Drumheller by Drumheller

Drumheller are Eric Chenaux (guitar), Rob Clutton (bass), Nick Fraser (drums), Doug Tielli (trombone), and Brodie West (alto sax). Everybody composes and everybody improvises. Drumheller plays out of jazz. And there are family resemblances to be found (if you’re looking for them) to other out-of-jazz milieus, whether they are (or have been) in Amsterdam, Empty Bottle Chicago, Downtown New York. But this music could only be made in Toronto. The tensions between what is tight and what is slack, what is sharp and what is sweet, what is together and what is alone, what is multiple and what is single, and (most of all) the fact that the group never has to demonstrate to or clarify for the listener their intensions around any of these tensions, are all allowed in their hometown. Each musician in Drumheller brings very different musical predilections to the project and all of the group’s resources are present in their sound: for sure anything jazz; but also experimental free improvisation, post-punk, traditional folk, formal composition, noise, and all manner of groove music. Anything can be allowed, but never for the sake of allowance: it has to make Drumheller music.

Rat-drifting music searches for specificity, celebrates detail. It experiments with radical particularity and wonders about the possibilities and potentials of those experiments. If the music drifts, it does so in the hopes that the listener drifts with it—her/his imagination experimenting with the possibilities of the music as well, as they find their own route through their own experience.