CKUT : yes, it is music.

On March 23rd, 2011, Simon Brown, Emilie Mouchous, James Shidlowsky and Alexandre St Onge
(in this particular incarnation) brought a lot of conspicuous looking suitcases and timers in to the on air studio where they holed up for 2 hours building something out of electronics that was shaped by the tick -tick-tick of their timers...

The idea behind their opus entitled Les 11 épuisements was to cyle through all the possible permutations of duos and trios ending with a quartet. Each segment is of variable length, all improvised, uncut - with swiss precision timing. Here is the set list:

01. Alex + Emilie
02. James + Simon
03. Alex + Simon
04. Emilie + James
05. Emilie + Simon
06. Alex + James
07. Alex + James + Simon
08. Alex + Emilie + James
09. Alex + Emilie + Simon
10. Emilie + James + Simon
11. Alex + Emilie + James + Simon

Montreal based trio Aim Low came together as a self described happy accident and make some pretty dense wall of sound droning music  with effected guitars, bass, vocals and other objects. They've been making themselves nauseous by hanging around in the brown zone of frequency spectrum since boredom brought them together in late 2010.  they have self released an a few ep's and at the time there was talk about cassette releases on they live we sleep, and  walnut locust in the near future. 

While chatting in the studio after their set  that literally gave my lungs a good vibrational massage due to the intensity of the sound pressure levels emitted through their modest amplifiers, they talked about the process of improvisation in their approach  to creating and performing music. I can't remember if it was d.a or l.f that said it,  but what he did say was that it's like  "You know how to get home from one place, but we each take different routes to get there. There are established starting and ending points and structural conventions in place, but ultimately it's like - hey guys i'll meet you down the street in 12 minutes, some times you're early, sometimes you're late some times you just hang around there till you all meet up." I dunno - i really enjoyed this analogy to structured improvisation. 

Fleshtone Aura serves his spicy dinner with a tangle of source cassettes and electronics that deploy the deeply arousing aromas of both a series of poignant and extraordinairily well timed belches and farts (or the equivalent thereof) AND the grandest gestures of the sternest-most-serious-never-leaving-the-lab shut in tape music connoiseurs of days of yore...but, ah, those toots never act merely as a humorous apology, never slapping a stick just for slapstick, nor are those high brows ever talking down to us, they're just gifts, we're supposed to use them as catapults into the ??!!??!!.....a series of dynamics and moments (karate chop, massage, flower sniffing, paper airplane glides, broken table leg,  spoiled milk, et c) that sometimes explode atop or beside each other in matter of seconds, or sometimes linger on a sweet spot for us to suckle sugary nectars....... these juxtapositions described cease being juxtapositions when heard, all moments contribute to a fabulous, pink-pulsing-writhing whole, the superflousness is left in the waste basket, even the meanderers meander with great purpose, leaving nothing but a strobing (perhaps beaked) body builder (who never bathes or waxes: why lie?) flexing themselves into a vast meadow of previously unseen flowers in some public park somewhere.
- Words penned by the inimitable  Id M Theft Able

Check out Mr. Fleshtone Aura's Site where you can get your grubby hands on the physical fromat of the the 3 tapes he's endowed us to post of the FMA for your aural pleasure, there's also a lot of really great visual art on the site too.

The brother men of Tonstartssbandht (Andy and Edwin) have appeared on the airwaves of CKUT in many forms over the last couple years, both appearing and hosting a variety of programs including Montreal Sessions, New Shit, If You Got Ears, and a very special episode of Chaud Pour Le Mont-Stone where their dad did a Kermit the frog impression. They stopped by the station on a fine September afternoon during the Pop Montreal festival to play some songs. The result was a 30 minute extended psychedelic way-out jam, which flew the CKUT studio to another plane of musical reality.

For your convenience we have separated the session into two segments although you should note they are continuous and should be taken together. The first track "Hymn Our Garden" originated on the Russian tour tape, Hymn, from earlier this year. After a steady build of guitar fuzz the beat kicks in and we have entered "Late Fall Roll," a track from Edwin's solo project Eola. 

Tonstartss-friend Spencer Gilley was in the studio filming the whole thing, his masterpiece video adds a whole other dimension to the experience.

Also check out Tonstartssbandht's new tape Sinkhole Storm and Sandwich on Arbutus Records.

Andrew Zukerman (Gastric Female Reflex, Beniffer Editions) and Emilie Mouchous (Gmackrr) met in 2007 - or was it 2006? Neither of them can remember which it was for certain, however they met in the context of a performance. They liked each others sounds and decided it was imperative that they combine them and collaborate immediately. At a time where everyone's band had chosen the wolf as it's power animal, the duo was set on the name Vagina Wolf, this stuck for about 20 minutes, before opting for an animal whose girth was more suiting to their sound - hence Vagina Bison was formed. They recorded their first cassette release over the period of several years, shuffling between Montreal and Toronto to make it happen. The result: Sagina Bovin on Deirdre O'Sullivan and James Lindsay's label Pleasance Records in 2010. 

The duo stopped in to ckut's New Shit Radio during an Ontario-Quebec Tour in October of 2010 for a performance before their show that night. Using a lot of hand made instruments and modified toys and electronics, the resultant set was reminiscent of the electronic tonalities of Louis and Bebe Barron's Forbidden Planet soundtrack, with more dynamic range and syncopation, tortured electic birds and snippets of spoken word on tape, saliva burbling and saturated tone generation.  

CKUT may be Canada's largest and most active volunteer-owned campus/community radio station. Based out of McGill University in Montreal, CKUT's 5700 watt 90.3FM signal and online presence at ckut.ca is a true community voice with programming in English, French, Spanish, Korean, Hindi, and Haitian Creole and programs that include West Indian Rhythms, Folk Directions, Tiempo Latino, Macondo, Voice of Korea, Queer Corps, Freekick, Bollywood Dhamaka, WeFunk and "New Shit" (yes, you can say that on the radio in Canada) from a music department with the freeform motto of "yes, it's music."

CKUT kicks off their FMA portal with a mix of highlights from Montreal Sessions, an artist-in-residency program and zone for experimentation that includes live performance, curation, interviews and free improvisation. It's an approach that reminds me a bit of fellow FMA curator Dublab's Sprout Sessions, but with the distinct flavor of the Montreal experimental music community.

CKUT has so much to offer Montreal and the world, so dig in to the Montreal Sessions, dig deeper at ckut.ca, and stay tuned to CKUT's Curator Portal