No Hay Banda: I had a dream about this place
No Hay Discos

Many a debut album presents an ensemble as a work-in-progress and using the recording process as a catalyzing step towards forging an identity. The auspicious debut release from Montréal's No Hay Banda, on the other hand, finds the experimental chamber outfit arriving with its identity fully formed. Certainly no one will call the album tentative: a double-CD release, I had a dream about this place features four long-form works, with two extending past the half-hour mark. The sensibilities of the group, founded in 2016 by Daniel Áñez, Noam Bierstone, and Geneviève Liboiron, and Canadian composers Anthony Tan, Sabrina Schroeder, Andrea Young, and Mauricio Pauly dovetail on the release when their respective talents prove mutually beneficial.

Recorded at Montréal's hotel2tangoby Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, the material was realized by two different group configurations, with three pieces featuring violinist Liboiron, percussionist Bierstone, keyboardist Áñez (piano, ondes Martenot, modular synthesizers), and saxophonist Joshua Hyde; the fourth, Young's A Moment or Two of Panic, adds soprano Sarah Albu and bass trombonist Felix Del Tredici, with Hyde sitting out. Given the uncompromising experimental sensibilities they share, it wouldn't be off-base to see No Hay Banda and NYC's TAK Ensemble as kindred spirits.

In the opening minutes of An Overall Augmented Sense of Well-being by Tan, an Assistant Professor of Composition at the University of Victoria, droning violin and percussion flourishes rise to the surface of a swirling ambient-industrial churn, the elements collectively congealing into a thick mass of razor-sharp timbres and electronically enhanced textures. Without losing momentum, an occasional expression of classical melodicism arises to offset an opaque mass that otherwise creaks, grinds, heaves, and smoulders. Twenty minutes in, a detour into nightmarish territory transpires, with the material building to a brutalizing shriek before decompressing for a calming exit. Schroeder's Rubber Houses follows Tan's piece with a tactile excursion into a hydraulic industrial zone where scraping noises and violent convulsions appear alongside a rumbling engine drone. Following an extreme introduction, Rubber Houses downshifts to become a ghostly dronescape that softly wheezes and buzzes for its second ten minutes.

Initiating the second half of the release, Albu's vocal presence naturally distances Young's A Moment or Two of Panic from the other settings. It also positions the performance style considerably closer to classical music, albeit a variant that's particularly experimental in nature. For thirty-two minutes, Albu's undoctored voice wafts confidently across a woozy, shape-shifting base of string, bass trombone, percussive, and electronic gestures, the instrumental mass often subdued but also in places eruptive. Locating the album in a dark ambient-industrial realm, The Difference is the Buildings Between Us by Costa Rican-born Pauly concludes the recording with eighteen oft-unsettling minutes of cryptic textural flourishes and acoustic instrument interjections, the appearance of acoustic piano chords three minutes before the end an arresting touch.

January 2023