Mark Gane has had a storied profession within the Canadian music enterprise. He’s the co-founder of iconic late Seventies/Nineteen Eighties band Martha and the Muffins, and the author of their worldwide hit single “Echo Seaside”.
He was lately inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Corridor Of Fame for Echo Seaside, however Mark is far more than a pop-punk band guitarist or songwriter, nonetheless. Gane is a visible artist (painter, photographer, graphic design), efficiency artist, and a composer who likes to discover soundscapes far past the same old bounds of radio-friendly music.
Mark can be an avid gardener.
Most of his passions emerge on the experimental instrumental album, with compositions that had been impressed by plant names, and internal worlds of fantasy. It’s a private challenge that has been actually a long time within the making.
Backyard Music: The Album
The album was launched Might 1, 2025 independently, and is obtainable on Bandcamp.
The music is atmospheric and really modern in its sound; you might name it ambient music, for lack of a greater designation. The compositions are layered with harmonies and sounds, together with electronics, sampled vocalisations and bits of recorded spoken phrases and phrases used nearly as melodic parts. Love Lies Bleeding contains the lone sung lyric, “Honey Bee you’re gone for good, and so I sing this tune…”. Many tracks construct a contrapuntal construction inside these layers.
He explores completely different moods by means of the 11 tracks. Lethal Nightshade, for instance, makes use of layers of appears like gongs or chimes that ebb and circulation just like the wind, intercut with a grizzled voice speaking in slo mo. It successfully creates a type of haunted temper.
Mark’s ardour for sonic exploration is clear all through the tracks. Bare Broom Rape, named after Orobanche uniflora, also referred to as the one-flowered most cancers root, or ghost pipe, begins with chook songs and whistles, after which will get twisted up into what might be described as digital scribbling. Even Johnny Leap Up, maybe essentially the most typical sounding of the 11 tracks, takes a swingy pop type of rhythm down a meandering backyard path of experimental sounds and layers.
Candy Rocket (as a plant, aka Hesperis matronalis, or Dame’s Rocket), performs with the which means of the phrases with digital noise that resembles an area rocket’s sounds in flight, with a recurring spoken observe of assorted voices saying Oh my God! time and again. It’s a witty soundscape.
Mark Gane: The Interview
Mark’s fascination with sound exploration started throughout his artwork faculty days. “In fact, again then it was OCA and never OCAD,” he says. “I used to be a normal research pupil, which meant I might take something.”
On the then-Ontario Faculty of Artwork, he took programs as numerous as life drawing, experimental music, and summary portray.
“It was a type of uncommon moments in life,” he says of the chance. He notes that the type of setting the place college students are merely inspired to check no matter topics they need is uncommon. It supplied the uncommon luxurious of having the ability to fail with out anybody laughing, with out the excessive stakes sometimes inherent to inventive research.
“I actually valued these years. I believe when the artwork school grew to become a college I believe one thing received misplaced there.” It wasn’t a tutorial setting, he factors out, for higher or worse. “I had some phenomenal lecturers.”
A type of lecturers was Estonian-Canadian composer, pianist, organist, instructor and author Udo Kasemets. Kasemets taught on the Hamilton Conservatory of Music after emigrating to Canada in 1951, and was a music critic for the Toronto Star from 1959 to 1962. He was the founder-director of the Toronto Bach Society within the late Fifties, and a powerful proponent of latest music.
It was when Gane’s ardour for experimental music started to take flower.
“He was on an actual John Cage cycle,” he mentioned of Kasemets. He taught Gane about probability compositions, and tips on how to construction a bit round them.
Throughout Gane’s time there, OCA was visited by ensembles like CCMC, a free improvisation group based in 1974 with members that included Nobuo Kubota, Graham Coughtry, and Michael Snow. (Enjoyable truth: the trio would additionally go on to discovered The Music Gallery.)
“They might play within the Annex,” he recollects.
Even earlier than OCA, at Etobicoke Collegiate, a pal launched Mark to the likes of Penderecki, Stockhausen, and Steve Reich.
“I believe the primary time he came to visit to my home, he introduced the third King Crimson album, and Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew,” he says.
Whereas Martha and the Muffins took the vast majority of his consideration for a number of years, Gane has carried out with different sonic pioneers resembling Laurie Anderson and John Oswald, and has exhibited and took part in group exhibitions and performances at OCA, The Music Gallery, The Artwork Gallery of Ontario and different galleries in Toronto.
He conceived, produced and carried out with collaborator Charlie Roby within the efficiency set up colored evening: 12 hours 12 tones at Toronto’s 2010 Nuit Blanche Pageant. Mark has additionally remained lively as a author, editor, producer and director of music movies.
“In a means this file is type of a full circle.”
That’s not solely his personal impression. After releasing the album, a pal from again within the days on the experimental lab at OCA instructed him, “You had been doing issues like this within the sound lab.”
In impact, it’s a journey that started the opposite means round.
“In a means, I’ve seen in some evaluations, it’s marking the best way from Echo Seaside to right here — but it surely’s actually the opposite means round.” Sonic experiments, he notes, got here lengthy earlier than Martha and the Muffins.
Particularly, a number of the strategies he makes use of on the album had been first developed a long time in the past, together with the layered sounds, and the method of hiding sounds inside different sounds, in order that when one diminishes and disappears within the combine, it reveals one other beneath it.
A Half Century Of Experiments
A lot of the album consists of about 50 years price of collected studio, discipline, and located recordings.
“It was percolating for a very long time,” Gane says of the album.
It was associate and inventive collaborator Martha Johnson (sure, the Martha of the Muffins), who advised engaged on his personal album a few years in the past.
“My Martha and the Muffins co-founding member and inventive associate mentioned, you actually ought to mix all of the belongings you like.”
He’d been gathering sounds and tracks for years when well being points put the challenge on a shelf briefly. The pandemic added impetus.
“In the course of COVID, I assumed […] I higher end this or I’ll be useless earlier than this occurs,” he laughs. “I believe in 2022 I simply received to it. Oddly sufficient and with none rationalization I can provide, I let it sit for one more two years.”
In essence, it’s the album’s inspiration that stored him from working within the studio.
“The backyard at all times received,” he says. “I’m fairly obsessed.”
The Music
How does he describe his personal music?
“I believe, Ray Dillard, who co-wrote one of many items, and helped me combine it […] he described it as trendy classical music, which I assumed was type of fascinating. I might add to that that it’s type of filmic.”
Whereas he realizes it’s asking quite a bit in as we speak’s world, he has a request for anybody listening to the album.
“Once I was youthful, you listened to albums at one go,” he says. “I’m asking for folks, if they will, to take heed to it at one go underneath centered listening circumstances.”
As a society, we’re bombarded with photos and sounds on an nearly fixed foundation. “My thought is to attempt to take 40 minutes and discover a quiet place to take heed to it,” he provides.
Will previous followers like his new music?
“I’m fairly comfy with the truth that some folks will hate it,” he says. “It’s not a pop album.”
He’s not anxious about relevance within the pop music stratosphere as of late.
“I believe with music, you at all times discover an viewers,” he says.
He paid numerous consideration to the main points, together with the order of the tracks on the album. “I spent a very long time sequencing this album. There’s type of an arc to it, however alternatively, the items are fairly disparate,” he notes.
For the sake of listeners, he’s left a couple of additional seconds of silence between the tracks to as to not plunge straight from one into the subsequent. “You may’t plunge one into the opposite,” he says.
“You’re occurring a journey.”
- Discover Mark Gane’s Backyard Music to purchase, stream or obtain [HERE].
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Anya Wassenberg is the Toronto Metropolis Editor at Ludwig Van. Beforehand, she was a contract author with a specialty in tradition and journey for 3 a long time, and a inventive writing teacher for Ontariolearn.
