CANADA'S SCATTERED BODIES, FEATURING THE SCENICS' ANDY MEYERS, POET/WRITER BRIAN BRETT, AND COMPOSER/DIRECTOR SUSHEELA DAWNE, RELEASE VIDEO FOR "MINDANAO DEEP",
THE NEW TRACK FROM "TALKING SONGS" |
Canadian collective, Scattered Bodies, is composed of three dynamic artists, Brian Brett, Susheela Dawne, and Andy Meyers, who all have vastly different backgrounds. Together they blend their talents using samples from relentlessly productive Toronto art punks The Scenics' late 1970's recordings to create "Talking Songs", which was recently released on Dream Tower Records.
Produced by The Scenics' Meyers at Allowed Sound Studio, "Talking Songs" was described as "Excellently ominous and highly creative...it's a skin-crawling, subtly menacing mash", by "The Big Takeover"'s Jack Rabid. On the heels of the release of the video for "Domestic Mysteries", the first single from the record, the band is proud to unveil the video for the album track "Mindanao Deep".
Here is a link to check out the new video:
You can stream the track "Mindanao Deep" here:
Taking their name from a line in John Donne's Holy Sonnets after which Philip Jose Farmer later titled one of his psychedelic sci-fi / fantasy novels, award-winning Canadian writer Brett supplies the words for Scattered Bodies and shares vocals with Dawne, while Meyers and composer Dawne write the music.
Here's a link to the first video from "Talking Songs", "Domestic Mysteries", featuring film footage by Lutz Mommartz:
Andy Meyers co-founded The Scenics who are celebrated as one of the few original Canadian punk bands whose music was inspired by the Velvet Underground and comparable to contemporaries like Television, and Pere Ubu.
During their original 1976-82 run, The Scenics played scores of shows, took part in the notorious "Last Pogo" concert (documented on a live album and film), and released an album and single of original material. They also casually recorded hundreds of hours of demoing, rehearsals, jamming etc.
When The Scenics reformed in 2007, Andy began listening to this cache of recordings. According to Meyers "Almost all of the music you hear on 'Talking Songs' is sampled from those cloudy basement recordings. We played together so much that rhythm and melody snuck in everywhere, whether we were playing full-out, or messing around between songs. I kept hearing moments that could be used to build new songs. I compiled a digital stockpile of these moments which Brian, Susheela and I decided to use for our second album of Brian's subversive, darkly funny words set to music."
"I began by making multi-track loops of drummer Mark Perkell from studio recordings The Scenics had made in 2010. Then I set the samples into the loops like mosaic tiles. Brian would listen, and then we'd record him weaving one of his poems throughout the piece. Occasionally, I'd add live guitar or bass. Susheela added wordless vocals, as a witness. As this was going on, Susheela had also chosen some of the texts and created her own soulful, sophisticated melodies for them. We worked backwards with her tracks, adding the samples after the songs had been created."
With Meyers' reputation for creating sound worlds which are both surprising and accessible, combined with Brian Brett and Susheela Dawne's soulful talents, "Talking Songs" is a true collaboration. In the words of "The Quietus"' Paul Tucker, "Make no mistake, Talking Songs is... an often unsettling meld of orphan sounds and menacing undercurrents, and an offbeat celebration of those old staples: love, experience, sex and death."
|
No comments:
Post a Comment