Leon Louder Scattered Ensemble
Habitat

Montreal-based composer Leon Louder spent the 2020-21 lockdown period in remote collaboration with four fellow musicians, exploring tones from homemade and traditional instruments and percussion, using a mixture of live sampling and improvisation to create aleatoric tonal landscapes. Inspired by a stay on a remote island in the St-Lawrence River estuary, where the weather can shift dramatically from serene to turbulent at any moment and the dialogue of birds, insects, and seals is omnipresent, Habitat is a sequence of restless sound worlds, an impressionistic depiction of a constantly changing ecosystem that had its parallel in the emotional turmoil of pandemic time.

Like the phenomena they approximate, the pieces exist in a continual state of composition and recomposition. Populated with melodic fragments that call and respond, break apart and ricochet, they ask the listener to live in the music as much as to listen to it, accepting discord as equal to harmony, chaos as part of the order.

The individual tracks are strikingly varied, not only in their vocabularies of sound but in the moods they create and the hints of environment they evoke. They range from "Full of Light", in which mesmerizing bell and woodwind tones interweave in melodic counterpoint, building to a gently driving train-like rhythm that conjures some sort of Celestial Express -- to "Underpass", whose low dark sounds and simple repeated rhythms carry us down through subterranean strata bored out by primeval life forms, into what feels like a maze of subway tunnels on another planet.

The recordings bring into play double bass, vibraphone, homemade zithers, piano, modular synthesizer, and found percussion, and feature collaborators from the Montreal experimental music community: radio artist Martin Rodriguez, multi disciplinary artist Gabrielle Godbout, drummer and electroacoustic composer Samuel Bobony, and multi instrumentalist Rodney Sothmann.