COLIN STETSON Vinyl & CDs

Review: The vinyl edition of the erst CD album The Love It Took Took Leave You by Colin Stetson is now upon us. The esteemed saxophonist and multi-reedist marks his first full-length solo recording since 2017 here, delivering an album drawn on the experience of love lost, and yet zest for life regained. Written some years before its release - yet always lurking in the background, waiting for recognition apropos the right moment - The Love It Took To Leave You was recorded over the course of a week in early 2023 at The Darling Foundry, a 144-year-old former metalworks facility in Montreal, now transformed into a contemporary art complex, with a voluminous main room that still maintains its raw architecture of brick, concrete and steel. With an arsenal of saxes and clarinets, Stetson builds a heartbroken yet integral tapestry of emotions, his saxophonic welt-geist riffing upon whirling, looping maelstroms of breath, chamber reverb and unerring focus.

Review: Canadian saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist and frequent collaborator of Arcade Fire, Bon Iver and most recently post-metal juggernauts Cult Of Luna; Colin Stetson isn't your standard film composer, nor is 2018's cerebral psychological family horror Hereditary your standard frightfest. Stetson's droning brass and avant-garde compositions may add layers of mercurial dread to filmmaker Ari Aster's bleak visuals but when isolated, the pieces take on entirely new life of caustic, crawling atmospherics which swell to nauseating degrees before spiralling into frenzies of twisted modern classical imbued jazz, complete with bursts of warped brass and psychotic strings coalescing into truly hellish soundscapes.