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Oct 20, 2020 By Christopher Roberts Badge Époque Ensemble

Toronto’s Badge Époque Ensemble are releasing a new album, Self Help, on November 20 via Telephone Explosion. Now they have shared another song from it, “Unity (It’s Up To You),” via a video for the track (which features James Baley). Alex Kingsmill directed the stop-motion animated video. Watch it below.

“The appeal of writing a song about ‘unity’ is its slipperiness as a concept,” says the band’s Maximilian Turnbull in a press release. “It can be used as a dividing line, giving form to the particularity of things defined in opposition of one another, or we may zoom out wide enough to find all matter and all energy under its purview. It is a word which requires a frame. A recorded song is sympathetically flexible in its compression. We can single out a lead vocalist (easy to do on this song with returning BÉE guest, the incomparable James Baley) or soloist (guitar from Chris Bezant), or, as I am inclined, we can choose to hear the song as one sound. As the song says, it’s up to you.”

Kingsmill had this to say about the video: “‘Unity’ is an exploration into correlation, symbiotic cohabitation, and the relationships that are an essential part of being in a sensory world. The video probes the ways in which we imagine, invent and impart meaning onto these interconnections- an immersion into systems, layers, sensations, emotions and feelings that we navigate everyday in our lives, and that sometimes overwhelm us. This project brings to life ideas I’ve been eager to explore with clay for a number of years, guided by the stunning music of Badge Époque Ensemble.”

Self Help was recorded live over three weekends in the months before lockdown at Toronto’s Palace Sound Studio. Badge Époque Ensemble features Turnbull (Rhodes, clavinet, and synthesizers), Karen Ng (saxophone), Chris Bezant (guitar), Giosuè Rosati (bass), Ed Squires (conga, percussion), Jay Anderson (drums), and Alia O’Brien (flute). Previously they shared the album’s first single, “Sing a Silent Gospel,” which features Meg Remy (U.S. Girls) and Dorothea Paas.

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