Lightman Jarvis Ecstatic Band - Banned
Canadian artists Yves Jarvis and Romy Lightman have formed a new band called Lightman Jarvis Ecstatic Band. – Pitchfork
“Banned, the resulting album, blurs the lines between internal and external space. Its 15 tracks manifest sounds as sculpture, emphasizing textures as much as melodies, and, restlessly twisting, like the field recording of a dream.” – Exclaim! (7/10)
“Nailed on to be one of the weirdest ostensibly song-based listens you’ll encounter all year, it’s quietly charming, in both senses; it’ll freshen your senses for what songwriting might choose to do in the decades ahead, and is also pretty much guaranteed to be one of those wonderful outlier records that future musicians will cite. If everyone who heard this formed a band …” – Backseat Mafia (8.2/10)
In the past decade, Jarvis’s ever-expanding swatch of releases on ANTI- Records and Flemish Eye have earned international acclaim, while Lightman’s twin-sister-led band Tasseomancy has transfixed listeners since the late 2000s. The debut album from Lightman Jarvis Ecstatic Band marks the duo’s first collaboration, slingshotting both musicians out of their comfort zones into spellbinding territories of lysergic folk and impressionistic rock.
Banned was recorded in the tranquil environment of the Tree Museum, an outdoor art gallery in rural Ontario hosting residencies for contemporary sculptors over the past 20 years. Beyond leaving the city behind to live alone in the woods, the album title Banned also highlights an element of risk. Like late ’60s counterculture musical Hair, the duo reject notions of repression with unspoken celebrations of naturalism, openness, and sexual liberation. These 15 songs offer an ephemeral intimacy and invitation to express free love that can only occur when artists welcome listeners into their private world.
“Ecstasy is perverse and sacred,” says Jarvis. “To display ecstatic joy like we do on this album is a vulnerable thing. First and foremost it’s about our desire for creative expression and the curiosity around that. It should be censored, but it won’t be.”
On the quasi-title-track “Elastic Band” Jarvis and Lightman sound completely at ease as their voices harmonize in a rustling thicket of instrumentation. Listen to “Elastic Band” HERE.
“It starts off as a psychedelic CGI bubble bath and ends with the two band members battling it out in a Dragonball Z-style fight. It’s pretty appropriate for a meandering, shreddy song about a rocky relationship,” said The Fader.