Monday, May 17, 2010
Spring.
The next NS release will be the Terrible Ideas C-10 by our pals from Halifax, Stop Motion Massacre. Expect it in early June.
Besides all of that stuff, you can catch d'Eon on May 28 and ORII on May 30 at Obey IV in Halifax. Peace.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
D'eon Featured in Concordia's "The Link"
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Chris d’Eon takes dance music to the ashram
Chris d’Eon lived in a monastery in northern India after college, where a Tibetan musician taught him to play the dranyen (the lefthand instrument at right). PHOTO ELSA JABRE
When I showed up at a crowded coffee shop to meet Chris d’Eon, I wondered how we would recognize each other. Turns out d’Eon isn’t hard to miss.
With hair hanging below his shoulders and clad in a white linen tunic, d’Eon has a way of standing out in a crowd. So, too, does his music, a surprising multi-genre experience blending techno house beats with folkier, Middle Eastern acoustics.
Halifax native d’Eon, who performs under his last name only, has a passion for music that started at an early age. When he was four years old, his parents bought him some synthesizers and a sequencer. He soon started mixing together his own tracks.
“I would record loops, like a drum pattern, and then I could record a bass line and then I would sequence them,” said d’Eon, now 24. “When I was a little kid I was really into making dance music.”
D’Eon’s musical interests expanded when he started college and began studying Iranian, Arabic and Turkish music. This interest took him to northern India, where he lived in a monastery and studied with a Tibetan musician who taught him to play the dranyen, or Tibetan lute.
Sometimes this influence on his musical experimentation even comes as a surprise to d’Eon himself.
“It’s all sort of subconscious,” he said. “Like, it ends up being that I want to make, say, a house tune and it turns into something with Turkish lyrics and I’m like, ‘Oh shit, how did that get in there?’”
D’Eon, who has been in Montreal for just over a year, has already released three cassette tapes. He released the two most recent on his own label, Numbers Station Recordings, which he founded with Zach Fairbrother and Matt Wilson, his co-members in local band Omon Ra II.
D’Eon explained that he was aiming for a less experimental, poppier sound on his latest cassette, ÆON, released in late 2009.
“I have this internal fantasy of wanting to sing pop music,” he said. “I think it’s because I’m in my mid-20s now, and we were all born in the ‘80s, and that was our childhood. And so I think that a lot of people releasing music now are sort of really into ‘80s R&B, like Paula Abdul and Janet Jackson. All that stuff is great!”
When asked if he had any interests outside of music, D’Eon shook his head.
“I’m not really good at being a regular member of society,” he admitted, “and when you’re a musician you sort of have more license to be a fucking weirdo.”
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
MAJICAL CLOUDZ C50 - FEB 2010
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED if you like flying saucer attack, mazzy star, spacemen 3, lustmord, or smoking lots of pot.
audio samples:
Majical Cloudz I (Recontextualized Deterritorialized Jingle) by numbers-station-tapes
19 Never Better (Address) by numbers-station-tapes
it will be released on numbers station in february of this year and will be limited to 30, so look out for more details and order info as it comes on this blog within the next couple weeks.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Troy Richter Interviews Chris D'eon on Avant-Lard.
Chris D'eon is a musician from Dartmouth Nova Scotia. Chris seems capable of just about any music he sets his mind too. In years past he played classical piano, tackling the technical romantic masters of Rachmaninoff and Liszt, before moving on to the industrial noise band Dead Hookers, (it's important to note that Chris has since renounced this band), in between he composed on his own and played in bad high school funk bands. Recently, Chris has moved to Montreal and has been dividing his time between dubstep inspired techno and weird ethno-folk-pop, all the while lending his talents on bass to Omon Ra II and co-running a tape label with myself and fellow maritime ex-pat Matthew Wilson called Numbers Station. He recently put out a tape on the aforementioned label and has received some very good reviews. The tape could almost be seen as an anthology with recordings that date from when he was seven years old, to high school, to now, yet remaining cohesive in its extremely idiosyncratic nature.
Chris was interviewed by Troy Richter. I have had the pleasure of working with Troy over the last couple of years, writing, recording, and performing with him on multiple occasions. Most notably helping Troy with his Friendly Dimension project. He has earned himself a cult like status most notably for being the front man to the now defunct, minimal punk band Gilbert Switzer, whose influence may not be fully realized until later, as you can hear their signature sound ripple through the punk underground of Montreal and beyond. Currently Troy reads and watches lots of movies, favorites include Argento horror movies, and then philosophizes about them in his poetry, which as he puts it tries to "unite the personal with the universal." Troy did this interview on his own free will and offered to donate it to Avant-Lard.
-Z
Making music, definitely. performing is secondary to actually making the music. The creation is the most important part of the musical process to me, and performing is only one of many ways to distribute that music.
2. Is your music strictly traditional? Do you ever mix your influences together?
I totally mix them together, but usually not intentionally. Generally when I start making a tune I think "okay, i'm going to make a ____ tune", whatever the style or aesthetic may be, but once I start putting the pieces together, the pieces seem to have come from all kinds of places, and by the time it's finished, it doesn't sound anything like what I wanted to make. A lot of the time the music that I was exposed to as a child seeps in subconsciously into the tunes I make, and sometimes the stuff I've learned in the past comes in without my noticing. So I'll try and write a pop song, but it comes out sounding like Kurdish music. I'd also like to mention that I really, really hate world fusion music.
3. Your Myspace wallpaper is really pretty, what is it?
Thanks-- I think it's an arabesque design from a really old book on interior design?
4. What's your favorite science fiction movie and why?
To be honest I don't know very much about movies, so I can't really think of that many science fiction movies that I know and like to begin with, but I did read lots of Isaac Asimov as a kid. The Foundation trilogy is really great, and of course the Robot stories. I really like science fiction that asks moral questions that will be applicable in the future. Especially now that we're starting to make frightening leaps in scientific progress like controlling rats' and monkeys' minds with microchips, and making computers that learn by themselves, some of the ethical issues raised in old science fiction like that are actually going to be totally relevant.
5. What's the biggest difference between Montreal and Halifax?
I don't completely know yet as I've lived here less than a year, but one difference is that drivers don't stop for any pedestrians here. Motorists are awful here, and they're allowed to turn right on a red light, so every time I try to cross the street there are cars coming at me from my right and left.
6. What is your favorite memory from your trip to India last year?
I think the best decision I could have made was to move into the dip tse chok ling monastery. Every day for two months I woke up at 6am to the sound of monks reading sutras and guru pujas. The monastery is on the side of a mountain in the himalayan foothills so every morning I could look over the valley while the sun came up over the himalayas, and watch the monkeys run around the trees below. I think I needed that Isolation from the world for a while. A few months of peace and quiet in a far away place can really shake off any unwelcome djinn.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Chris D'eon Wa Al-'Asr (By The Time) Cassette Review
-Zachary Fairbrother
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Re-posted from Weird Canada
Chris d’eon’s debut cassette is an incredible 60-minute multi-genre psychedelic-meets-minimal-techno Tour de Force that will absolutely astonish, bewilder, and bewitch anyone curious enough to catch its spell. Weaving within currents of basemental panned-vocals, reverberated folk and Chicago-house-meets-Boards-of-Canada minimalia, wa al-’asr threatens all norms in genre synthesis and track sequencing. Chris d’eon has shown an incredible knack for branding every species of sound with his personal phantasms; every wavelength tinged with the unabashedly cosmic dark-age strata. As such, there is a brilliant vision ensconced inside wa al-’asr’s easter-folk and electro meanderings that is unquestionably rebellious; why try to push boundaries when committing every stream of consciousness to tape does the job for you. Let the world figure it out and they’ll fail miserably. Thankfully there are sadists like myself who enjoy trying. Amazing. Brilliant. Wonderful.