminated in the recording of a proper full-length in winter 1996. Tracked during overnight sessions at an East End Montreal studio, the album is a shrouded, finely wrought song cycle of sensory overload and the sense of loss. Mixed bone dry and with almost no overdubs,
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The Dead Science
Seattle-based The Dead Science has created a majestic, ornate and soaring collection of postpunk avantpop on this, their fourth full-length album, and their first for Constellation. Villainaire is a brilliant song cycle driven by layers of Sam Mickens’ vibrato-laden voice, dark lyricism and
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Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra
Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra (SMZ) returns with its sixth full-length recording and first since the band’s line-up change of summer 2008. Having shed three members and recruited one (drummer David Payant) the group officially dropped the "Tra-La-La Band’ from its name, played a debut
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Tindersticks
Chances are you have already heard about the release of a new Tindersticks album. Perhaps you have already heard the album itself. In which case read no further than this: Constellation is releasing The Hungry Saw in North America, with deluxe packaging for both the CD and 180gLP formats.
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In the wake of their critically celebrated 2008 album The Hungry Saw – their first in five years – the recharged and regenerated Tindersticks present their second North American release on Constellation Records, Falling Down A Mountain. The band has worked non-stop since the release of their
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Vic Chesnutt
The songs on North Star Deserter are some of the most bracing and intense ever heard from Vic Chesnutt: macabre and fearless, playful and funny, at times deeply personal and at others, incongruously hopeful. Stripped-down songs like "Warm", "Rustic City Fathers", "Over" and "Marathon" are
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Vic Chesnutt is the real deal, a man who lives for music and who has tirelessly deployed his impish, surly, witty, unflinching perspective in hundreds of songs featuring brilliantly unique wordsmithery and a profound playfulness that thumbs its nose at a life of seriously hard knocks. Vic’s
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