DOOMSQUAD, makers of psychedelic electronic dance music from Toronto, will release their new album ‘Total Time’ on April 29th via Hand Drawn Dracula (Canada) and Bella Union (Rest of world). To go along with the announcement, they released the first track lifted from the album is new single Solar Ass, which is streaming here.
Having formed in 2010 siblings Trevor, Jaclyn, and Allie Blumas soon began to explore trance and electronic beat making. Their shared fascination with dance culture, rhythm, and the unknown, along with their lifelong immersion in the arts, began to manifest as a collective ethos. Before long, DOOMSQUAD had mushroomed into a full-scale art project.
Inspired by some of their favourite artists — Georges Bataille, Richard Tuttle, Tanya Tagaq, and Genesis P-Orridge — DOOMSQUAD travelled to the New Mexican desert to write and record ‘Total Time,’ creating dark, pulsating beats interspersed with hypnotic, incantatory jams. The album opens with the enticing dance of Who Owns Noon in Sandusky, which was written to inspire the nakedness in us all, a song to wake up our inner clocks and reclaim our circadian time. Solar Ass was written as a love song to a donkey, a song for paying respect to the smaller, under-appreciated elements that carry us through our contemporary lives. The songs on ‘Total Time’ are meant to lead you through a genderless experience of transition to owning time, losing time, and becoming timeless, while providing a platform for you to dance through your consciousness.
Upon returning home from New Mexico, the band continued to draw inspiration from the Toronto arts community, which is vast but also extremely supportive and close-knit. Their friendships and connections led to some fortuitous collaborations, including one with Canadian avant-garde legend, Mary Margaret O’Hara, whose otherworldly vocals grace The Very Large Array. The driving, dirty bass lines, and analogue layers of effects come care of Graham Walsh (Holy Fuck), who produced and mixed the album.
The record features a number of other contributors: Mike Haliechuk of Fucked Up plays guitar. Industrial noise experimenter David Foster aka HUREN offers vocals on Russian Gaze. Colin Fisher and Brandon Valdivia of free-jazz duo Not the Wind, Not the Flag bring instrumentals. And, galactic twins Josh and Jesse Hasko, who perform as North America, are a crucial part of Total Time as well. Over the years, the connection between DOOMSQUAD and the twins has deepened and this summer they’re joining forces: the Haskos are becoming members of DOOMSQUAD’s live act, which will take it further than it’s ever gone before.
‘Total Time’ track listing:
1. Who Owns Noon in Sandusky
2. Pyramids on Mars
3. Collective Insanity
4. Its the Nail That Counts, Not the Rope
5. Solar Ass
6. Farmer’s Almanac
7. The Very Large Array
8. Eat The Love
9. Russian Gaze
For more information on DOOMSQUAD, visit handdrawndracula.com.
