Hannaford Street Silver Band - Voices on High - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Terrific Brass playing, virtuosic solos and great ensemble playing mark the Hannaford Street Silver Band's album Connections in Brass. One of North America's favorite Brass Ensembles puts Canadian composers on display with it's unique style.

The Hannaford Street Silver Band is Toronto's award winning professional brass band and resident company of the St Lawrence centre for the Arts. The HSSB was formed in 1983 by a group of professional musicians with a love of the brass band repertoire and ensemble playing. Since then the band has been reinvigorating the brass band tradition to critical and popular acclaim. It's mission is to honor the traditions of this art form and at the same time place it in a contemporary context with a unique Canadian point of view, The HSSB has redefined what a brass band is capable of doing by facilitating innovative creative projects and collaboration with the very best of Canada's diverse cultures and outstanding artists.

Come Back Down, the new album by Nashville experimental-pop duo Total Wife, was born from the edge of sleep. When composer and producer Luna Kupper would begin to fall asleep during late-night mixing sessions, the songs would follow her into the halfway place between dream and lucidity. Like Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, she'd wake with a new perspective on the puzzle she was piecing together. InchI'm a psychological mixer - I'm trying to think of how someone's experiencing the sound, versus getting stuck in trying to make all these different tones and using all this gear to make something sound a certain way,Inch Kupper says.And like a spiral from waking life into dream, the songs on Come Back Down are endlessly self-referential, building whole universes from a single point. Kupper sold all of her synths to make rent before she started working on the album, and so every inorganic sound is instead built from samples of the band's own work. A guitar on one song may be reprocessed and used as a synth on the next, while everywhere on the album vocal samples are taken from a single unreleased cover of Elliott Smith's InchBetween the Bars.Inch In tribute to this process, the album was almost named The Julia Set after the mathematical equation which feeds into itself again and again, creating beautiful fractal images. The intention was to create something complex but accessible; experimental, yet precise and without abstraction. In her lyrics, too, lyricist and vocalist Ash Richter is as straightforward as she's ever been. She drew on her experience of pandemic isolation to write about connection and disconnection, using her lyrics as a tool for the communication that was missing in everyday life. On the soaring, shoegazey track InchpeachesInch, a storm that forced the cancellation of a recording session became a metaphor for emotional distance. Inchstill asleepInch chronicles