The debut full-length by Ariel Engle and Efrim Manuel Menuck
Shares 10-minute track “We Live On A Fucking Planet And Baby That’s The Sun”
Album out 21st April
Two acclaimed and fiercely seasoned iconoclasts of Montréal independent music join forces: ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT is the newly minted orchestral-punk electro-shoegaze power duo of Ariel Engle (La Force, Broken Social Scene) & Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion).
“Darling The Dawn” is their radiant debut long-player: singing & modular synthing in glorious blown-out tangles & tendrils of melody & drone, with contributions from Jessica Moss on violins & Liam O’Neill (SUUNS) on drums, mixed by Jace Lasek (The Besnard Lakes).
LISTEN TO “WE LIVE ON A FUCKING PLANET AND BABY THAT’S THE SUN”
“We Live On A Fucking Planet And Baby That’s The Sun” opens with haunting modular synth pulse and shimmering drone, as Menuck and Engle’s intertwining voices sing in unison and then in harmony through ornate and winding melodies. Guest players Jessica Moss on violin and Liam O’Neill (SUUNS) on drums eventually join in, helping to drive the song towards a rapturous crescendo, as the lead vocal hands off to Menuck while Engle traces soaring arcs of wordless devotional canon. The song’s lyrics contain the album’s title “Darling The Dawn” and the 10-minute track is a tour-de-force that stands as a thematic and stylistic mission statement for the album as a whole.
“We live on a fucking planet and baby that’s the sun” is a lyric that’s been floating around in my head for a couple decades. I lived in an apartment once with floor-to-ceiling sliding doors by my bed. One morning I woke at dawn, sat up like a bolt, and heard myself say those words. I could see the halo of orange pink light cut into the last of the night. The lyric is about the uncanniness of living on a sphere. The smallness of us in contrast to the size and motion of planets and the comfort of the eternal return of dawn and sun after the night.
– Ariel –
EFRIM:
we’ve known each other since 1997.
we met here in montreal, at the northeast edge of the tiny mountain.
started playing music together during the first lockdowns of 2021, with no idea but filling empty space.
like tossing seeds into an alley, hoping the blooms would rise and exhale and endure.
recorded a self-titled cassette and played a show outside. made small and immediate plans.
recorded a long-playing record and raised families. continue to make small and immediate plans.ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT= the work that gets done, the work that all of us do, trying to build a home beneath endless deluge.
the sound we make is maybe secondary to the labor involved in making that sound.
next record might be disco, or could just be a long yell in aisle 3 of some terrible grocery store.
this long-playing record:
it started with the idea of making a long thing about “THE DAWN”.
the different weights of its radiance,
the pink light that twines into white light and turns purple
the noise of it, and the way it kisses our dumb faces when we rise and leave the night behind.and then the songs turned into another thing on their own accord=the heaviness of that light when you haven’t slept,
the weight of your legs when you’ve been walking all night trying to find home.
these times are in-between times. the old things are sinking with their hands around our throat.
there is a dawn coming, and a terrible reckoning too. there’ll be even more beauty there, during the unravelling, and then even more after the dark times are through.
hold on
and hang onto what you love.
the dawn comes for us all.
ARIEL:
Efrim had an idea already for what he wanted to make when we started working together. We first talked about it at a Jennifer Castle concert at Ursa in Montréal—an apt show to have planted the germ for this project, given Jennifer’s otherworldly folk songs.
This music is inspired by ancestor music, some shared some not. A loose idea expressed in longform narratives over thick synthetic beds. Sea shanties for seas we’ve never sailed but are familiar to us.
Some of these songs were written through file sharing while both in the city in adjacent neighbourhoods. Efrim sent music, with lyrics or not, and I mostly kept the first thought I had, like a cold read. I wanted the melodies to be immediate to me and to surprise me. This is not a laboured vocal process, it’s about being a weather vane, guided by preconscious impulses.
“We live on a fucking planet and baby that’s the sun” is a lyric that’s been floating around in my head for a couple decades. I lived in an apartment once with floor-to-ceiling sliding doors by my bed. One morning I woke at dawn, sat up like a bolt, and heard myself say those words. I could see the halo of orange pink light cut into the last of the night. The lyric is about the uncanniness of living on a sphere. The smallness of us in contrast to the size and motion of planets and the comfort of the eternal return of dawn and sun after the night.
ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT
“DARLING THE DAWN”
180gLP / CD / DL
Constellation • CST171
Release date: 21 April 2023
TRACKLIST
A Sparrow’s Lift
We Live On A Fucking Planet And Baby That’s The Sun
Waiting For The Light To Quit
A Worker’s Graveyard (Poor Eternal)
The Sons And Daughters Of Poor Eternal
Anchor
Lie Down In Roses Dear
Genre: Electronic, Shoegaze, Postpunk, Devotional
RIYL: Pentangle, Can, Amps for Christ, White Magic, Trees, Windy & Carl, Kali Malone, Thee Silver Mt Zion
ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT is the recently minted duo of Ariel Engle (La Force, Patrick Watson, Broken Social Scene) and Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion). Longtime friends, collaborators, and stalwarts of the Montréal post-punk community, this is their first full-fledged project together. ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT weaves these two unique voices through lustrous tendrils of blown-out tones and drones, expanding on Menuck’s eponymous modular and analog synth-based work of recent years, now imbued with an additionally searing, soulful warmth and melodicism through Engle’s singing.
The duo speak about the inspiration behind the record, their work likened to a “dawn” which is coming for us in the real world. “These times are in-between times.” says Efrim Manuel Menuck, “the old things are sinking with their hands around our throat.” But as they sing throughout the record, some brighter world must come. “There’ll be even more beauty there, during the unravelling, and then even more after the dark times are through.”
For Menuck, the record started “with an idea of making a long thing about ‘THE DAWN’, the different weights of its radiance, the way it kisses our dumb faces when we rise and leave the night behind, the heaviness of that light when you haven’t slept.” As the album title suggests, literal sleepless anxiety/euphoria and a sense of somatic channelling is also vital to these songs: “I mostly kept the first thought I had, like a cold read, I wanted the melodies to be immediate and to surprise me, not a laboured process; it’s about being a weather vane, guided by preconscious impulses” says Engle.
The record’s sometimes bleary, often incantatory hopefulness shines through in electronic shoegaze suffused with freak-folk, kosmische, darkwave and post-industrial. Flowing from ambient minimalism to pulsing maximalism, “Darling The Dawn” conjures traditionals sung in the haze of earliest light, accompanied by overdriven circuit boards powered with ungrounded wires. It’s the singing and lyrics above all, in sentiment and delivery, that conjure certain freak-folk furrows—Engle calls this “music inspired by ancestor music, sea shanties for seas we’ve never sailed”—while the instrumentation resonates out-of-time, in a glistening liminal at once synthetic and analogue.
Warm and distorted synths provide the palette, along with signal-processed violin contributions from fellow-traveller Jessica Moss, and the drumming of Liam O’Neill (SUUNS) that helps propel the album’s pair of 10-minute centrepieces “We Live On A Fucking Planet And Baby That’s The Sun” and “The Sons And Daughters Of Poor Eternal” to their spiralling peaks.
“Darling The Dawn” is an album of preternaturally genre-bending sonics and songwriting, aiming to capture, as Engle says, “the uncanniness of living on a sphere, the smallness of us in contrast to the size and motion of planets and the comfort of the eternal return of dawn and sun after the night.” This is a wholly compelling collaboration between Engle and Menuck, a set of songs thrumming with alternately tender and serrated beauty, as only their combined strengths and sensibilities could conjure.