William Davison and his five sous-chefs have been cooking up—yes, this disc is thoroughly cooked—their signature stews for over a decade now. This vinyl release documents their improvisatory web-toed amblings through the mutant sonic kitchen: each member chopping and dicing various ingredients—both delicious and repugnant—while Davison hovers over the frothing pot, deciding the exact proportions. Boiled samples bob about in the bubbling broth next to charred balloon-farts, the remnants of a discarded-pizza-box frottage, and the muffled death-bleats of an inbred toy keyboard. In other words, Davison mixes and manipulates various source sounds spontaneously furnished by five other musicians who perform on an obscene array of strange junk, toys, homebuilt contraptions, audio hardware, and bona fide musical instruments.
While thick, soupy, and full of flavours both fragrant and odious, as well as textures flaccid, mealy, and rubbery, the result is a treat. Davison and some of his cronies—notably Sherri Higgins and Toronto stalwart James Bailey—have been active in various fields of experimental music for quite sometime. This band lies between the outer reaches of collective electronic free-improv (AMM et. al), the surrealist crypto-concrète of Davison and Higgins’ chums Nurse With Wound. Over the course of two sidelong pieces, cockeyed loops swirl and clank about drunkenly amidst various disembodied debris and ghostly yawns.
Nick Storring is a Toronto-based composer, musician, and writer, and a contributing editor to Musicworks. His music has been presented and performed by the Esprit Orchestra, Eve Egoyan, Quatuor Bozzini, Beijing’s Musicacoustica Festival, and Vancouver New Music. An avid collaborator, Storring has composed for films by Terrance Odette, Ingrid Veninger and, in collaboration with Dafydd Hughes, for the National Film Board’s award-winning Web documentary High Rise: Universe Within (2015), directed by Katerina Cizek. He’s also scored productions by Litmus Theatre and MT Space, worked with celebrated choreographers Yvonne Ng, Marie Josée Chartier, Brandy Leary, and Deepti Gupta, and created music for “ambient gaming environment” Tentacle, which was mounted at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2011. Storring’s writing has appeared in Exclaim!, The Wire, and AUX.tv. He also contributed liner notes to Alga Marghen’s reissue of the ’60s band Intersystems’ entire recorded output, as well as RVNG Intl.’s box of early psych trio Syrinx’s reissues and previously unreleased material Tumblers from the Vault.