FYEAR
FYEAR

"A lament to a burning planet, this restless debut from Montréal avant-garde-jazz ensemble has an end-of-times feel à la Matana Roberts." - MOJO 

 “The dissonances will become sonic complements, the noise will become pleasing and the future, well, the future might look a bit brighter. As long as we have people living on earth that look at it from a good angle. And who try to come up with ideas of how to understand and then shape our future.” - Veil of Sound

"The music may alternate between soft and loud passages, but it never veers far from its spirit of dystopian panic. “Pt. VII: Pure Pursuit” weeps for the uncertainty of human existence. To use cultural critic and theorist Mark Fisher’s pungent phrase, their music describes the psychological damage caused by 'the slow cancellation of the future.'" - Art Fuse

"A furious indictment of our times, a vision of fierce conviction for the future." - BBC Radio 3

Sharp and Kellough have collaborated on wordsound projects for over a decade, performing widely at avant-garde festivals across Canada, developing a symbiotic relationship where spoken text knits into the very fabric of instrumentation and composition. FYEAR has been emerging from these ongoing processes and performances since 2016, with the intensive interaction of two vocalists, and texts that anxiously interrogate our present and future capitalist polycrisis. The vision of a larger instrumental ensemble began to consolidate in 2018-2019 as Sharp continued writing arrangements and developing the music in tandem with Kellough’s refinement of the spoken word arc. 

This debut album by FYEAR documents its resulting signature 40-minute multi-movement work, which was fully realized in 2020 and has been performed several times over the past three years. The ensemble’s first performance was commissioned during pandemic lockdown by Jazzahead! Festival (Bremen DE), recorded in an empty Montréal venue, and premiered as a broadcast in April 2021 (subsequently rebroadcast by several festivals in Europe, Britain and Canada that year). The group’s proper live debut on 11 September 2021 at Send + Receive (Winnipeg CA) was roundly hailed as a festival highlight, with rapturous receptions following at live performances during the 2022 Suoni Per Il Popolo Festival (Montréal CA) and the 2023 Moers Festival in Germany. FYEAR is an undeniably gripping and singular live experience of electroacoustic, semiotic, musical and political substance. The album captures the balance of widescreen dynamic intensity and unflinchingly urgent grittiness of the work, further contextualized by extensive printed artwork culled from FYEAR’s live visual projections (by acclaimed graphic artist Kevin Yuen Kit Lo). 

Jason Sharp has released three solo albums on Constellation and has appeared on records by artists as diverse as Roscoe Mitchell, Matana Roberts, Nadah El Shazly, Ratchet Orchestra, Sam Shalabi’s Land Of Kush and Elisapie. Kaie Kellough has been a sound performer for two decades; his poetry and short story writing have been nominated for multiple awards and have won the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. Other FYEAR members have credits that include Mingus Big Band, Aaron Parks, Lhasa, Bell Orchestre, Patrick Watson, and various award-winning film soundtrack works.

PACKAGING NOTES

CREDITS

FYEAR is:
Jason Sharp (electronics, bass saxophone)
Kaie Kellough (voice)
Tawhida Tanya Evanson (voice)
Joe Grass (pedal steel)
Jesse Zubot (violin)
Joshua Zubot (violin)
Stefan Schneider (drums)
Tommy Crane (drums)
Kevin Yuen Kit Lo (typography and visual design)

Produced, composed, and arranged by Jason Sharp.
Texts by Kaie Kellough.