Montreal-based electroacoustic composer Jeremy Young’s (Sontag Shogun & Cloud Circuit) new record, Amaro, is more like a suite of meaningful multi-disciplinary duets than a new addition to his growing catalog of pure solo material. Yet it centrally documents a haptics-based approach to making music that Young has been developing and refining through live performances and studio improvisations for close to 3 years. This sonic “system” is not modular but tactile, performable, and tourable, and includes: 3 individual oscillators (sine, square, triangle) tuned microtonally by hand in real time and filtered, amplified surfaces and objects that make up the pieces’ rhythmic foundations, tape loop fragments of found tape usually from eBay, and radio and EMF signal captured and routed across the tonal and textural signal paths.
Amaro includes contributions from artists close to Young here in Montreal such as Deanna Radford, Markus Floats, and Ida Toninato, and those based in New York and beyond, like Vito Ricci, Dolphin Midwives, Pauline Kim Harris, Tomonari Nishikawa, and Johannes Bergmark. The album’s beautiful cover visuals come courtesy of frequent Montreal-based artist collaborators, China Marsot-Wood and Thaïla Khampo. It’s an adventurous suite of sonic material, yet not over-produced; neither ambient nor noise, synthesized yet performed without “synths” in real time with the feel of an instrumental record.
The film ‘Mythy’ by Charles-André Coderre uses images that were treated with handmade chemical film techniques and buried in the ground for several weeks. It’s a meditation on the photochemical film emulsion.
Thank you, gents. ~J.Young