Exhaust

exhaust is a bass, drum & tape trio that crashed through various small montreal venues in a series of semi-controlled explosions during the mid-90s, with an early vinyl release on constellation appearing in 1998 (cst004; issued on CD in 2000). as other projects began to dominate the players' schedules, exhaust played only sporadically from 99-01, but regrouped last summer for a short tour and month long cabin retreat, where their new album was recorded. all the original elements - ultra low end bass moan, loping breakbeat trapkit, live reel-to-reel tape scratch - remain at the core of this new studio work. the band is more 'head trip' than `body blow' nowadays, and has constructed a brilliant downtempo album of concréte/punk experimentation that gestures towards various currents in contemporary electronic music as well.

spliced & diced at the hotel2tango audio workshop during mixing, the record is an abstract slab of minimalist collage. bassist gordon adds bass clarinet on several tracks, while mike (tapes) & aidan (drums) deploy loops, signal processing, machine noise & live beats around slow, stripped down, see-saw bass guitar. the result is a chill, vaguely paranoid late night roam through the proverbial deserted city, picking up the occasional sinister, garbled transmission along the way. refreshingly absent are the endlessly self-replicating strains & sounds of electronica - exhaust focuses squarely on its own organic playing (and broken gear) to craft these electronically processed tracks, without facile recourse to the 'add-some-blips' strategy that plagues so much so called post-rock.

aidan's own 1-speed bike techno alter-ego is integrated back into exhaust's live trio context; rather than remixing stand alone tracks as he did on the exhaust debut, he cuts, pastes & filters his rhythms all over the new record, combined with gordon & mike's recent forays into sound art and sound environment recordings, all three members have put their heads & ears together to execute a series of controlled experiments sourced from their distinct & deliberate palette of riffs & melodic passages.