Introducing The Ryōkan Band
towards a chemistry of the group sound
Friends,
The record approaches. Another song was released earlier this month, Fugitive Song (a response to Rainer Maria Rilke Sonnet #3). The song, like all songs on this record, is a testament to the brilliant players that make up The Ryōkan Band. And so I ramble.
When the single released I shared these stray thoughts about the session:
Felicity, Alex and Evan’s cascading harmonies in the chorus are so powerful and uplifting. I love each of their voices so much.
There are moments in this record when I listen to Felicity and I hear Anh, or follow a guitar line of Alex’s and end up with Josh’s somersaulting bass. Phil and Evan, both such distinct players, often diverge and come together like figure eights.
In the recording sessions, Josh often spoke of the necessity to be on “funk island”. This is one of those songs.
What these thoughts encircle is perhaps chemistry…or alchemy. A group is cast together and through their interaction, a transformation takes place. Tang Dynasty poets like Li Bai and Du Fu (whose poems are featured on the record) often practiced or wrote about alchemy, in pursuit of the elixir of immortality (a concoction of cinnabar, gold, mercury, sulphur) that could grant eternal life. The record begins and ends with short instrumentals entitled “The Elixir of Immortality” in a nod to this process. While the chemical process may have been poisonous and often deadly, can we not think of their poems’ endurance and transformation through time, translation, medium as alchemical? Is this not what also occurs when a group of musicians come together and a song emerges?
To reverse the alchemical mix of cinnabar, gold, mercury, sulphur that constitute this record, I wanted to share some of my first experiences with each of the artists on the record. A mix of biography, early impressions and lots of hyperlinks for you to explore their music.
Anh Phung
There is a beautiful symbiosis that occurs when Anh plays the flute. It feels utterly natural, an extension of her body, capable of whatever imagination stirs and whatever sound is required. To hear her is to be transfixed - magic!
The first time we ever played together was in 2017 at the Monarch Tavern. Having met her briefly a few weeks before, I asked her on a whim to play as a trio with Josh Cole and I at an upcoming show. I remember a feeling of great joy as we played - Anh’s blossoming flute instantly opened up new corners of my mind.
Excitedly, I asked her to drop by the session for Stardust a few months later. With a casual ease she entered the session, and over a couple hours contributed enormously important sections to City By My Window, Rough Times, and Skyline.
On How Can I Possibly Sleep When There Is Music, one can listen to the record with Anh as the lead vocalist: there is as much expression, tone, and lyricism to her playing as any of the words. When a poem enters song, we must rethink the boundaries.
Here is a beautiful solo performance of Anh at the Women From Space Festival in 2021
I love her playing on this Dan Edmond song \ /\ /itness
Alex Lukashevsky
The Bad Baby himself. A Toronto icon. A spidery guitar player, a surrealyricist, a voice capable of the croon, the bark and the moan.
My first introduction to Alex was an accident. It was 2012 (?) and I had just started frequenting Holy Oak Cafe. I happened to walk in one day as Alex, Felicity and Daniela were preparing to play a set of material from their recently released record Too Late Blues (a masterpiece!). What freedom! I had never heard a set of music like this. At 22 years old I was still figuring out how to express myself and here was a path. Their voices were elastic, bouncing off the walls and returning to each other in an embrace of harmony and dissonance. Alex treated the guitar so singularly, alternating between stray obtuse lines and then more classically, as if he was a chanson or bossa singer. Something in my brain was dislodged that day and I often attribute it as my entrance into the beautiful world of music that populated Holy Oak, carries on in The Tranzac, and percolates in the other small corners of Toronto.
To have Alex play on this record is so meaningful and how he plays is so integral to the expression of this project.
Some of my favorite guitar playing of Alex’s is on this Eucalyptus record
The Tranzac Experience of Deep Dark United (was too young/out of the loop to witness this era but grateful that this was preserved...and for the reunion(?)shows at Cameron House in 2019)
Evan Cartwright
Evan! What a remarkable human. A curious and playful thinker whose expression in percussion, guitar, and language is so fluid, emotive and powerful. To share a friendship and collaborative partnership over the last ten years is such a gift.
Evan has reminded me over the years of a vague memory of when we first met at a mutual friend's apartment in our early 20s. Despite the foggy encounter, Evan soon after started playing in the LUKA band alongside Ada Dahli and Julie Arsenault. What a special configuration of sweet and beautiful people. As a virtuosic player, Evan knew how to meet us where the music was at: simple, Jonathan Richman-esque folk-pop. With a simplicity of playing he would animate the songs with a vitality and spirit that lifted the songs to new places. I remember when he first burst into yelling “No!” during O My Heart is Full in a response to my chorus (perhaps my favorite part of our sets back then).
Over the years, the music we’ve made together has changed. I still strum two or three chords, but the arrangements and language has given way to a greater canvas of sounds, rhythms and colours. Evan still always meets the song in whatever form it arrives.
His 2022 solo record bit by bit (my favorite record of that year)
The intensity of the 2020 Ways+ collab with Brodie West and Simon Toldamn: Fortunes
The powerful rock trio Cola with Tim Darcy and Ben Stidworthy (see them live!)
I also recommend the rare tape The Hour (of which there are only 12 cassette tapes made, and seven remaining)
Felicity Williams
Like wind brushing against trees (that sway and soft rustle), or perhaps the flight of a bird. There’s an airiness to Felicity’s tone, but also something very stark and grounded. And also a sacred quality to the way her voice carries words - a weight and beauty. It moves me!
My introduction to her was through her trio set with Alex recalled earlier. A few weeks/months later (before?) I saw her perform with Thom Gill at Cine-Cycle. A miraculous event. A few years later in 2015 we performed together in the inaugural Holy Oak Family Singers tribute to Judee Sill. While Felicity sings harmonies on Stardust, it wasn’t until the Ryokan Band’s first stirrings (2018) that the potential of our singing-together came to be. The doubling, the harmonizing, the echo and response. The texture of two quiet voices brushing up against each other (the wind and the tree!). It was such a thrill and still is! Our duet of Anew Day captures it quite well and, so does every song on this new record.
Felicity’s own work in adapting Al Purdy’s poems to song is also an inspiration for the possibility of cross-medium translation and expression. Anyone who has been privileged to hear live performances of the Purdy-songs knows it is a treasure.
One of the Purdy songs can be heard here
The stellar collaboration with Andrew Zuckerman as You Can Can (a favorite of 2023)
Deep collab with justin haynes: Biodad
Philippe Melanson
The sheer force of expression astounds. To play like Phil is to to be so highly attuned to space, to texture and to how the body wants (or doesn’t expect) to move. It is at once such exploratory and curious playing and yet always so grounded in a feel that rests in the body so comfortably. The animated quality of his face is inevitable when you’re moving through a song in such a way.
I first met Phil at the same Holy Oak Family Singers tribute to Judee Sill (well, the rehearsal). I had seen him play as part of Bernice and had been amazed at how he supported the band (as well as his iconic fashion). I have seen him play in countless projects over the years and, in whatever context, your eyes and ears are drawn to him. It is not distracting, it is a recognition of the band's core pulsing and propelling the others to a higher plane.
This new record is our first collaboration on tape and the spirit of invention he brought to it is deeply special. The curator of small sounds/objects, the wayward recorder musings, the propulsion of acoustic drum n’ bass rhythms. Bless him!
virtuoso display of e-drums on Sam Gendel’s Satin Doll
Bernice the greatest band of our generation
Beautiful live video of Phil and Sam
The rat-drifting return of Impossible Burger with Phil, Karen Ng and Christopher Willies - special!!
Josh Cole
Josh is a disciple of the bass - there is an understanding of the instrument’s expressive possibilities and a desire to keep learning/unlearning his approach. An equally inventive player in the groundless leap of free improvisation and a deeply funky pocket in whatever song he supports.
Josh first reached out to me when he was curating a bill of music at June Records. A few years later we crossed paths again at ‘that judee sill rehearsal.’ How special to walk in a room of near-strangers in 2015 and still be communing as friends and collaborators almost ten years later.
Josh came on as a key collaborator during the making of Stardust. Evan had been playing with him in the Brodie West Quintet and I felt their chemistry would enliven my first brush with more jazz-adjacent songwriting.
Often people speak of the bass player in a group as this felt support, but why make it invisible? It needs to express itself too! Josh plays with an ear towards the arrangement, locking into the unit and stretching out when space allows. You can hear it all over this record: he is the fundamental and the flowery. How lucky to play with him!
Also his brilliant wife Sonia animated the wondrous Crazy Love video and their daughter Jojo is extraordinarily cool. A special family.
a heavy and surprising world conjured by Kind Mind
Josh in the eterna-groove for Craig Dunsmir’s sensational Dun-Dun Band record
Brodie West Quintet - what a group! Clips may be my favorite Toronto jazz record of the last decade.
Sandro Perri
The master. That fragile tender voice. His otherworldly and familiar songwriting. The architect of sounds. A quiet presence that looms so large on the scene.
Before I got acquainted with the extended Sandro universe, my brother Adam, living in Montreal at the time, was telling me about Constellation records, this amazing band Drumheller he saw at Resonance and their inscrutably sublime guitar player Eric Chenaux. Thank you Adam!
Soon after I realized the sounds I was discovering at the holy oak (lukashevsky) were part of a larger whole. And there was Sandro as player, mixer, engineer, mastering on all the liner notes. And then his own records - what enormously beautiful records.
In 2014 Sandro graciously welcomed my request to open a set of his at the holy oak. I was ecstatic. A week later we had coffee at the oak and discussed music, film and our daily lives. The time he made for me was very meaningful and in retrospect is part of a constellation of small gestures that navigated me into an inspiring community of players.
Working with Sandro on this record was a dream. While the group had cultivated a distinct sound and chemistry prior to the recording session, Sandro was deft at recognizing how to adjust the density and weight of our group dynamic. He also got me to question how I sang certain songs - to force me to consciously parse the distinctions between singing, speaking and the tones in between. I am so grateful for his presence and guidance in the session.
Impossible Spaces still sounds so fresh
Joe Strutt’s recording of the best song of the 10’s
Off World 3 (Nicole Rampersaud’s unbelievable solo on Impulse Controller!)
What is a record? An entrance, a threshold. Come on in!
how can I possibly sleep when there is music is out on may 31st everywhere via next door records.
I'll be playing some shows in support of the record in May and June and there will be more to announce soon for late summer and fall. The dates are below.
Yours truly,
Luka Kuplowsky
PS
May 25, Calgary, East Down Get Down
June 14, Hamilton, Into the Abyss Records w/ ALMA
June 18, Toronto, The Tranzac Main Hall w/ THE HEART OF GOING LA
PPS
Whenever I share one of these entries I’ll give you a window into the moment of writing –more specifically, the food/drink/music/film that has filled this specific day.
All the records I mentioned in the post + Blue Asia - La Yeu Cua Tung Yeu / Samba de Janeiro
Drinking Hong Kong Milk Tea and eating a green onion pancake at Hong Kong Island
