Thursday March 11 • The Music Gallery presents
DAVID DANIELL & DOUGLAS McCOMBS
Part of the Pop Avant series

With special guest, Debashis Sinha

Doors 8pm, concert 9pm
Tickets $15 regular, $10 member + senior, $10 student
Or $10 advance at Rotate This, Soundscapes + Ticketweb — BUY NOW!

The Music Gallery is pleased to host two members of Chicago’s creative music community in the Toronto debut of their spacious, pastoral, electro-acoustic, guitar-oriented collaboration. Douglas McCombs may be best known as a member of groups like Tortoise and Eleventh Dream Day, while David Daniell was last in Toronto to lead an ensemble of 14 local musicians through an arrangement of his 30-minute piece Sunfish, at 2007’s X Avant Festival.

David Daniell and Douglas McCombs first met in early 2006 while touring as members of Rhys Chatham’s six-guitar ensemble. Following that tour, the two spent several months trading albums and discussing making music together; they began their collaboration when Daniell moved from New York to Chicago later that year to study pedal steel guitar. Over the years Daniell has collaborated with many notable musicians, including Loren Connors, Rhys Chatham, Tim Barnes, Thurston Moore, Greg Davis, and Jonathan Kane, as well as releasing numerous albums under his own name and with his band San Agustin. McCombs is more often seen wielding a bass guitar, whether as a member of Eleventh Dream Day, the acoustic collective Pullman, or post-rock pioneer Tortoise; in his role as the driving force behind Brokeback; or through his work with the likes of Tom Zé, Azita Youseffi, Will Oldham, Yo La Tengo, and Calexico.

Sycamore (Thrill Jockey Records, 2009) is the first album to document the duo’s music. The album was recorded at two large loft spaces in Chicago chosen for their live acoustics. Daniell and McCombs approached these live recordings as raw material, which they subsequently edited, arranged, and recomposed (with a nod to Teo Macero’s work on Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew and the work of the French musique concrète masters) into entirely new musical constructions. The final edits and mixes were performed with John McEntire at his Soma Electronic Music Studios in Chicago.

Debashis Sinha
For many years known as a percussionist and composer with a number of Canada’s premiere intercultural music pioneers, Debashis Sinha is forging a name for himself in the world of audio, solo performance, and new media art. His training under master drummers from various world percussion traditions from Cairo to Los Angeles inform his work and his exploration of the use of tradition as a tool for innovation. While spanning a wide range of exhibition contexts from concert to art gallery, his creative output is intimately tied to his own South Asian heritage, gestures that infuse the form of classical Indian music (involving elements of mindfulness and improvisation) with content created from his own experience growing up involved in multiple cultures and his eclectic skill set as sound designer, video maker, and musician.