★Constellation
Coin Coin Chapter Five: In The Garden
* Double 10" in 350 gsm widespine jacket w/interior colour flood + 300 gsm printed inners + fold-out insert + DL card * Celebrated composer, performer, saxophonist, soloist, band leader, educator, activist, and mixed-media artist Matana Roberts returns with a new installment of their acclaimed Coin Coin series. For over a decade, Coin Coin has been the central artistic project for Roberts, a remarkable exploration of American ancestry and the nature of memory through "sound quilting": modern com…
Galaxy Heart
Galaxy Heart is the companion album to Phosphenes (Nov 2021) and completes an intensive body of work that Montréal composer-violinist Jessica Moss wrote, performed and self-produced in deep isolation throughout 2020. As A Closer Listen wrote in its Top Ten Modern Composition list for 2021, "few musical voices represent so well the estrangement and intensity of our times; Moss is among the best of them." Galaxy Heart consolidates this assessment, revealing the more exploratory and extemporaneous …
Say Laura
The new record by Eric Chenaux is his most immaculate and pristine. Say Laura perfectly incarnates the counter-intuitive interplay of instrument and voice that Chenaux has been revealing and revelling in throughout the past decade: his gently unhinged juxtaposition of resplendently smooth, seductively assured singing and puckish, frazzled, thoroughly destabilized guitar could come from no other musician. The five wandering, wondering ballads on Say Laura bring Chenaux’s semi-improvised but keenl…
Musique Fragile 02
** 2021 Stock. Edition of 500 ** A limited edition series of 3xLP box sets with extensive screenprinted art/packaging for the slipcover box, the individual LP jackets, and three different posters (one for each album). Volume 02 features 'lost' and/or recuperated recordings by Hangedup + Tony Conrad (previously unreleased 24-track and 2-track sessions captured in Montréal several years ago), Kanada 70 (aka Craig Dunsmuir, compiled from his many obscure CD-R bedroom recordings released in Toronto …
Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis
Matana Roberts returns with the fourth chapter of her extraordinary Coin Coin series — a project that has deservedly garnered the highest praise and widespread critical acclaim for its fierce aesthetic originality and unflinching narrative power. The first three Coin Coin albums, issued from 2011-2015, charted diverse pathways of modern / avant composition — Roberts calls it “panoramic sound quilting”—and ranged sequentially from large band to sextet to solo, unified by Roberts’ archival and oft…
Sequence One
Light Conductor is the twilight slow-burn modular synthesis duo of Young Galaxy’s Stephen Ramsay and Jace Lasek of The Besnard Lakes. Sequence One is their first album: a warm shimmering sonic hug of enveloping drone and hypnotic arpeggiation flowing along buoyant filter-sweeping eddies and waves. Gently immersive like a saltwater bath under a starry sky, Light Conductor make nighttime/sunrise music in widescreen high-fidelity at their vintage-equipped Breakglass Studios in Montréal, pinning the…
Coin Coin Chapter Three: River Run Thee
"River Run Thee" is the third installment in Matana Roberts’ visionary Coin Coin series. The album follows 2011’s "Gens de couleur libres" and 2013’s "Mississippi Moonchile", both genre-exploding ensemble works showered with widespread critical acclaim.With Chapter Three Roberts presents a solo work, building a hallucinatory and hypnotic soundworld from layered streams of sung and spoken vocals, pure and processed saxophone, drones, noise, sampler/fx pedals and field recordings. Coinciding with …
Never Were The Ways She Was
Two of Constellation's acclaimed solo instrumental artists join forces on this tremendous new album of original compositions for horn and violin. Colin Stetson has developed a unique and renowned voice as a performer and composer, chiefly on bass and tenor saxophones, where he rallies an array of technical strengths and innovations (circular breathing, contact micing of his own body and the body of his instrument, vocalizations through the reed) to make some of the most captivatingly organic, da…
Skullsplitter
Eric Chenaux has emerged as one of the most distinctive, innovative and original voices in what might be called avant-garde balladry, juxtaposing his gorgeously pure and open singing against a guitar sound and style that truly stands alone. Skullsplitter is the impressive new album that confirms Chenaux’s singular aesthetic: genuine, natural, unaffected vocals gliding through slow, smoky melodies while electric and nylon-string guitars are deployed with adventurously experimental, dextrou…
Coin coin chapter two: Mississippi Moonchile
Mississippi Moonchile is the much-anticipated new installment of Matana Roberts' unique and forward-looking project and it finds Roberts conjuring some of the most nuanced, thoughtful and substantial American liberation music of the 21st century. Mississippi Moonchile was developed for an intimately woven New York jazz sextet and represents the next leap forward in Roberts' iconoclastic and complex project of memory and recuperation, where historical and contemporary musical tropes, fragmentary …
Coin coin chapter one: Gens de couleur libres
At first look this might seem like a weird move for the Constellation label as Matana Roberts’ debut for the imprint is pretty much straight-up free jazz. But she’s got some serious history with the Montreal collective, even throwing down horns with Godspeed Thinking about it too, there’s always been a nod towards the free jazz scene (not least on Colin Stetson's recent genre-bending LP) but where others were a nod, ˜COIN COIN Chapter One : Gens de Couleur Libre…
New History Warfare Vol. 3: To See More Light
Colin Stetson established himself as an intensely original solo composer and performer in 2011 with the release of the widely acclaimed New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges, which ended up on countless year-end lists. Anyone who has seen Stetson in solo performance can attest to the stunning physicality of his circular-breathing technique and capacity to produce a seemingly impossible palate of multiple voicings simultaneously in real time. New History Warfare Vol. 3: To See More Light is th…
New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges
restocked: Colin Stetson was born and raised in Ann Arbor, MI and earned a degree in music from his hometown school, the University of Michigan, in 1997. Six years in San Francisco followed, then another four in Brooklyn, NY. Since 2007, Colin has made his home in Montréal, Canada.Throughout the past decade Stetson has developed his unique solo voice on saxophones and clarinets, culminating in the 2008 release of his debut solo record New History Warfare Vol. 1. As a soloist he has performed c…
Monogamy
"Sam Shalabi returns to his Land Of Kush project with this new concept album tackling notions of shame and sexuality. Monogamy follows on from Shalabi's excellent Thomas Pynchon-inspired Against The Day LP expanding the title of his ensemble with the Egyptian Light Orchestra suffix especially for this release. There are some twenty-four musicians and sound artists gathered for Monogamy, and you can certainly hear the scale of the endeavour; tapping into Montreal's experimental scene Shalabi co-o…
Against the Day
Since Sam Shalabi enjoyed his mini-breakout in 2004 with the Shalabi Effect's The Trial of St. Orange, the Montreal composer has explored the overlap between popular Western music and traditional Middle Eastern musics, particularly those from Egypt, the country from which Shalabi's parents hailed. These projects tend to be diffuse and ambitious: Shalabi works with dozens of musicians on long, brash drones, or plays meditative oud pieces in comfy theaters. Land of Kush, …
At the cut
Spilling over with trembling strings and thunderous crescendos, "Coward" foreshadows the electric energy that is to be found throughout Vic Chesnutt's newest record. With members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, A Silver Mt. Zion, and Fugazi once again contributing, At the Cut is populated by giant melodies, quiet meditations, and intense studies on mortality and memory. But, for all its bombast, At the Cut is probably most notable for Chesnutt's unwavering honesty and cathartic powe…
Prince Of Truth
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 Geraldine Fibbers, Scarnella). Evangelista is the best and the brightest, filled with adventurous risk taking that sometimes whispers and licks, sometimes pulls the listener so close that it is hard to bre…