CONCERT

Name: FYEAR: Soundtracking the polycrisis
Start: 2024-10-16T00:00:00-04:00
End: 2024-10-16T00:00:00-04:00
Location: PHI Centre

241016 FYEAR trame sonore de la polycrise COVER — Photo: Frank Schemmann

October 16 FYEAR: Soundtracking the polycrisis

Performance
Music

PHI Centre Espace 1
407 Saint-Pierre St
Montreal, Quebec, H2Y 2M3

Album launch schedule
Doors: 7 PM
Music: 8 PM

All ages

Price in advance: $25
Price day of the event: $30
*Fees included, taxes not included.

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Before visiting, please review some essential information about the visit, including details on accessibility at the Centre.

The Montreal-based group, led by composer Jason Sharp and poet Kaie Kellough, launches its debut album: a blend of out-jazz, post-classical, ambient metal, drone, avant-rock, electronic music and spoken word in an epic work about our current polycrisis.

Support: Jason Sharp (solo set)

Presented by
- PHI
In collaboration with
- Constellation Records

ABOUT THE BAND

FYEAR is the Montréal-based ensemble led by composer Jason Sharp and poet/writer Kaie Kellough. Fusing spoken word into genre-bending compositions for electronics, two voices, two drummers, and processed saxophone, pedal steel guitar, and violins, FYEAR incorporates drone, out-jazz, post-classical, ambient metal, avant-rock, and modular synthesis into a sonic and stylistic palette the opposite of collage or pastiche; the FYEAR ensemble conveys a unique and unified sound/aesthetic while traversing adventurous and variegated terrain. Kellough’s poetics convey acute political-existential themes, alternating between declarative, meditative, and cut-up/semiotic manifestations.

FYEAR premiered this full-ensemble work during pandemic as an audio/visual streaming performance commissioned byJazz Ahead! (Bremen,Germany) in 2021, then performed for the first time in front of live festival audiences at SEND+RECEIVE (Winnipeg, Canada) in 2022 and at Moers Festival (Moers, Germany) in 2023. FYEAR recorded the work in summer 2023 at theHotel2Tango studio in Montréal with engineer/co-producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart, Matana Roberts, Sarah Davachi, Suuns, Big|Bravel) and it was released by Montréal experimental music label Constellation in spring 2024.

This will be the band's official album launch and only Canadian live date this year.

Website ↗
Album Smart Link ↗

241016 FYEAR trame sonore de la polycrise Album — Photo: Album cover / FYEAR

WHAT TO EXPECT

"A cross between the music of a less scattered John Zorn and a less politicized Gil Scott-Heron, saxophonist Jason Sharp presented us with an exhilarating set of music played by his eight-member band."

"The musicians led us to question the very nature of our world, with demanding compositions underpinned by vocals and lyrics, and punctuated by Kevin Yuen Kit Lo's percussive and always relevant projections. Sometimes simple, such as displaying a sentence from the sung text, at other times consisting of Fuji chrome-colored slide projections, they succeeded in elevating our experience of this concert a further notch."

"The vocal performances were spectacular, with entanglements of voice and text and the sharing of syllables at times. Intense, spectacular and successful. Kaie Kellough's flow would make Machine Gun Kelly blush with envy. And what can we say about the luminous presence of second vocalist Tawhida Tanya Evanson? We definitely witnessed a vocal tour de force tonight."

—Jerome Daviau