Toronto-based musician Joshua Van Tassel has made a name for himself playing with some of Canada’s finest contemporary acts, lending his talents to Donovan Woods, Rose Cousins, Great Lake Swimmers and many more. But his creative output does not end there. Van Tassel is also a composer, and part of his solo work focuses on cinematic and often highly conceptual classical music. The style was typified by 2014’s Dance Music: Songs For Slow Motion, a collection of songs for his wife to use in her work as a craniosacral therapist—a spaced carved out of our world in which to shelter, a place beyond time’s hectic flow.
This month saw the release of the album’s follow up, Dance Music Volume II: More Songs for Slow Motion, but the record is far more than a simple sequel. Alongside a string quartet and standard electronics, Van Tassel also uses the Ondea for the first time—what is described as “a contemporary re-creation” of the early French synthesizer, the Ondes Martenot. Representing one of the first electronic instruments alongside the theremin, the Ondes Martenot was invented by Maurice Martenot, a cellist and World War II radio operator who wished to combine his two occupations. Thus emerged an instrument with the grace of the cello and the eerie mystery of radio oscillations, allowing the operator to weave emotive, ethereal and almost extraterrestrial sounds by working a ring along a wire.
The Ondea is just as versatile, and Joshua Van Tassel explores its range in the most intuitive manner—through practise and learning. Single ‘Eternal Turtle’ arose early in his days with the instrument, the product of a creative freedom only possible when starting afresh. An instinctive way of operating, almost akin to play, and then acting upon unconscious associations to follow through the emerging logic of the music. “I had gotten the instrument about two months prior,” he explains, “and had been practising every day, very slowly, and trying to play in tune.” With the added layer of effects pedals, Van Tassel crafted an ambience that struck a chord out of nowhere:
For some reason, the sound immediately made me think of a giant, slow, and very old turtle moving slowly through and even older forest. I improvised the main line that runs through out the piece thinking about how this creature would move, then layered everything else immediately after. Compared to the other pieces on the album which in some cases took weeks, this one came out in one sitting and was the first time I felt like I had touched on the sound of the album I wanted to make.
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With intentions similar to the first record, Dance Music Volume II aims to transport the listener, offer some alternative dimension in which to reside. “There’s a lot of really ugly shit happening in the world,” Van Tassel says, “and I wanted to make a really beautiful album.” But that is not to say the songs present some flat utopia. Like the strangeness of the radio oscillations, there is a an odd quality to songs like “Conjuror-er,” a mournful, alien atmosphere through which anything might emerge. The poignant ‘Their Hands On Their Hands’ has a desolation beneath the surface, and ‘Nest of Light’ something close to foreboding in its slow, foggy unfurl.
But in setting out to chart such strange waters, Joshua Van Tassel makes sure to anchor his sound in the ideals of slowness and beauty. The result is a repositioning of ambiguity, reclaiming the unknown as a site of possibility rather than fear and dread. ‘Shadows Smile For You’ might be the clearest example of this, a personal song written for his son who has a “great conversational relationship with shadows.” A shadow can be many things—a friend, a follower, a version of yourself cast back dark and different—and Van Tassel offers no answer or judgement.
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Dance Music Volume II: More Songs for Slow Motion is out now via Backward Music and available from the Joshua Van Tassel Bandcamp page.
