Glissandro 70 - G70 2: Bones of Dundasa (180g Black Vinyl)

20 years after its self-titled debut, Glissandro 70’s follow-up straddles the album and archive. Comprised of a decade’s worth of recordings that were abandoned, lost in a hard drive mishap, recovered in the form of rough stereo mixes, reappraised with the balm of time, and restored/augmented/enhanced, they are finally seeing the light of day. Back in 2016, Craig Dunsmuir asked Sandro Perri to meet for a drink, and dropped a bomb: those recordings they’d been working on over the past few years? Well, he’d gotten cold feet and wanted to shelve them. Perri then dropped a bomb of his own: he’d accidentally deleted those very same recordings during a computer upgrade. Hesitation had met destruction, the double negative all but sealing the material’s fate. When the COVID lockdowns hit, Perri began poring through his vast archive of old recordings and works-in-progress, and though the Glissandro 70 multi-track sessions were definitely gone, in early 2024 he discovered rough stereo mixes on another hard drive. By his own admission, it felt really good. By that point, Dunsmuir was also primed for the work’s reappraisal, as he’d loved how Perri repurposed some of their other collab material for his second Off World LP. A meticulous rediscovery and re-creation process began in earnest. Glissandro 70’s beguiling mechanics are perhaps best understood through the dissonance of the duo’s respective approaches as solo artists and bandleaders. Dunsmuir, a human music encyclopedia and 20-year veteran of Toronto record stores, leads the Dun-Dun Band, a group that mines the ferment of three towering Fs (Fela, Philip, Pharaoh). Equally inspired by math-rock, Dunsmuir’s scrumptious G70 riffs don’t aestheticize complexity or pester the listener into noting they’re in 13/8: rather, rhythm materializes as a mere fact of the riff, sharing more with the tranced coalescences of gnawa and afrobeat. Perri is the consummate studio dog and might be Toronto’s own Caetano Veloso, crafting loose, sprawling songs of quixotic beauty whose textural virtuosity and joy in repetition refashions pop music into sound sculpture. Together, they’re each other’s perfect foils, and Glissandro 70 is also informed by the intersection of their respective leftfield electronic projects, Kanada 70 and Off World. On G70 2: Bones Of Dundasa, Dunsmuir plays the role of “riff referee”, while Perri assumes the mantle of jester, destabilizing the “obstinate ostinatos” with his signature textural tics, editing, and dubby interjections.