(Austin Weber presents our premiere of the debut album by the two-person project Cora Canning.)
Some of our readers may be familiar with the mind behind today’s stream of Cora Canning – Unveiled Webbing, as it was spawned by the mad scientist from a project called Nostril Caverns that I’ve been covering here at NCS since last year.
Nostril Caverns is Toronto-based multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Chris Balch’s one-man band, which has been active since 1999. The project’s music has covered a wide variety of styles and mergers between genres depending on the release, but often revolves around grindcore, technical grindcore, death metal, black metal, prog metal, and also improvised/experimental music. Earlier this year at NCS, I covered his latest 99-song technical deathgrind (with black metal influences) release, Spatial Lacerations, and I continue coming back to it.
In between sessions of work on his current absurdly ambitious plan for an upcoming release in which each song will be composed of 100 unique sections (instrumental demos of which are available for two of them here and here), he partnered with his friend and fellow multi-instrumentalist Dave Turnbull to create Cora Canning’s Unveiled Webbing, which we’re streaming early below.
To borrow the description found on the Bandcamp page for the release, the music here is “Bizarre Randomized Experimental Rock/Jazz”, though I’m keen to stress there’s plenty of metal music influence to it, at least enough to count as a reason to premiere it here! Even for me, it’s hard to describe or compare the music here to anything else I’ve heard, though I do often get a distinct Behold… The Arctopus zany instrumental prog-metal vibe paired with odd and often funny opening samples, and some of Chris’s more grind-influenced ideas pop up at times as well.
Unveiled Webbing is a strange yet fascinating musical journey, one you may be surprised at how much you enjoy in spite of the “Bizarre” and “Randomized” tags worn unabashedly on its sleeve. Below, we’ll touch on the unique process for the creation of the music on Unveiled Webbing. The booklet accompanying the album provides the following explanation, which is quite fascinating and inventive:
“We (Chris Balch & Dave Turnbull) started by each recording 49 drum tracks, 49 keyboard tracks, 98 guitar tracks, and everything was improvised. Each instrument was recorded alone while listening to silence, except for a count-in and count-out to signal 20 seconds. Then 1 drum track, 1 keyboard track, and 2 guitar tracks were randomly chosen for all 98 songs.”
Here is a further statement from Chris Balch about Unveiled Webbing and how his collaboration on it with Dave Turnbull came to be:
“Dave and I have been collaborating since the ’90s back in high school and we still get together once in awhile and record some improv music. For this album, the reason we got together was actually to play some music at my sister’s wedding, and I asked him if we could record one of these randomized albums while he was here.
“The idea behind the randomization process is to have each instrument playing completely unrelated parts at the same time, creating a weird seamingly incoherent sound that becomes familiar after multiple listens. This differs from free jazz/improv where a band plays their instruments together at the same time while hearing each other, because we recorded our instruments one at a time while listening to silence. It’s just another way of making music and trying to keep things interesting.”
*Cora Canning – Unveiled Webbing will see official release this Friday, September 8th
Pre-orders available here:
https://nostrilcaverns.bandcamp.com/album/unveiled-webbing-2017
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/NostrilCaverns/