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An incredible work combining shoegaze, pop, and ambient into an extraordinary album. Recommended a thousand times over.
Favorite track: The Sons And Daughters Of Poor Eternal.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
All orders include album lyrics sheet as a downloadable PDF.
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180gram LP pressed at Optimal (Germany) comes in 350gsm Arktika jacket + 300gsm Arktika inner sleeve, printed with LE-UV inks. Jacket has colour flood inside. Includes download card.
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Includes unlimited streaming of "Darling The Dawn"
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Get the 180gLP of ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT + 2 other 180gLPs featuring Efrim Manuel Menuck for a special vinyl bundle price:
ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT "Darling The Dawn" 180gLP (CST171, 2023)
Efrim Manuel Menuck + Kevin Doria "are SING SINCK, SING" 180gLP (CST144, 2019)
Efrim Manuel Menuck "Pissing Stars" 180gLP (CST129, 2018)
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Includes unlimited streaming of "Darling The Dawn"
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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. AH_ML 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. “Darling The Dawn” is a spellbinding album of preternaturally genre-bending sonics and songwriting: a sort of electronic shoegaze suffused with freak-folk, kosmische, darkwave and post-industrial, flowing from ambient minimalism to pulsing maximalism, conjuring traditionals sung in the haze of earliest light accompanied by overdriven circuit boards powered with ungrounded wires.
Engle and Menuck see ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT in a folk lineage traced through the likes of Pentangle and Trees to White Magic and Amps For Christ. While there’s no discernable guitar or acoustic instrumentation on the album (warm distorted synths provide the palette, along with signal-processed violin from fellow-traveller Jessica Moss), off-kilter drone incantations like “A Sparrow’s Lift” and “A Workers’ Graveyard (Poor Eternal)” perhaps sit most overtly within these seams of the skewed-folk substratum. The dichotomic ritualism of Can is an adjacent signpost, where methodical longform soundscaping combines with a feeling of extemporized immediacy. The album’s tremendous 10-minute centerpieces “We Live On A Fucking Planet And Baby That’s The Sun” and the motorik-driven “The Sons And Daughters Of Poor Eternal” also make this influence explicit thanks in part to the resplendent drumming of guest Liam O’Neil (Suuns), who helps propel both tracks to their spiralling peaks.
Above all it’s the singing and lyrics, in method and melodic delivery, that conjure certain freak-folk furrows. Engle calls this “music inspired by ancestor music, sea shanties for seas we’ve never sailed” and the duo have indeed forged a collection on “Darling The Dawn” where vocals often feel strangely rooted in traditionals, while the instrumentation resonates out-of-time, in a liminal space at once glisteningly synthetic and oxidized in analog patina. As the album title suggests, sleepless anxiety/euphoria and a sense of somatic channeling is 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. 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.”
“Darling The Dawn” captures a wholly compelling collaboration between Engle and Menuck in an album of genuine thematic power, thrumming with alternately tender and serrated beauty as only their combined strengths and sensibilities could conjure. Thanks for listening.
credits
released April 21, 2023
La Colectiva “ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT”
Ariel Engle – Voice
Efrim Manuel Menuck – Noise
Blessed guests:
Liam O’Neill played drums and Jessica Moss played violins.
All of it recorded at Thee Might Hotel2Tango and flooded basement.
Mixed by Jace Lasek and mastered by Harris Newman.
supported by 366 fans who also own “"Darling The Dawn"”
First half is difficult and beautiful; second half is mournful and ethereal. There are deep movements within. Jessica Moss is an amazing artist. aconitum vulparia
Portland shoegaze that plays, as the best representatives of the genre do, with huge, hollow atmosphere against intimate observations. Bandcamp New & Notable Nov 23, 2016
This Austin group stitches together the synthesized sounds of the '80s & '90s with '00s indie & '70s AM gold, all under glitchy electronics. Bandcamp New & Notable Sep 26, 2018
supported by 354 fans who also own “"Darling The Dawn"”
Does anyone have a source/link to a translation of the Yiddish (and other) lyrics? Love the atmosphere and musicianship on this album, yet I'm confident I would enjoy it more if I could understand the words. Thanks in advance! thegreatgrackle