#telephone explosion

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Listen/purchase: In Another by Masahiro Takahashi

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Dorothea Paas — Think of Mist (Telephone Explosion)

Photo by Colin Medley

Dorothea Paas’s debut album, Anything Can’t Happen, was one of the picks for our 2021 Mid-Year Round-Up — and rightly so. Its warm thrum of band-in-a-room folk-rock and Paas’s beautifully expressive voice made it a standout of that year. On her new album, Think of Mist, Paas couches her voice in much more gentle, jazzy arrangements, while her lyrics plea for the dissolution of the self, a melting away that’s conveyed in the luscious, pillowy feel of the music. Don’t get too comfortable, though: it turns out there’s a sting in the album’s tail.

Opener “My Hand Makes Ripples on the Surface of the Water” acts as both an introduction to the album’s dreamy sound-world, with its nylon-string guitar, bass, and synths, and a lyrical delineation of the boundary between Paas and her surroundings. As she gently intones the song title and repeats the phrase “I surrender,” it feels like the start of a benign meditation session. Then, on single “Autumn Roses,” the sly sway of soft-rock is introduced as Paas sings invitingly, “Are you ready to come into my world?”

From this point on, the journey is largely smooth and homogenous. Some of the songs feel like echoes of one another, such as “Diver” revisiting the water imagery of the opener, and short instrumental interludes “Made of Mist” and “Resolve” create an uninterrupted sense of flow. There’s an expansion of perception in “Night Picture,” which feels akin to Phil Elverum’s work as Mount Eerie, Paas mentioning the sky, the trees, a lake, and nocturnal creatures. On “Maybe I’ll Fade” she’s moved from touching the surface of the water to singing the line, “I want to be the water.” This sense of abandon characterizes much of the record.

However, doubt sets in on “Whatever That Means”: “I’m afraid of losing whole days to something I don’t understand.”  This leads inexorably to “Locked,” the album’s gorgeous but strangely unnerving denouement. The song has a lulling sway, punctuated by crisp rimshots, then suddenly, out of the music’s gentle fabric, looms a horrible distorted scream. Dissolution has finally been achieved — only for the protagonist to panic and emit a terrifying mortal cry. It cleverly colors the perception of all that has come before.

Tim Clarke

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Badge Époque Ensemble - Air, Light & Harmony

On November 3rd, Toronto’s Badge Époque Ensemble return to Telephone Explosion Records with their new album Air, Light & Harmony. The release keeps up the jazz-funk group’s torrid pace of releases for TER; A,L&H being their 6th LP release, and 4th proper album for the label since 2019. The release completes a trilogy of triptych-titled works, following 2019’s Nature, Man & Woman, and 2021’s Future, Past & Present. All 3 of these releases feature compositions which resample loops and stems from prior albums. Air, Light & Harmony takes this gambit further with in-house recycling of snippets from dusty LP copies of their own work (ala Portishead’s famed approach) featured throughout to create warped and ambiguous moodscapes. This emphasis on texture is befitting of BÉE’s only entirely instrumental album. In many ways this latest work is a counterweight to the maximalism of last year’s Polaris long listed Clouds of Joy album. Clouds carries the density of a Discogs rabbit-hole binge, with its nearly 20 contributors; precise arrangements, soaring choir vocals, extended solos and meditations on joy… By contrast, Air, Light & Harmony has a distinct yin energy - a lightness of touch that could be said to resemble a playlist as much as an album (something playfully alluded to by the generic streaming service displayed on an iPhone screen that is the album’s cover). Bandleader Maximilian Turnbull has alluded to the change-up: “I wanted to do an album that was more sketch than painting. No deliberation, just spontaneous movement.” Accordingly, the record was made swiftly in Turnbull’s garage home-studio, and is characterised by an unassuming breeziness. A stylistic tour this broad, yet unassuming is a rare accomplishment befitting such a unique and eclectic group. Like water finding its level, Badge Époque Ensemble have created an album with a free flowing approach, arriving at their plane of sound naturally, a place you would do well to dip into.  BADGE ÉPOQUE ENSEMBLE IS: Jay Anderson - Drums Chris Bezant - Guitar Edwin de Goeij - Rhodes, Piano, Synths Karen Ng - Alto Saxophone Alia O'Brien - Flute Gio Rosati - Bass Ed Squires - Congas, Vibraphone, Percussion Maximilian Turnbull - Production, Guitar, Synths

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Bound Together by Scott Hardware from the album Engel

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Dorothea Paas Album Review: Anything Can’t Happen

(Telephone Explosion)

BY JORDAN MAINZER

A singer-songwriter who has played and toured with the likes of U.S. Girls, Jennifer Castle, and Badge Époque Ensemble, Dorothea Paas finally released her debut LP earlier this month. With it, she revealed her own mature and defined artistic statement. On Anything Can’t Happen, Paas muses on loneliness, trust, and self-love over songs that take many different shapes both among the album and within themselves. They tease you and defy your expectations, wowing you with their vocal and instrumental harmonies and surprising you with their discord. Her purported influences, from Laurel Canyon and English folk mainstays to the droning ambience of Grouper, all combine to form a singular aesthetic, and the ramshackle nature of the instrumentation and lyrical ideas mirror the deep questioning that eats at the core of the record, one of the very best debuts of the year.

Paas opens the album with a bold statement, especially considering the increasing isolation the world has chosen to bestow upon us over the past few years, pandemic or otherwise: “I’m not lonely now.” Immediately, she clarifies what she means, and distinguishes being lonely from being alone: “Doing all the things I want to.” With falsetto, and over scratchy strums and a brief synth twinkle, the 30-second opening track sets up the rest of the album beautifully. Despite her struggles with interpersonal relationships, Paas retains a certain level of humble confidence. On the stunning “Closer to Mine”, she sings, “I try to respect my body in the shape that it takes / I try to respect my mind in the patterns it makes,” over fittingly off-kilter stop-start drums and guitars and harmonies, at times delving into brief krautrock jams and ending in a slowcore dirge. The connection between Paas’ affirmations and the idiosyncratic aesthetic of Anything Can’t Happen--whose very title isn’t necessarily pessimistic but rather rejecting of passivity, emphasis on the “happen” rather than the “can’t”--is simply a wonderful thing to witness. Elsewhere, she uses her music to convey to another person something she might not be able to do face-to-face. “So hard to be soft with you / So hard to be gentle,” she sings on “Waves Rising” over strummed electric guitar, layered vocals, and chugging drums. The acoustic fingerpicking of “Interlude” and “Perfect Love” that surround “Waves Rising” acts as a similar balm.

Of course, Paas, or at least the point of view from which she sings, is self-aware and willing to acknowledge her faults. “Will you ever trust me again? Will you ever believe another word I say?” she sings on the distorted title track, whose jazzy drums and circular guitar rhythms make it sound like a Crazy Horse-style burner calmed down by the lilt of Yo La Tengo. She eases worries on the cooing, field recording-laden “Container”: “Of course I want you,” she sings, later warmly yearning “Why can’t it always be June?” Even moments of self-doubt, like on “Frozen Window”, wherein three-note arpeggiated guitar melodies and spidery bass act as a bed for Paas’ therapeutic confessions, are belied by songs like closer “Running Under My Life”. That song begins like “One” does, with the same declaration of not being lonely, but with the steadfast idea that “Some things are just for me.” The song, basically 6+ minutes of delayed harmonies and synthesizer, is the least catchy or accessible on the record, but wholly original. Certain moments on Anything Can’t Happen may be just for Paas, but at least we can sit and marvel that she made them happen.

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FREAK HEAT WAVES - “Busted”, from the album ‘Zap The Planet’ out September 4th, 2020 via Telephone Explosion Records

Created by: Jason Lei

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PANTAYO - “V V V (They Lie)”, from the Toronto collective’s self-titled debut, out now via Telephone Explosion

Created by Diana Lynn Vandermeulen

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NEW FRIES - “Ploce”, off the album 'Is The Idea Of Us' out August 7th, 2020 via Telephone Explosion

Animation by: Amy Lockheart