Welcome to the fifth post in a weekly series on new Canadian music ! This week is Noh-wave with a review of Yamantaka // Sonic Titan’s debut album ‘YT//ST’.
The album is not new new as it is from late 2011, but it made it on the Polaris Music Prize 2012 shortlist that is what caught my attention. When I was first listening to it I was like, no-way what is this a east meets west clash rock opera ?? But then came the Nowh-wave and it all started to make sense and sink in and my level of appreciation grew. It is a creative and super weird music mix, a blend of Canadian music cultures ! Read more about how Yamantaka // Sonic Titan describes themselves.
With YT//ST, the pan-Asian cultural collective, Yamantaka // Sonic Titan has crafted a debut LP that sets new standards for the creative heights and satisfactions of genre fusion. They call it Noh-Wave. The key to Yamantaka’s sound lies in their uninhibited admixture of East and West, their commingling of the band’s ancestral musics with more contemporary genres to explore the complications and contradictions of dual identity. By simultaneously inhabiting a variety of cultural forms, the band shatters the comfort with which colonialist cultures have appropriated the image and art of Asian and First Nations peoples to assemble a wholly new hybrid form. This is Noh-Wave, and it draws from both pop and J-pop, British prog and Japanese psychedelia, punk rock and Iroquois core, black metal and Chinese Opera, noise music and Noh theatre. The resultant sounds could be seductively soft (as heard on “Hoshi Neko”) or electrifyingly loud (as heard on “Reverse Crystal // Murder of a Spider), but they’re invariably the stuff of a visionary new approach to popular music.
Check out the video for Hoshi Neko it is not just for cat lovers.
… Watch this space for next weeks’ update !
Fuzz On !