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Haunter Records is proud to present Left My Brain @ Can Paixano (La Xampanyeria) OST. A project five years in the making, dotted by contributions from dear friends Asaël Robitaille, v1984 and Marie Davidson; it is Osborne-Lanthier’s most ambitious work to date and, in many ways, an elegiac record. Largely composed and produced in the shadow of his mother’s passing, it also contains an another sort of elegy: to a infamous Barcelona restaurant that functioned as a daily stop for Osborne-Lanthier during a stay in Catalunya. It was in the midst of that trip that he started adding sardonic, deranged experiments to his then-overtly serious, academic work. After his mother’s passing in 2016, nostalgia drove him to revisit a body of old recordings where he discovered something new: the sarcasm, self-effacing humour and proficient technicality he’d found so funny originally was now just a mask for insecurity and sadness. He set out to rework those recordings, reprocessing them over and over until their structures completely changed, until they’d gained such texture and depth they were no longer recognizable.
The music’s journey construes a multi-layered story, one only he can tell. The record smacks with a wet nostalgia that soaks into the concrete dryness of Osborne-Lanthier’s sound design, maintains a taste for intensity as a tool for immersive engagement. There’s a widescreen romanticism to these compositions, reminiscent of a vivid dream: the tracks are tactile and elastic, morphing rapidly from uncanny-valley EDM tropes to vast, sweeping expanses of sincere choral synths. Osborne-Lanthier sees the album as something of a concept cemetery; an overgrown plot that slowly filled to the brim with dead ideas; a mycelial network of thoughts and plans that never came true. The fruiting body of a fungus born from the nutrients of dead plants: an opus born from trash.
For all of its absurd alien beauty, this is as much a record about being a musician as it is a record about making fun of music: as much an expert-level exploration of technical chops as it is an assault on the stupidity of technicality. Beautiful film-like ambient passages flow directly into weapons-grade riffs, fluid whirlpools drain into chattering synths and shrieking frequency envelopes. Ugliness and immaturity are not only preserved but elevated. The result is Osborne-Lanthier’s most finely-honed record to date — a reflection of what it is to be human: divinely uncategorizable.
Composed between 2015 and 2020 in Montreal, New York, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, Milan, Tokyo, Stockholm, Osaka and Shanghai by Jesse Osborne-Lanthier.
Produced in Montreal by Jesse Osborne-Lanthier.
Additional production and arrangement assistance by Asaël Robitaille.
Mastered by Heba Kadry.
Design, layout and additional art by Jesse Osborne-Lanthier.
Art installation and photographs by Adrian Altman, courtesy of the artist.
Cat. No. SPCTR015/PTTDIABL001 – All rights reserved.
℗ & © Haunter Records 2020