CCMC
Cover of LP Volume One. Group photographed in front of the Music Gallery, 30 St. Patrick Street, Toronto, 1976. Left to right: Peter Anson, Michael Snow, Casey Sokol, Nobuo Kubota, Bill Smith, Graham Coughtry, Al Mattes, Larry Dubin.
From 1974 until the early 1980’s CCMC played at least two concerts a week, most of which took place in their own venue, The Music Gallery, in Toronto. The band was and continues to be a ‘free music orchestra’ devoted to spontaneous composition. One look at the cover of the Vol 1 LP and it’s apparent that CCMC are not your typical hippy free-rock group, slick-suited jazz cats, nor tweed academic weekend composers. In fact, CCMC never really look like typical musicians at all, but rather like visual artists, family men, scholars, Canucks, ecologists, sculptors and radical adults they are. Similarly, their sound can never really be pinned down in the way that other devotees of ‘free’ music usually are; never as dogmatic as AMM, as angry as American free jazz, as bleak as Japanese free jazz or as humorless as European free improv. CCMC are as comfortable playing toys and melodies as they were noise electronics and torrential freak-outs. In the truest sense CCMC were sonic explorers devoted to spontaneous free music, uninhibited by any restriction, be it melody, silence, genre, volume or instrumentation.
The Music Gallery, 1984 Casey Sokol, Michael Snow, Al Mattes, John Kamevaar, Nobuo Kubota.
Current Members: Michael Snow, John Oswald & Paul Dutton
Past Members: Peter Anson (guitar and later synthesizer); Graham Coughtry (trombone); Larry Dubin (percussion); Greg Gallagher (saxophones); Nobuo Kubota (saxophones); Allan Mattes (bass, bass guitar, electronics); Casey Sokol (piano); Bill Smith (saxophones); and Michael Snow (piano, trumpet, guitar, analogue synthesizer)
Polyphasic Recordings is honoured to be involved in the distribution of the CCMC back catalogue.
CCMC Vol 4 – Free Soap
CCMC Vol 5 – Without A Song
Larry Dubin & CCMC
CCMC ’90
Michael Snow – 2 Radio Solos
- Kanada 70 – Meagre Means
May 8, 2011 | 12:01 pm
Mysterious CD-Rs have been appearing in records stores across Toronto for the last few years, all housed in photocopied Letraset sleeves with a $0.00 price sticker on the front, all under the moniker Kanada 70, the nom-de-plume of Craig Dunsmuir (Glissandro 70, Max Gross). Culling from several of these releases between 2006 and 2010, all […]
May 1, 2011 | 11:26 am
Named after the Brian De Palma film about the intimacy and invasive nature of sound recording (in his case a metaphor for filmmaking), this EP finds Toronto’s VOWLS eavesdropping on Pop music. The a-side Burlap swaggers around a drum machine beat that sounds like a New Order 45 played at 33rpm, with thick psychedelic layers […]- VOWLS Plays Monterey Pop (Remastered)
March 25, 2011 | 11:27 am
About the Film Inspired by Ron Hardy’s disco re-edits, Michael Marranda’s revised literary texts and Richard Prince’s appropriated photographs, this video is composed entirely from footage taken from D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary on the 1967 Monterey Pop music festival. Instead of using the iconic footage of the performances, VOWLS chose to focus on the audience, […] -
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