Watch the video for Sonny Singh’s new single ‘Jaano Jot’

08 August 2024

We’re less than a month away from the release Sage Warrior, the second solo album from musician, educator and activist Sonny Singh. The album was created as a companion to the book with the same name by Singh’s longtime friend and visionary civil rights leader Valarie Kaur, with each track on Sage Warrior accompanying a chapter in the book. Sonny had previously shared the joyous, inspiring and heartwarming ‘Pavan Guru’, and now he’s unleashed a video to accompany new single ‘Jaano Jot’, weaving between Punjabi, cumbia, and reggae. “This is a very important song to me – drawing from the revolutionary words of Guru Nanak over 500 years ago yet so relevant in today’s world where millions of people are dehumanized through policies of war and occupation and rising hateful and violent political rhetoric”, Sonny stated. “I see this sacred poetry and music as a call to action to speak up and stand up for the oppressed, from Punjab to Palestine.”

The accompanying video was shot and directed by Shruti Parekh, and depicts Sikh community members in Richmond Hill, Queens preparing food in the kitchen, known as a langar hall, of a gurdwara, a Sikh house of worship. Kaur explains this advent in the upcoming book:

“Langar was embodied protest. Radical and subversive. Eating together with people of all castes and creeds meant rejecting with your body and breath adherence to hierarchy. High caste people ate from the hands of low-­ caste “untouchables,” and vice versa. They were training their bodies into a new way of being, undoing millennia of conditioning. They became new in the act: equal, and equally beloved.

Langar was more than a rebellion: It was a practice for an alternative world of solidarity, dignity, and humility.”

Watch the video for ‘Jaano Jot’ now.

Sage Warrior is out on September 6th.

Masayoshi Fujita previews upcoming album, Migratory, with two new singles, ‘Our Mother’s Lights’ ft. Moor Mother & ‘Valle’

07 August 2024

Photo: Ryo Noda

After enticing us with the beautiful and reverie-inducing ‘Tower of Cloud’, vibraphone wizard, multi-percussionist, and composer Masayoshi Fujita has unveiled today two celestial and delicate new singles, ‘Our Mother’s Lights’  and ‘Valley’, lifted from his much anticipated upcoming album, Migratory. ‘Our Mother’s Lights’ features composer, poet, vocalist and educator Moor Mother. “I love the creative work of Masayoshi”, she said. “To collaborate on such a beautiful composition is really exciting and I’m honoured for the world to hear it.” Fujita has also commented on the track:

“I didn’t intend to add any vocals to ‘Our Mother’s Lights’. But through some lovely encounters with Camae (Moor Mother), it just happened. And I’m glad that it did, because her voice and lyrics are so powerful and fit with the image of the song very well. She has just brought this song to another level.”

Speaking about ‘Valley’, Fujita says:

“I had this bowed marimba phrase idea whilst I was scoring a film last year. When I made this song, I envisioned clouds crawling over mountains and valleys from the point of view of a bird.”

Listen to both singles below and be sure to grab Migratory when it’s out on September 6th through Erased Tapes.


Malcolm Pardon announces new album, The Abyss, and shares video for single ‘Enter The Void’

30 July 2024

Malcolm Pardon, who is also one half of Swedish electronic duo Roll The Dice with Peder Mannerfelt, is back with a new solo album. Entitled The Abyss, the upcoming record continues to build on the death related themes explored in his 2021 solo debut Hello Death. “It’s not meant to be threatening or horrific in any way,” Pardon explained. “There’s this constant dialogue we have with ourselves about how we’re going to die at some point. It’s like a constant companion, so you might as well get to know it, and befriend it.”

The Abyss will be released September 20th through The Leaf Label and ahead of it the composer and producer has shared the gentle and melancholic ‘Enter The Void’, which “serves as a perfect distillation of Pardon’s approach, balancing a delicate piano refrain with a low, rumbling blast of noise before being carried aloft by swooning strings that echo down a distant hall”, as the press release describes. ‘Enter The Void’ is offered with an unsettling video by Swedish director Oskar Wrangö, who had this to say:

“I have always been drawn to Malcolm’s music. It creates new images in my mind, and that’s a pretty rare thing. To me this track is a fine balance between real darkness and simple beauty. I wanted to create a unique visual experience in that landscape – when it comes to the end of things or the beginning of something unknown. It comes from a dark depressive past of my own and I think the strong contrasts are important. It’s taken me to new and interesting places. If ever a nightmare was poetic, this is my very personal interpretation of the title – Enter The Void.”

Watch the video for ‘Enter The Void’ below.

Sarah Neufeld, Richard Reed Parry and Rebecca Foon team up for debut collaborative album, First Sounds

24 July 2024

Photo: Steven Sebring

There’s wonderful news from three of Montreal’s finest musicians – boundlessly inventive composer and violinist Sarah Neufeld, incredible multi-instrumentalist and musical polymath Richard Reed Parry and enchanting and brilliant cellist and composer Rebecca Foon -, who have teamed up for a collaborative album. Longtime favourites here at CTD, the pairing of these three artists is a match made in heaven. Neufeld, Parry and Foon first met in Montreal in the late 90’s and played together then in various outfits as they found their way into the local artistic scene. They have today announced the release of their debut album, First Sounds, slated for a November 1st release through Envision Records in North America and One Little Independent in the UK and the rest of the world. Featuring nine compositions, “with dynamic minimalism, sweeping crescendos and rich harmonies”, as the press release describes, they delved deep into the cinematic realm, exploring and drawing from classical and orchestral influences.

Parry shared some insight into their collaboration:

“In Montreal, October 1999, the three of us played music with each other for the first time. As we began to improvise together, we felt a shared, wordless musical language emerge right away, somehow intuitive and familiar from the very start.

We experimented and played together often at that time – Montreal was and still is a very creative and multi-faceted artistic hive of activity. The musical chemistry we found together was formative in each of the bands we went on to form and musical collaborations we pursued, but we never made a recording of our original trio and its unique, intimate and explorative sound.

Decades of friendship and many bands later, in the heart of the first pandemic winter the three of us got together in a room and made our first album as an ensemble. Picking up exactly where we left off years earlier, we began fashioning compositions that immediately tapped into the same musical language we had discovered between us so many years earlier.”

Alongside the album news, the trio unveiled the first single, ‘Maria’, an utterly engrossing, otherworldly and beautiful track featuring Shahzad Ismaily on percussion. Of the track, Parry said:

“The melody was inspired by an old handmade recording on reel-to-reel tape that came with a tape recorder I bought, it had very slowed down/half speed voices singing hymns on it, but the recording was so slow and distorted you couldn’t really tell what they were singing. So, the tune sort of felt like a hymn-like invocation.”

‘Maria’ comes with an accompanying video directed by Jason Last, who had this to say about it:

“Recording and observing nature in Catalonia, Spain, I wanted to capture the cyclical and intricate nature of the sound through elements of light, touch, and the movement of my own body as I shot for each 5-minute take. Connecting my body and the subjects that I shot.”

Watch the video below.

Paradise Cinema to release second album, returning, dream, in September; listen to lead single ‘a morning in the near future’

23 July 2024

Photo: Suzie Howell

Back in 2020, multi-instrumentalist Jack Wyllie (Portico Quartet/Szun Waves) unleashed his new collaborative project, Paradise Cinema, and a self-titled debut album. Four years on, a new Paradise Cinema album will be released with contributions from Khadim Mbaye, Tons Sambe and Laurence Pike. Entitled returning, dream, the album is influenced by the likes Jon Hassell, Terry Riley, Don Cherry and Midori Takada, also tappig into contemporary electronic, ambient and non-western music and is also inspired by physics and science fiction. About the album, Wyllie comments:

“It is an imagining of what music could be like in a different time and space, ancient and futuristic from everywhere and nowhere at once. I was listening to a lot of physics podcasts when I created this record. I loved the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics; about multiple worlds splitting off like branches on a tree when faced with quantum choices. I could imagine different histories and worlds and multiple versions of myself, others and even other societies existing. In this album I’ve dug into these ideas and attempted to make music that would come from those different spaces, trying to poke my finger through to the other selves and stories. Effectively a form of composed science fiction, the music is an idea of what might be occurring or have occurred on a branch of the tree in a very different world. But I like to think the tracks might actually have been composed somewhere or sometime.”

returning, dream is out on September 13th through Gondwana Records and Paradise Cinema are enticing us with the gorgeous, celestial and serene opening track, ‘a morning in the near future’,  featuring Jack Wyllie on flute, synths and drum machines with Tons Sambe on Tama drums. Take a listen below.