Instruments of Happiness: Slow, Quiet Music in Search of Electric Happiness
Redshift Records

Tim Brady presents his Instruments of Happiness project in three versions, as a quartet, a sixty-to-twenty-piece orchestra, and a 100-piece ensemble comprised of sixteen professional guitarists and eighty-four community players. As logistically unwieldy as the latter version might seem, the group has, in fact, performed in that iteration across Canada to packed venues. It's the quartet version, however, that's featured on the group's third commercial release, with Brady, its artistic director, partnering with Jonathan Barriault, Simon Duchesne, and Francis Brunet-Turcotte on the release.

An electric guitarist since 1972 and long-celebrated presence on the Canadian new music scene for his innovative approach to the instrument, Brady eschews ego-driven grandstanding for conceptually based projects that have greater goals in mind. The three guitarists with him in Instruments of Happiness share that sensibility, as demonstrated vividly on the quartet's latest release. It's driven by a terrific concept: “Slow, quiet music in search of electric happiness.” Brady hit upon the idea for the recording four years ago as a way to explore what he calls the spatial element, music that's about “the space that it inhabits, not just the notes that are played.”

Having earlier explored the idea in the larger units, he realized it might be interesting to see how it might play out in the quartet. The next steps involved choosing a location for the premiere performance and inviting composers to create the works to be presented. For the former, they settled on the Église le Gesù in Montréal, which has a seven-second reverb time, and for the latter, commissioned Canadian composers Louise Campbell, Rose Bolton, Andrew Noseworthy and Andrew Staniland to write new material in accordance with specific guidelines: each piece had to be fourteen minutes, designed to be played by the guitarists positioned far apart in a reverberant space, and had to convey the project concept.

The recording, which took place six months after the live performance, was made in the Amphithéâtre le Gesù on August 9, 2020, with the set-up tailored to replicate the spatial arrangement of the musicians at the church and its reverb. Sideways by Montréal musician Campbell inaugurates the album with pitch-shifting patterns that grow woozy as layers accumulate. As the piece advances, a dazed, dreamlike quality asserts itself, though things change three minutes in when the music takes a somewhat nightmarish turn. Shifts in tone aside, the composition never loses its patient character in allowing the material to develop fluidly through multiple episodes. There are a few muscular passages too—witness the scalding flurries that erupt near the work's end— though things never get so loud the project's quiet criterion is abandoned. Speaking of which, the Toronto-based Bolton ushers in her Nine kinds of Joy on a susurrating wave of elongated tendrils. The guitarists' drones gradually blend into an entwining mass until the strands separate into slow-burning sonorities and finger-picked patterns that in turn coalesce into a swirling field of contrasting textures. Noseworthy, otherwise known as the co-founder and director of People Places Records, flexes his composer muscles on Traps, taboos, tradition with queasy convulsions of bent notes, jagged scrapes, and fretted dive-bombings. Hailing from St. John's, Newfoundland, Staniland caps the release on a suitably sombre and elegiac note with Notre-Dame is burning, its array of molten drones, supplications, and flame-like figures ably recalling the April 2019 fire that nearly destroyed the Paris church. It's almost impossible to hear the smolder with which the piece ends and not visualize the distressing sight of the steeple falling and smoke engulfing the building.

April 2022