Sixteen years ago, Michael Cloud Duguay, a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer from Peterborough, Ontario, was playing at a festival in Slovakia with The Burning Hell when a storm crashed a tent into the crowd, killing two people and injuring others. That traumatizing experience stayed with Duguay, inspiring an investigation into the Foehn wind phenomenon—which has been blamed for accidents, migraines, and mental illness—and eventually inspiring Wobbly Yonder, released on the label he runs with his Scions bandmate Andrew MacKelvie. Wind underscores and animates nearly everything on this brief but remarkably eclectic album, often along with water, as in the waves that introduce the opening track, “In the Teeth of the Freshening Foehn,” which builds into a glorious crescendo of instruments before returning to quietly lapping water. It also powers the human voices and the saxophones, clarinets, flutes, whistle, and horns played by a large cast of contributors, among them Burning Hell’s Mathias Kom, Ariel Sharratt, and Jake Nicoll, who co-produced the album, Eliza Niemi, Jason Mercer, MacKelvie, and Owen Davies. It’s there in the entrancing “Over Here in This Place New Light is Streaming,” where a soulful bass clarinet dances with the waves, and in the lovely flutes and their windy, watery backdrop on “Summertide.” The songs, several of which were co-written with MacKelvie and Davies, run the gamut from sweeping instrumental dreamscapes to rock and experimental jazz and much in between, and there are also lots of non-wind instruments, including the banjo and exquisite violin on “The Only Angel in Sight,” cello, bouzouki, hurdy gurdy, hand bells, and whale harp as well as keyboards, guitars, and drums. Not surprisingly, the recordings were mostly made near water, using Nicoll’s solar-powered camper van studio in locations around Prince Edward Island as well as St. John’s and Ontario’s Wolfe Island—perfect backdrops for an album with oceanic depths and a deceptively breezy feel.
Mary Dickie is a Toronto music and arts journalist whose work has been published in a variety of different publications over the past couple of decades, including Impact, Eye Weekly, Maclean’s, ELLE Canada, The Toronto Sun, FASHION magazine and IN Toronto. She is also a member of the Polaris Music Prize jury.