This weekend the long due brainchild of Phil Cousins, AKA Elfinity was officially released online on Bandcamp. The EP, “World Peace Dub” was given a proper welcome through an intimate gathering of friends and fans at a local club in Halifax. Spectators enjoyed comfortable seating in the Rainbow room at Men’s & Mollyz during the performance of the 6 tracks on the album as well as a couple acoustic originals to start.
The full EP can be downloaded from Bandcamp on a pay-what-you-want basis with all of the moolah (minus a very small percentage for using Bandcamp) going to supporting and encouraging more amazing art just like this release! (there might be some coffees in there too).
My experience working with Phil was enjoyable, to say the least. Since January 2017, he and I would meet at my small home studio for production sessions every week. Sometimes our sessions would go for 6-8 hours and would feel like only about an hour. When I received the Ableton project files for each of the songs, most of the big decisions about song structure and timbre were hashed out. Phil synthesized the instruments for each of the songs during his compositional stages. Some of these songs had been on the back burner for years! Breath Engine was originally started around 5 years ago (on Ableton Live 7).
The majority of the album is comprised of synthetic sounds with a few which are complimented by living, breathing, bass guitar playing human named Max Mackeigan. His bass wizardry shines on the track Breath Engine and Spirit of The Age (A Hawkwind cover).
The style of the album spans a spectrum of genres ranging from dub to pop. The Pop-iest of the collection, “Chemistry” features a beautiful vocal performance by Sarah Bezanson which, surprisingly was her first experience singing in front of people (let alone being recorded). Her vocals were backed by a robot version of Phil, heavily vocoded and mixed into the sonic pallet as an omnipresent air through a precisely arranged stereo spectrum.
This EP was such a pleasure to work on and a treat to mix and master. I wish for these songs to find their way into many people’s music libraries; enough to encourage another release like this from Elfinity (and band) ;)
