Stream: Seance Centre “Chandigarh”

20 Mar 2013 — Parker Bruce

Toronto's Brandon Hocura works as a DJ, helps with record re-issuing at Invisible City Sound System, and is in charge of Polyphasic Studios. But as that isn't enough apparently, he also has a musical endeavor with his wife Naomi, a filmmaker, named Seance Centre. The duo is set to drop debut EP Chandigarh soon both digital and on vinyl. Hocura tells us a bit more about the release:

'The EP is named after Le Corbusier's modernist experiment in urban planning, the city of Chandigarh in Punjab, India. We travelled to the city almost 10 years ago, and the city felt like an improbable collection of contradictions; cold and modern, yet brimming with exciting life; futuristic, but already in a slow-motion state of decay; chaotic as any Indian city, but somehow things had this incredibly organized flow. In the center of the city was also a beautiful verdant park, one of the best we saw on our entire trip. Apparently Corbusier designed the city to resemble the human circulatory system. I guess we found this place very provocative and hope that in some ways our music has some of the contradictions that made this city so interesting.

'[Seance Centre] started when we were hosting and doing a small tour with legendary Italian DJ Beppe Loda. We started messing around in the studio with some synths and drum machines and in the presence of Beppe we felt a bit like Klein + M.B.O. Although nothing from those sessions made it on the EP, we feel that Beppe's spirit, maybe channeled through obsessing over his Elettronica Meccanica tapes had a profound influence on our sound.'

The music of Seance Centre is massaging, 'the slow-motion state of decay' as Hocura describes it aptly. The EP fritzes out and sizzles. It doesn’t feel 'cold' or in any way like decay though. However, it does have the 'flow' that Hocura mentioned when talking about the Indian city, a flow from song to song and flow within each song. "39 Clocks" (perhaps named after the band) is a loosey goosey, cyclical song where the singing is most noticeable on the EP, whereas "La Chinoise" (maybe or maybe not a reference to Godard) bobs with hems and haws so well that you almost forget there were vocals somewhere in the first place, until Naomi comes back in with her raised and rising huffing. The title track is the sound of fusing, or as Hocura himself puts it, 'the cosmic sound also came from Italy around the same time, from the Cosmic club. It's mostly associated with Daniele Baldelli who is Beppe Loda's rival. The "Cosmic" sound has come to be associated with slowed down electronic "disco" and this is also something that influenced us.'

Listen to the whole EP below and look for it to be released soon.