OURI ANNOUNCES DEBUT ALBUM, SHARES TWO NEW SONGS AND VIDEO

NEW LP, FRAME OF A FAUNA, DUE OCTOBER 22, 2021

WATCH AND SHARE “CHAINS” HERE

BUY / STREAM “HIGH & CHOKING PT. 1” + “CHAINS” HERE

PRE-SAVE FRAME OF A FAUNA HERE

"effortless and sublime" - PAPER Magazine

"a richly rewarding left turn" - The FADER

"expertly guides listeners through a narrative of anticipation, climax and release" - Office Magazine

"equal parts comforting and transcendent" - V Magazine

Photo Credit : Kane Ocean // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Today, Montreal-based multi-instrumentalist and producer Ouri announces her debut album Frame Of A Fauna. To coincide with the album announcement, Ouri shares two new singles "High & Choking Pt 1" and "Chains", which is coupled with a music video directed by Derek Branscombe and Ouri. The video finds Ouri studying the confines of her computer screen, programming the human body of a dancer who eventually moves beyond the boundaries of the programming she's within.

WATCH AND SHARE “CHAINS” HERE

BUY / STREAM “HIGH & CHOKING PT. 1” + “CHAINS” HERE

Frame Of A Fauna takes the Canadian artist's knowledge of big orchestral sound, and creates her own fusion, puncturing the classical with industrial abrasions and electronic nuance. The project inspects the framework of the body - how emotional hardship can imprint, and in turn deform the skeleton. If the bones are the container that stands the test of what is being contained- What is the residue of happening? And where does it go? She notices the way time can rupture a rib cage, pull out the collar bones, or make a fist out of fingers.

The cycle of birth, death, and constant rebirth sends Ouri transcending through the creation of this album, as she explores what lies inside the lining of the big dharma wheel: trauma, control and vulnerability. The album begins in a bedroom in London, and hops to Berlin where she witnessed her sister give birth - and sees its completion a year later after a sudden trip to Brazil, where she said her last goodbye to her mother.

Ouri shares about her forthcoming album, "Between fragmented souvenirs and sonic explorations, Frame Of A Fauna navigates mutable identity, magnetism and initiating a sense of belonging in an eclectic sound. Mixing classical, field recordings, and electronic and future trip-hop, this album provides a soundtrack to reflect your own shapes and space in this lifetime."

LISTEN / BUY / STREAM “FELICITY” (FT. ANTONY CARLE) HERE

These new offerings follow the previously released single "Felicity" and Ouri's recently released joint project with Helena Deland, Hildegard, which received widespread critical acclaim with Pitchfork praising the collaboration as "pure creative symbiosis" and The FADER describing as, "a hypnotic composition that ebbs in and out of darkness, mining strength in synchronicity."

Ourielle Auvé, known professionally as Ouri, grew up in France and moved to Montreal at the age of 16 with dreams of becoming a composer. As Ouri developed her compositional ability, as well as her production and vocal chops, she integrated herself with late-night DJ sets in Montreal's underground rave scene and was eventually selected to take part in Red Bull Music Academy's Montreal Bass Camp. From there, her profile began to grow as she headlined Boiler Room's Montreal showcase, toured with the likes of Yves Tumor and Jacques Greene, released her first EPs Superficial and We Share Our Blood, and collaborated with fellow Montreal artist Helena Deland on the interdimensional Hildegard.

PRE-SAVE FRAME OF A FAUNA HERE

Frame Of A Fauna Artwork // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

1. Ossature
2. The More I Feel
3. Two
4. Odd or God (ft. Mind Bath)
5. High & Choking Pt 1
6. Fear of Being Watched
7. Fonction Naturelle
8. Wrong Breed
9. Chains
10. En Mon Doux Sein
11. Shape of It
12. Too Fast No Pain (ft. mobilegirl)
13. Felicity (ft. Antony Carle)
14. Grip

MORE ABOUT OURI
Ouri grew up in France, in a family of mixed french and afro-carribean descent. She began playing the harp and piano at 5, but at 7 she found unity in the cello. A self proclaimed introvert who’d rather dash off on her own than feel disconnected in the wrong crowd- she arrives in Montreal at the age of 16 to pursue a degree in composition.

Montreal’s rave scene is where her artistry began to take shape - establishing herself in the community as a producer, DJ, and composer. Lending her skills to various collaborations, she strengthened her sense of self, but also her affinity for transforming sonically into any genre, playing any role.

In 2018 she was invited to MISM x Boiler Room’s Montreal show, signed to Ghosty (international) & Make it Rain Records (Canada) for the release of her EP ‘We Share Our Blood’ and was asked to make official remixes for the likes of Tokimonsta. Her growing notoriety let her support Jacques Greene, Yves Tumour & Kllo live in concert.

Evolving beyond her affirmed DJ persona, she breaks out of the underground to come up for air - where she collaborates with folk artist Helena Deland. They merge in a dimension of their own, and Hildegard is born.

Now in her debut album, she shatters the oftentimes submissive and distant approach to ambient sound to finally take up space and connect to her own experience.

Ouri explores the intricate formation of shape in Frame Of A Fauna. The intangible is held and the unseen is sung as it inspects the framework of the body- how emotional hardship can imprint, and in turn deform the skeleton. If the bones are the container that stands the test of what is being contained- What is the residue of happening? And where does it go? She notices the way time can rupture a rib cage, pull out the collar bones, or make a fist out of fingers.

She takes her knowledge of big orchestral sound, and creates her own fusion, puncturing the classical with industrial abrasions and electronic nuance. Ballads and drum samples take melodies out of the middle ground. She finds home in the new hybrid- but first she must stretch the old structure to make a clearing.

The album begins in a bedroom in London, and hops to Berlin where she witnessed her sister give birth - and sees its completion a year later after a sudden trip to Brazil, where she said her last goodbye to her mother.

The cycle of birth, death, and constant rebirth sends her transcending through the creation of this album, as she explores what lies inside the lining of the big dharma wheel: trauma, control and vulnerability. She starts outside and builds as she asceneds inward, which is how she transforms the universal, into a personal space, not for the lost, but rather for those who are in suspension.

She sculpts chaos with layers of texture, only to ask you to find her voice within it, “Hold on, hear it out and chase me” she sings.

Sound fills to the brim, cello meets synth, becomes lush and ethereal, only for her feather light voice to slither in with ferocity. You weed through the sound to meet her in her sincerity. In this way we are listening twice- for what she wants to say, and what she wants to feel- which are not always the same. 

She invites you to be comfortable in the lucid, to be sensual without the sexual, in the possibility of communicating what you may not yet know.

She edits lyrics to Ossature in a final revision to include hope in her perspective, and records GRIP in record time in a sweeping fit of grief in honour of her mother.

Conscious not to define herself within any one structure, but to cascade her own spectrum of sound - in Frame Of A Fauna Ouri shows us everything she can do, while what comes next is everything she will.

TOUR DATES
Oct 27 - Montreal, QC l Phi Centre
Nov 11 - Quebec, QC l Pantoum

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BAZOOKA JOE 204 SHARES “KING CAKE BABY” FROM UPCOMING LP

BAZOOKA JOE 204’S NEW LP, PRAIRIE NILSSON, OUT OCTOBER 15, 2021 VIA PEANUTS & CORN RECORDS

LISTEN AND SHARE “KING CAKE BABY” HERE

BUY / STREAM “KING CAKE BABY” HERE

LISTEN TO THE ‘PRAIRIE NILSSON’ PODCAST EPISODE 1 HERE

Photo Credit : Joe Compayre // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

The agonizing morning trudge to work. The ecstasy of nights out on a payday weekend. And the long wait for the direct deposit notification that starts it all over again. “King Cake Baby”, the third single from Bazooka Joe 204's Prairie Nilsson album, is a percussive, parading ode to the lower class living large, and an exploration of the makeshift mutual aid found in Winnipeg's beverage rooms and kitchen parties.  

LISTEN AND SHARE “KING CAKE BABY” HERE

BUY / STREAM “KING CAKE BABY” HERE

BZJ_S_KCB_cover.jpg

“King Cake Baby” Single Art //  DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

MORE ABOUT BAZOOKA JOE 204
Indie rap luminary Bazooka Joe 204 (formerly John Smith) is back, detailing a life well-wasted in Winnipeg’s drinking holes and dark alleys, one bare-knuckled bar at a time. Prairie Nilsson, Bazooka Joe’s 8th solo offering, features the veteran storytelling MC leveraging tales of lost payday weekends, agoraphobic apathy, and middle-aged rap regrets into raucous, but unsparing explorations of class, addiction, and privilege. Legendary producer bigmcenroe’s timeless, layered, music box boom bap provides a banging backdrop for Joe’s authoritative delivery, clever hooks, and deft technical touch.

LISTEN AND SHARE “THAT I KNEW WHAT FOR” HERE
BUY / STREAM “THAT I KNEW WHAT FOR” TOMORROW HERE

LISTEN TO THE ‘PRAIRIE NILSSON’ PODCAST EPISODE 1 HERE


Bazooka Joe’s rap career began in earnest in 1999, when, known as John Smith, he started releasing music with stalwart Canadian indie rap label Peanuts & Corn Records. Initially a scrappy battle rapper, Joe quickly displayed a knack for detail driven community stories rooted in his unique upbringing, with one foot firmly planted in Winnipeg’s notorious North End and the other on the shores of the Hudson Bay in Churchill, Manitoba. A pioneer and player in Canadian rap, Bazooka Joe has remained relevant and active in the studio and in concert over decades, having shared the stage with a diverse group of artists including Propagandhi, Sean Paul, and Killer Mike. “Kinship Of The Down & Out”, from Joe’s critically acclaimed 2004 album Pinky’s Laundromat, recently made the Winnipeg Free Press’s list of Manitoba’s 150 Most Important Songs.

BUY / STREAM “ART SCHOOL KIDZ” HERE


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PRAIRIE NILSSON TRACKLIST
01 Lookit
02 Iowanna
03 That I Knew What For
04 King Cake Baby
05 Art School Kidz
06 Carp Diem
07 The Prestige
08 Into The Sea
09 The Stone

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JASPER SLOAN YIP REVEALS “ON THE BEACH” + “OLEANDER” FROM NEW DOUBLE EP

VANCOUVER SONGWRITER JASPER SLOAN YIP TO RELEASE HIS DOUBLE EP STRANGE CALM / BLUSHING AUTUMN ON OCTOBER 26, 2021 VIA TINY KINGDOM

WATCH AND SHARE “ON THE BEACH” HERE

WATCH AND SHARE “OLEANDER” HERE

BUY / STREAM “ON THE BEACH” + “OLEANDER” HERE

PRE-SAVE STRANGE CALM / BLUSHING AUTUMN AND GET INSTANT ACCESS TO JASPER’S AUDIO LINER NOTES PODCAST ‘STRANGE COMMENTARY’

PRE-SAVE STRANGE CALM / BLUSHING AUTUMN HERE

Photo Credit : Nelson Mouellic  // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Next month, Vancouver songwriter Jasper Sloan Yip will release Strange Calm / Blushing Autumn; a pair of EPs that ruminate on themes of life and death. Today, he shares two more tracks from the double EP, “On The Beach” and “Oleander”.

“The six songs that make up Strange Calm attempt to deal with the death process," says Yip. ""I imagine them as a psychic journey to the beach to greet the end of the world. The beach is the perfect place for endings: it is the edge of one world and the start of another. In ‘Oleander’ we find ourselves standing in the water, swaying to the pull of the moon, gazing upward at stars that will surely ‘forget all of our constellations’. In ‘On the Beach’ we float through the ‘wild motion’ of this new frontier, affirming that we can ‘separate the water from the waves’ before looking up one last time “as the constellations drift apart and lose their shape” to say that we ‘would do it all again’. There is a lot of anxiety in the first four songs of Strange Calm. I was really struggling when I wrote them. But I'm glad for all of it, it led me to a place of gratitude, and that's what these last two songs are about."

WATCH AND SHARE “ON THE BEACH” HERE

“On The Beach” + “Oleander” Single Artwork // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Strange Calm / Blushing Autumn is available to pre-save today. Fans who save the EPs get  exclusive access to Jasper's podcast, ‘Strange Commentary’, a collection of stories, interviews, and insight on the songs from the album.

PRE-SAVE STRANGE CALM / BLUSHING AUTUMN HERE


MORE ABOUT STRANGE CALM / BLUSHING AUTUMN
When he set out to record Strange Calm in early 2020, Yip was trying to say goodbye. “I was dealing with a lot of climate dread, and at the same time, I could feel my musical life being pulled apart by different but equally powerful forces,” says Yip. “The songs on Strange Calm reflected these anxieties, and somehow helped me make peace with them too. It’s a meditation on learning to live with the death process.”

Just as the recording session for Strange Calm wrapped, the pandemic had reached the shores of B.C. By the summer, Yip decided to record a second short collection of songs to release with Strange Calm, a decision that coincided with the start of a new chapter in his life: fatherhood. “I committed myself to recording more music, booking time at the studio before writing a single song. Almost immediately after doing that I learned that I was going to be a dad.” The result is the second EP, Blushing Autumn.

WATCH AND SHARE “STRANGE CALM” OFFICIAL VIDEO HERE
WATCH AND SHARE “SILVER LINING” VISUALIZER HERE

BUY / STREAM “STRANGE CALM” + “SILVER LINING” HERE


Jasper Sloan Yip and his band arrived at The Noise Floor on Gabriola Island to record their Strange Calm with producer Jordan Koop (Orville Peck, Wolf Parade, Rae Spoon) on March 14th, 2020, just as life on the west coast shut down. “It was surreal. On one hand, it felt like an isolated recording studio was the perfect place to make an album about the end of the world, but on the other, we also understood that at any moment one of us might start showing symptoms, or we may be ordered by the province to pack up and go home. This tension was infused into everything we did.”

Thankfully, the band left the studio the following week healthy and joined the rest of the world in lockdown with six completed songs. Their tentative plans to return to the Noise Floor the following month to complete the album were cancelled, and Jasper, like everyone else, started to wait. 

WATCH AND SHARE “GIN FIZZ” HERE

BUY / STREAM “GIN FIZZ” + “HALCYON DREAM” HERE

With the album ostensibly finished and nothing else to do, Jasper began work on a six-episode liner-notes podcast titled ‘Strange Commentary’ to accompany the album. Spanning over 100 minutes, these audio liner notes paint an intimate picture that completes the songs on Strange Calm while extending far beyond them. “Strange Calm is shaped by its incompleteness. When I listen to these songs, I hear the music that isn’t there, and that’s ok. The podcast helped me let it be by giving me another way to finish the story,” says Yip. 

Exactly one year after arriving on Gabriola Island to make a record about the end of the world, Jasper and his band were setting up at Afterlife Studio in Vancouver with producer John Raham (Destroyer, Tanya Tagaq, Frazey Ford) to record Blushing Autumn, four songs about Yip’s upcoming fatherhood and the promise of new life. 

“We all spent a year inside. Not just in our homes, but inside of ourselves,” says Yip. “For me, it began with the surreal experience of life imitating art in a scary way. I was ready to accept certain fates... But it didn’t go the way that I expected, and now, the strange calm that I was struggling with for so long is gone, and the world feels new again.”

PRE-SAVE STRANGE CALM / BLUSHING AUTUMN HERE


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STRANGE CALM / BLUSHING AUTUMN TRACKLIST

STRANGE CALM
01 Halcyon Dream
02 Gin Fizz
03 Strange Calm
04 Silver Lining
05 Oleander
06 On The Beach

BLUSHING AUTUMN
01 Blushing Autumn
02 August
03 Anew
04 Every Night, Beside You, I Lie Awake

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