Kanada 70

Kanada 70 is the main home-recording guise of Toronto's Craig Dunsmuir, who has been half of Glissandro 70 with Sandro Perri and whose other active solo pseudonym is Max Gross (a recent remixer of Sandro's "Love And Light"). Around the time of the release of Glissandro 70 back in 2006, Craig started working on a series of photocopied-cover micro-releases and giving them away to friends and peers, mainly in Toronto; mailing the first handful in the sequence of K70 CD-Rs to Constellation initiated the correspondence that eventually led to the compiling of Vamp Ire for Musique Fragile Vol. 2.

Repetitive and cyclical, the hand-played and/or -punched/-programmed nature of Kanada 70 tracks (as well as occasional forays into dub-style muting/mixing) lends each return of phrase some degree of variation. Taking inspiration from prog-rock and African funk as well as strands of metal, abstract techno, industrial and noise music, these sketch-style pieces often differ in both mood and fidelity from Craig's work in Glissandro 70, but there's a shared fixation with odd time signatures and rhythmic clatter despite the oft-darker hues here.

From Battles and Thomas Mapfumo to Theo Parrish and Actress, from Autechre and Cluster to Black Dice and Bird Show, there's a slew of influences to be teased out of these tracks, and given that the Kanada 70 CD-R series is, at last count, twenty-six releases long (with other compilations culling from the stack having been issued on Polyphasic Recordings, Medusa Editions and Inyrdisk), Vamp Ire is just one possible way to piece this puzzle together.

An avid record collector and music enthusiast, Craig was a longstanding clerk/buyer at one of Toronto's leading indie stores, Soundscapes. He currently DJs disco 12"s as part of Invisible City Sound System.