Chloë Lum & Yannick Desranleau — The Garden of a Former House Turned Museum

Out: August 11th, 2023 on No Hay Discos (NHD003) CD/DL RIYL: Carla Bley’s “Escalator Over The Hill”, Tom Zé, Scott Walker, AIDS Wolf.

CHLOË LUM & YANNICK DESRANLEAU:
lum-desranleau.com
NO HAY DISCOS: nohaydiscos.ca | nohaybanda.ca

For more than a decade, Montréal/ Tiohtiá:ke-based artists Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau have been operating together within an ultra-peculiar aesthetic space merging performance, installation, narrative, text, sculptural and choreographic elements, and strategies derived from their background in experimental music. Described as “a refreshing departure from the biennial’s dominant motif of interspecies sensing.“ by Artforum’s Jayne Wilkinson, The Garden of a Former House Turned Museum was their inventive and ambitious contribution to the 2021 MOMENTA : Biennale de l’Image. From a strictly musical standpoint, the work encompasses their most elaborate output since their days as co-founders of the internationally revered avant-rock group AIDS Wolf alongside Alexander Moskos (AKA Drainolith). The score that they’ve crafted to accompany Garden is a far cry from the feral-concrète meets meticulous no-wave of their former band, however. Instead, it poists a knowingly wayward take on Broadway, using a series of fictitious letters to Clarice Lispector as its libretto. The mindbendingly versatile singer Sarah Albu voices a plethora of dispositions, standing in for all four of the characters of the video. She’s flanked by an ensemble comprising percussion, winds, brass, bass, and cuíca that plays with a unique blend of fierce precision, cheeky lyricism, and reckless abandon. Each letter has its own unique musical tenor and along the way Lum and Desranleau embrace sonic allusions to the American Songbook, free jazz, the outskirts of contemporary opera, post-punk fragmentation, and the samba of Lispector’s native Brazil. As such, the work traverses a vast expanse, while remaining grounded by its lean arrangement style and modest run-time.

Chloë Lum & Yannick Desranleau — The Garden of a Former House Turned Museum

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