Exo [LP] Vinyl Record

Mark Molnar has been a linchpin of the Ottawa experimental music scene for over two decades,spanning contemporary classical, electroacoustic, industrial/noise, and improv. As a string playerin a wide range of projects, an organizer and curator of innumerable shows, and via his own avantgarde label Black Bough Records, Molnar's unflagging contributions to independent music culturein Canada's capital city have been significant. EXO is his Constellation debut: a remarkable andbracing suite of post-classical composition on which Molnar plays every instrument. Meticulouslyself-recorded, primarily with strings, harp, and piano, EXO balances thematic melodicism,polytonality, and dissonance across three elegiac pieces of exquisitely expressive dynamism. Thisis exacting modern chamber music that blends formal and harmonic complexity with a solemnemotive sensibility accessible to a broad audience. Listeners that yearn for some edge anddisquietude in a landscape of often all-too-approachable post-classical music should find EXOeminently worth their time and attention.While Molnar is a highly trained string player, and studied music under Aubrey Wolfe, microtonalitywith James Tenney, and composition with R. Murray Schafer, his trajectory has been entirely andintentionally outside the academy, signalling a socio-artistic commitment to DIY culture, forgedfrom an early passion for the sonic worlds of post-hardcore, post-punk, no-wave, free improv, powerelectronics, and other independent/underground musics. His classically-informed works have beendescribed as "tense currents of musical modernism invigorated with punk's raw vitality." EXO carriesan undercurrent influenced by dark industrial and ambient metal in particular, with microphonespurposely placed to pick up the low-end frequencies of the piano body, and of a bass drumpositioned as a resonant skin in the acoustic space; an electroacoustic strategy organically meshedto the crisply defined and pristinely recorded pointillisms and polychords of strings, harp, and piano,which feed into this noisefloor of crepuscular sub-bass disquietude and decay. It's a productionaesthetic that lends EXO a distinct undertow of tension and feeling, a sort of roiling maximalismwhere the chamber instrumentation traces arcs and waves of form and flow as if drawn from a dark,impervious ocean below. It also reinforces the profound hermeticism of Molnar's process, as aforbiddingly solitary creative act of immersion and navigation. The album artwork, featuring semiabstract stills of the sea by British photographer Ed Allen, further reifies this metaphor.