Yamantaka // Sonic Titan are a freaky fusion of the future

Photo by Ming Wu.

Montreal’s southwestern Saint-Henri district is a breeding ground of skuzzy punks, noise jammers, and radical street artists tossing a brick through the status quo’s window. Despite recent attempts at gentrification and a swath of snooty restaurants, the working class ‘hood has maintained its identity thanks in part to the Pirates of the Lachine Canal DJ/show booker posse, Psychic Handshake record label and notorious squat scene of the Fattal Lofts, best summed up by a piece of graffiti with its motto: CHUG LIFE.

It makes a strange kind of sense, then, that Saint-Henri is also the birthplace of Yamantaka // Sonic Titan, a supercharged music/art/performance troupe that’s recently risen like a phoenix from the ashtray. Combining its members’ diverse upbringings and strong sexual politics into a proggy, percussive strain of psych-rock and ethereal pop, the group has knighted itself ‘Noh-Wave Opera.’ YT//ST’s core duo of Alaska B and Ruby Kato Atwood is rounded out with a motley crew of collaborators to conjure their mind-expanding concepts into the material world.

“I was a Saint-Henri kid, but Ruby lived up in the Mile End, so we would go back and forth between the two,” Alaska explains. “We always laughed about the fact that I was the connection to the weirdo heavy punk scene down there and she was the connection to the kind of indie-pop scene in the other part of town. I’ve been a noise head forever and used to live in the Fattal Lofts, which was super shitty. Bedbugs, wife-beaters, that kind of thing.”

If you think the ‘opera’ tag is a joke, just wait until you see their live show. Flipping a bird to the typical blasé posturing and limp-wristed rock ‘n’ roll theatrics, YT//ST creates full-scale events, complete with eerie face-paint, monochromatic paper sets and Boredoms-style drum blasts that blend black metal and kabuki into a jaw-dropping new form. The group’s debut album is equally epic, yet it’s all just a glimpse into their master plan to freak out the squares with a stage production so large no theatre in the world could contain it.

Here’s a live clip of “Counting Track”:

“If were to do the opera as a stage show, we’d probably edit it down,” says Alaska. “I think we’re going to be doing some smaller musicals in theatre venues throughout the next year, but will mostly be focused on supporting the record. It kind of takes you away from a big, in-depth, all-life-devouring project, but we’re totally going to pick up on it again when we start recording our second album.”

“We created a cartoon world through our art installations, and the music was meant to be a continuation,” she continues. “The songs are written about characters who have appeared. We don’t really abandon anything we come up with, and just roll with it until it’s fully fleshed out. When the characters’ stories are told, we drop them and move them onto the next one. The world is big enough that we don’t have to center on just one or two. It’s a maximalist take on Wagnerian complexity.”

In their own words, YT // ST’s mix of Chinese, Japanese and First Nations imagery is “poorly appropriated”, yet they twist up these Asian and Indigenous traditions to create something truly striking. With lyrical allusions ranging from religion to nature to Picasso, it becomes obvious there’s no point in focusing on where they come from but rather which rabbit hole they decide to lead us down next.

“If you look for it online, there’s a Japanese blog that wrote about our song ‘Hoshi Neko’ and basically said that most of the lyrics were gibberish,” says Alaska. “All of the words are real, but the grammar is really bad. We use mediocre Japanese all throughout the record, because our singer is third generation and at this point she’s so divorced from the culture. In Japan you hear people singing poorly in English all the time. They’re trying to connect with the rest of the world’s pop culture, and we’re trying to point out the fallacy of language with music representation. That’s not something we’re making fun of, but rather trying to embrace it.”

Previously - Craig Storm

You can follow Jesse's shorter rants at @wipeoutbeat