Having already entranced the indie-rock set with their psychedelic prog-metal fusion, this ceaselessly creative Montreal/Toronto collective up the performance-art ante with a new drag opera debuting at Buddies in Times' Rhubarb Festival tonight.
Who: Yamantaka // Sonic Titan is an audio-visual force of nature. The endlessly creative, constantly evolving Montreal/Toronto art-and-music collective makes beautiful noise, incredible illustrations and elaborate stage settings. Together, the members of YT // ST explore Asian, Indigenous and diasporic identities, riffing on and sending up stereotypes while crafting their own unique and utterly compelling ways of telling stories. Bold, intense and difficult to describe, YT//ST has caught fire, with rave reviews and sold-out shows suddenly their new normal.
First, some history. Sprung from the ashes of Montreal noise music project Lesbian Fight Club, Yamantaka // Sonic Titan was founded in late 2007 by performance artists Alaska B and Ruby Kato Attwood. The two had begun to collaborate as Concordia students and worked their way through a variety of art and music projects. YT // ST became the main forum for the two Asian-Anglo Canadians to explore mixed-race identities through constructing their own instruments, giant paper theatre sets and new sounds that combined metal, prog, punk and psychedelic rock with East Asian opera, pop, folk and more. They dubbed their sound “noh-wave,” as in a fusion of noh (classical Japanese musical drama) and no wave (the late-’70s NYC-born underground art and music movement).
“The whole project started with creating maximalist paper installations and playing music inside of them, like two storytellers inside of a fictional East/West landscape,” explains Alaska. “Everything was black and white—and still is, but now with a few streaks of red and metallic colours—and our characters were based off of popular myths and stories.”
YT // ST performed its first noh-wave opera in April of 2008 and began to grow as a collective while performing “short homebrewed operas,” crafting installation pieces and performing in an occasional concert-like setting.
Alaska’s personal favourites include a giant installation, called “↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ←→ B A (KONAMI KOMANDO),” that she and Ruby placed in a Montreal storefront window on Fairmount Ouest in 2008.
“It was in the Articule window for a month, and was very popular with children. It was just layers of printed paper, cardboard, and a spinning cartoon disc featuring absurd parodies of popular Asian cartoon characters.”
She also recounts how the group played “three shows in one night in the Montreal Eaton Centre food court, during Nuit Blanche 2009. We got to alternate between modal faux-Chinese folk music to pentatonic metal in front of crowds of shocked families.”
Not surprisingly, for Yamantaka//Sonic Titan there is no separation of audio and visual as they pertain to new projects.
“They are one and the same,” states Alaska. “The visuals are often about the music and vice versa, and every song tends to be like writing a comic book that you listen to instead of reading.”
That said, it was the Oct. 1 release of Yamantaka // Sonic Titan’s self-titled debut album on the Psychic Handshake indie imprint that caused the buzz to build well beyond the collective’s now split home bases of Montreal and Toronto.
The album, produced and programmed by Alaska (who also played drums and keys while Ruby added keys, percussion and her vocals) is bold, intense and electrifying. Through the album’s mesh of metal and meditative, repetitive rhythms, dramatic vocals and quirky pop moments we hear the stated influences of acts including Sun Ra, Sonic Youth and Japanese experimental band Boris. Unapologetically noisy and lo-fi, the album also showcases the many ways in which YT // ST is growing.
“When we started, it was all just my junk electronics, the light rig built by Alana Ruth and I, Ruby’s vocals, and some acoustic drums,” Alaska recalls. “From there, we evolved to have two drummers at the same time—including artist Walter K Scott—and added our guitarists Shub Roy, and now John Ancheta, and now we have Brendan Swanson on keys. The expanded lineup allowed us to focus on a proggier direction.
“The album YT // ST is definitely rooted in prog, because that was how we imagined a lot of the sound for our opera, STAR, which is still in progress. Moving into a tighter and song-oriented sound does push one to improve their technical musicianship, but we haven’t left any of that wild experimentation behind. It just doesn’t appear so prominently on this first record.”
Why: However one defines “experimentation,” it’s clear that YT // ST’s approach has dazzled. Word began to spread like wildfire following a Dec. 5 Pitchfork review, penned by The Grid’s own Stuart Berman, that gave the album an 8.2 rating. As Berman wrote: “Yamantaka // Sonic Titan may still aspire to the sort of conceptual grandeur that requires an Olympic Stadium to contain it, but right now, what they’re really good at is putting the ‘raw’ in prog.”
This was followed by a prominent Jan. 10 Pitchfork feature and interview, along with glowing reviews in sources like Exclaim!, Weird Canada and the VICE-curated Noisey blog.
“The critical response has felt really good, especially when we get fan letters from people who are honestly excited about what we are doing,” shares Alaska. “I think what really surprised us was how fast it spread and how high it charted on the Canadian campus radio charts as a really weird, lo-fi record on a weird and small indie label.”
The last two weeks have seen Yamantaka // Sonic Titan perform to capacity crowds in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. They’ve also been invited to perform at the prestigious All Tomorrow’s Parties event curated by Jeff Mangum (Neutral Milk Hotel), taking place next month in Minehead, U.K.
What’s Next: While European and North American tour dates are being booked, work continues on the Yamantaka // Sonic Titan full-length opera, STAR. Additionally, Ruby has made mention of a 16-mm, stop-motion short film that is to soon be shared with audiences. A second album is planned for release before year’s end.
Whatever the YT // ST project, it will be done collectively.
“Collaboration, more so than anything, opens up your possibilities,” states Alaska. “We tend to all have our fingers in each project to some extent, all of us having worked on the composition, arranging, directing or production of art at some point of the creative process. But we each focus on our specialties, and each project tends to have their responsibilities divided up accordingly.”
Where & When: To that end, YT // ST member and theatre practitioner Ange Loft took the lead in directing, choreographing and performing in 33, the drag opera that Yamantaka // Sonic Titan perform tonight (Feb. 8 ) through Sunday (Feb. 12) as part of Buddies In Bad Times’ Rhubarb Festival. YT // ST is thrillingly queer in all the best senses of the word, with 33 pushing boundaries further.
“This particular show experiments with stage ideas without the constraint of the rock venue,” Alaska explains. “The show has three actor/dancers—Daniel Ellis, Chase Lo, Ange Loft—but only a few members of the band will be playing. I’ll be on drums and samplers, alongside Brendan Swanson on keys, and Aylwin Lo on projections. There are almost no live vocals, as the show is about drag queens, so the performers are actually lip-syncing the majority of the time.”
And yes, for those who’ve come to associate YT // ST with costumes and face paint, expect full drama. Tickets range from PWYC-$20 each night.
