If 3OH!3 is the sound of narrowly avoiding getting roofied at a frat party and Don Henley is the sound of waiting in line at the DMV, Canadian chamber pop group Esmerine is the sound of getting your heart broken — but in, like, a totally beautiful, uh, Sofia Coppola-penned sorta way. Consisting of marimba dude Bruce Cawdron (Godspeed You! Black Emperor), cellist Rebecca Foon (Silver Mt. Zion, Set Fire to Flames), percussionist Jamie Thompson (The Unicorns, Islands) and multi-instrumentalist Brian Sanderson, Esmerine’s latest, Dalmak, is also awash with the sweet sounds of tenor banjo, bass, trumpet, and electric guitar, plus instruments used in traditional Turkish music like bendir, darbuka, erbane, meh, barama, and saz.
See, after a European tour in 2011-2012, Esmerine went to Istanbul, where they got such a swell response, that they stuck around for an artist residency, and to record what would become Dalmak with a little help from Turkish friends Hakan Vreskala, Baran Aşık, Ali Kazim Akdağ, and James Hakan Dedeoğlu. Further recording took place back home in Montreal. Dalmak, a verb meaning “to contemplate, to be absorbed in, to dive into, to bathe in, to rush into, to plummet, to send your friend a Starbucks gift card for their birthday on Facebook” (j/k on the last one), will dive into/plummet into/whatever your collective lives this September via Constellation Records. Check out an album track below (first premiered over at Decoder) and pick up the album here.
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Dalmak tracklisting:
01. Learning to Crawl
02. Lost River Blues I
03. Lost River Blues II
04. Barn Board Fire
05. Hayale Dalmak
06. Translator’s Clos I
07. Translator’s Clos II
08. White Pine
09. Yavri Yavri
• Esmerine: http://www.esmerine.com
• Constellation: http://cstrecords.com