Grey by Sofa

Sofa’s five-year run as a band culminated in the recording of this full-length in the winter of 1996. Tracked during overnight sessions at an East-End Montreal studio, the album is a shrouded, finely wrought song cycle of sensory overload and the sense of loss. Mixed bone dry and with almost no overdubs, guitarist Ian Ilavsky (Constellation co-founder, Silver Mt. Zion, Re:) cuts against the metronomic pacesetting of bassist Scott Clarkson and drummer Keith Marchand while Brad Todd’s voice alternates between schizophrenic staccato bursts and a devastatingly intimate, densely lyrical, often half-spoken invocation. One guitar, one bass, one trap kit, one voice. Grey is a mesmerising amalgam of slow core, industro-punk, primitivist math rock and post-hardcore. "Like Slint and Big Black meeting for a Joy Division reunion" in the words of one music writer of the era.

Sofa was a band from 1993 to 1997. Sofa formed when Brad Todd (voice) met Keith Marchand (drums) while teaching a summer course at Concordia University’s department of Fine Arts. Ian Ilavsky (guitar) and Scott Clarkson (bass) were recruited. The four founding members stuck together for the duration, devoting themselves to the sonic transmission of isolation, neurosis and loss.

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