Name: Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More
Brand: Esmerine

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

CST166LP

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Colour

Black

Colour details

Discogs ID

Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: Yes

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

180 Gram Vinyl - Custom Window-Cut Letterpress Jacket

Format Music GB

Limited edition

Release date

2022-10-07

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier GB

Cargo

Tax rate GB

Standard:20

UPC / Barcode

666561016616

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Total Cap

1 / Extended format: No / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No / black

CST166CD

{"blocks": [{"data": {"text": "CST166CD"}, "type": "paragraph"}]}

Download code: No

666561016623

{"blocks": [{"data": {"text": "666561016623"}, "type": "paragraph"}]}

1 / CD / Extended format: No / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

Artist

Esmerine

Genre GB

Post Rock

Label GB

Constellation

Distributed by <a href="http://scdistribution.com">SC Distribution</a>, Constellation has established itself as a reputable force within the music industry. The label's commitment to quality and artistic expression shines through in every release. Whether you're a fan of experimental sounds or simply appreciate boundary-pushing music, Constellation offers an unparalleled listening experience.

Discover the captivating world of Constellation today and immerse yourself in the extraordinary talent that this Canadian label has to offer.

Esmerine is a musical ensemble formed by Bruce Cawdron, Beckie Foon, Brian Sanderson, and Philippe Charbonneau. Originally a duet consisting of Cawdron and Foon, Esmerine released their first album outside of their involvement with "Godspeed You! Black Emperor," "A Silver Mt. Zion," and "Set Fire To Flames." Unlike their previous projects, Esmerine's music focuses on drums, melodic percussion, and cello rather than guitars.

The band expanded its lineup for their third album in 2011 with the addition of Sarah Page and Andrew Barr. However, as Page and Barr became more involved with Barr Brothers duties, Esmerine solidified its touring lineup as a quartet with Jamie Thompson and Brian Sanderson for their fourth album in 2013.

With influences from Rachels and Clogs among others, Esmerine creates captivating compositions that showcase the unique combination of marimba, drums, melodic percussion, cello, violin, and contrabass. Their mesmerizing sound has garnered them comparisons to artists such as Hangedup,Hrsta,Silver Mt. Zion,Fly Pan Am,Efrim Manuel Menuck,and Do Make Say Think.

Esmerine presents Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More, its first album in five years, following a celebrated run of Juno Award winning and nominated records throughout the preceding decade.

Founded by ex-Godspeed You! Black Emperor percussionist Bruce Cawdron and cellist Rebecca Foon (Saltland, Silver Mt Zion, Set Fire To Flames), the acclaimed instrumental music ensemble and has long embroidered emotive chamber works using threads of post-classical, post-rock, Minimalism, neo-Baroque, jazz, pop and a wide array of folk traditions. Esmerine conjures a distinctive and immediately identifiable sound that consistently defies the trappings of “fusion”, forging emotive cinematic soundtracks under the overriding sonic sensibilities of post-punk grit, Wall-of-Sound, drone and dark ambient. 

Recorded by longtime co-producer Jace Lasek (The Besnard Lakes), the new album manifestly carries on in this fine tradition. Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More completes Esmerine’s “Anthropocene” triptych: a series of album-length meditations that began in 2015. The album title itself has minor meme status in eco-artistic circles, appropriated from its original context Alex Yurchak’s 2005 book about the collapse of Soviet Russia by several exhibitions and works interrogating artistic production in the age of environmental crisis. (Foon is also well-known for her climate activism as co-founder of Pathway To Paris.) The album grapples with existential tensions between atmosphere and airlessness, seclusion and claustrophobia, forbearance and satiation, scarcity and abundance; it is one of Esmerine’s most restrained and wistful works. Instrumental densities ebb and flow, melding into each other with gauzy timbral warmth, sometimes tracing fleeting tendrils outwards, but always rotating around the saturnine gravitational force of a darkly glowing sonic center.

Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More is like a somber forest lit by a closely-orbiting opalescent planet; it could be the alternate score to Von Trier’s Melancholia or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Esmerine planted these compositional seeds before pandemic rooted everyone in place, under the auspices of a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts and a 2019 residency at Le Château de Monthelon in France. Lasek then began documenting the band between lockdowns in various stripped-down configurations with spartan remote equipment at the rural Québec homesteads of Cawdron and Foon, culminating in final sessions at Foon’s converted barn in summer/fall 2021, notably with extensive use of the barn’s resonant acoustic piano. Brian Sanderson appears on his fourth Esmerine album since joining in 2012, continuing to expand the ensemble’s ethnomusicological sensibility and melodic sound palette with guitars, ngoni, ekonting, hulusi, and brass horns of all sorts.

Everything Was Forever… also signals the full integration of bassist Philippe Charbonneau, who joined Esmerine as a touring member pre-pandemic and plays throughout the new album, along with sound design contributions via synth, tape echo and other processing. Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More features the pandemic collage artwork of Maciek Sczcerbowksi, in a second Esmerine album art collaboration following their Juno award for Album Package of the Year for Lost Voices in 2015.