TIMBER TIMBRE

Timber Timbre is the brainchild of Taylor Kirk, the commanding persona at the fore of its spacious, weighted sound.

With Hot Dreams, Kirk and longtime collaborator Simon Trottier daub vibrant colour across the rest-less evolution of Timber Timbre’s earthy, angular palette.

The elements – Kirk’s singular intonation, quavered in slow, low register, over stark orchestration – combine in haunting resonance with rotation of music and time. Normalized is the bedrock essence of folksy and fifties Timber Timbre, now cached in smoothed, viscous tonality: new sonic admissions, ringing sensuality and caprice, neon and haze.

On the acclaimed Creep On Creepin’ On (2011) – nominated for two 2012 JUNO Awards and a spot on the Polaris Music Prize Short List – Timber Timbre transmuted the hollow grey tones of Timber Timbre (2009) into plaintive doo-wop through oblique, concrete passages.

With Hot Dreams, Timber Timbre transposes new definitions of historic ambience, unabashedly weaving unity between disparate, charted environments.

Timber Timbre’s third full length on Full Time Hobby is its most cinematic work, connecting arid western to plodding horror with the pomp of Hollywood phantasm. Fittingly, Timber Timbre music from previous records has been heard on AMC’s Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead OST.

On the title single “Hot Dreams”, guitars chime melancholy and petulance, animating a sometimes reticent Kirk, singing “I want to follow through, follow through, follow through / On all my promises and threats to you”.

The sustained consonance of Mika Posen’s string arrangements mingle with vintage contributions from Olivier Fairfield on drums and Mathieu Charbonneau on keys: pivotal players in Timber Timbre’s lineage returning on Hot Dreams. Atypically velvet saxophone lines of repeat guest Colin Stetson echo with the backing vocals of Romy Lightman (Tasseomancy, Austra).

The grooved insistence of “Curtains!?” – penned with Simone Schmidt (Fiver, The Highest Order, One Hundred Dollars) – punctuates Timber Timbre’s peculiar sound with soft violence and definite metre.

Culled from ideas born during a stint Kirk spent in Laurel Canyon, Hot Dreams coalesced throughout 2013 with Trottier joining Kirk as composer and producer. The pair arranged the new material at The Banff Centre, later adding an array of synthesizers from Calgary’s National Music Centre. The record was engineered by Graham Lessard at the Banff Centre and Thee Mighty Hotel 2 Tango in Montreal, and mixed by Mark Lawson.

Hot Dreams immediately instills as Timber Timbre’s most lush and focused, evocative and flourished work to date: so distinctly familiar though it precedes memory, recognizable only as itself, as woodsy evokes the exotic.