Sometime in the back half of the nineties, a young Joseph Shabason was one of thousands of young people educated in the difference between damnation and salvation through the legendary Toy Machine skate video, Welcome To Hell. If, the tape suggested, the demonic underworld of American society showed itself in the various guardians of unfettered consumerism (read: big business, law enforcement, the stars and stripes themselves), then surely all that was holy resided in the antithesis of such symbols? The risk takers on the edge of society, those who rejected rigid rules in favour of speed and movement and style. The artistic rebels in a world of salesmen and cops.
Joseph Shabason’s work has always mined the personal, from 2018’s Anne and its exploration of his mother experience of degenerative illness, to the interrogation of an upbringing in an Islamic/Jewish dual-faith household which constituted most recent album The Fellowship. In each case, the Toronto-based composer and multi-instrumentalist renders otherwise unbroachable subjects into music so as to better articulate their contours, not only for his own benefit but that of the listener too. A language beyond language, able to communicate through invention and style.
A method, in its own curious manner, not all that different from skateboarding. Which makes Joseph Shabason’s latest full-length Welcome to Hell all the more fitting. A joint release by Western Vinyl and Telephone Explosion Records, the album takes the seminal Toy Machine VHS and transmutes it into his jazz-adjacent ambient music. Shrinking the distance between the creative energies of skating and musical composition, the result is a concept album which channels the movement and style of figures like Mike Maldonado and Elissa Steamer, not to mention the Toy Machine aesthetic.
A huge list of collaborators were involved too, with Kieran Adams (sound design, percussion), Michael Davidson (vibraphone), Bram Gielen (upright bass, bass guitars), Thom Gill (guitar, keys, piano, electric guitar, vocals), Hugh Marsh (violin), Phil Melanson (drums, percussion, electric drums), Vincent Spilchuk (trumpet) and Felicity Williams (vocals) all lending their talents. As lead single ‘Jamie Thomas’ shows, the result is striking. Soundscapes full of detail, movement and laidback swagger, which get at something almost intangible, the spirit of the era.
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Welcome To Hell is out on the 20th October via Western Vinyl and Telephone Explosion Records and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp.
