Yamantaka // Sonic Titan Sign To Toronto’s Paper Bag Records

Yamantaka // Sonic Titan sign to Toronto-based label Paper Bag Records.  The label will issue the band’s Polaris Music Prize short listed debut album “YT//ST“ digitally immediately with a physical release following on September 11th.

The video for Hoshi Neko lifted from their debut album has been selected for screening at the 15th annual Antimatter Film Festival which runs from October 12 to 21 in Victoria, BC.  Watch the video below.

YT//ST was founded in late 2007 by performance artists alaska B and Ruby Kato Attwood, born from the ashes of the late Lesbian Fight Club. Armed with mixed-race identities, mad illustration skills and a whole pile of home-brew junk electronics, alaska and Ruby wrote and performed the first mini ‘Noh-Wave’ Opera, YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN I in April 2008. YT//ST continued to perform short operas, eventually forming a network of Asian and Indigenous artists through collaboration and formed the current YT//ST collective. Montrealers had come to know YT//ST by their dazzling musical theatre performances in giant monochrome paper sets, sometimes in far out places, like the Montreal Eaton Centre Food Court at 2AM. Aesthetically, they blend the poorly appropriated styles of Noh, Chinese Opera, Chinese, Japanese and First Nations Mythology, Black & White Television, Psychedelia & Rock Operatics into a sensory feast of nigh-monochromatic costuming, unique hand-built musical instruments and their own mangaesque cardboard ‘NEVERFLAT’ style of 2.5D set design. YT//ST continues based in both Montreal & Toronto.

The collective functions as a mutating and constantly evolving art cult that brings together individuals of Asian, Indigenous & Diasporic identity to perform/create as a collective. Working in multiple mediums including installation, theatre, music, video, animation, illustration and design, YT//ST negotiate cultural clashes between dominant cultures and those whose traditions are oppressed, erased or being eclipsed. They retell the mythologies, customs and stereotypes of their ancestors with cartoon bodies as their vessels.

For more information on Yamantaka // Sonic Titan, visit www.ytstlabs.com.