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Constellation records a showing the way these days. The Canadian label released three new records last Friday, with 10 of 12 the artists with releases this year withholding their music from Spotify and Amazon, Constellation has also recently partnered with Mirlo.
Mirlo is a music streaming and download platform built by independent musicians and coders on voluntarist, open-source, and federated principles. It stands in political and ethical opposition to tech/start-up culture and provides a progressive alternative driven by a non-profit, collectivist, and decentralised mandate. It also provides a Patreon-style tool for artists and labels that delivers digital downloads to annual subscribers, with at least one notable user-facing advantage over Bandcamp: subscriber-exclusive releases can be fully streamed by non-subscribers so they can preview and check out that music.
Constellation will also soon launch on Subvert, as the label actively attempts to chart a future beyond corporate streaming and monopoly tech in the year to come, marching steadfastly toward its 30th anniversary next spring.
Constellation has been a signatory to BDS since 2011, and in October and November they drop a pair of albums that respond explicitly to the Gaza genocide: the BETHLEHEM project by that city’s Church of of the Nativity choir director Lawrence Sammour in collaboration with Beirut electroacoustic musicians Sary Moussa and Abed Kobeissy (out 16 October) and Every Martyr Is A Universe by Bilal Nasser, a Palestinian-Canadian classical guitarist, composer, activist and harm-reduction worker with his label debut.
Light Conductor • Sequence Three
The Montréal psych-ambient synth-droners return with Sequence Three, their first album in five years and the final instalment in the group’s opening trilogy of records that began with Sequence One in 2019. The spectral supergroup co-founded by Stephen Ramsay (Young Galaxy) and Jace Lasek (The Besnard Lakes), always joined in some capacity by Lasek’s Besnard bandmate Olga Goreas, delivers another dose of its trademark longform slowburn jams, forged from restored vintage synths and other analogue electronics. Lasek and Ramsay apply rockist sound production to their minimalist ambient mantras, saturated with tube compression, drenched in pink and brown noise, all queasy modulation, sparse beats, and languorous melodic lines. Evoking a humid dawn on a gas giant, these are alien drone anthems melding the numinous transcendentalism of Spiritualized and Cluster with the eroded grit of William Basinski or GAS.
Light Conductor has been tagged “heavyweight analogue synth nirvana” by Uncut Magazine and praised for its “fabulous, epic, shimmeringly radiant kosmische” by Electronic Sound, among other accolades. Sequence Three consolidates these strengths, while leaning into the darker disquietude that has always been an undercurrent of Light Conductor’s aesthetic.
