With his solo career Van Tassel has a built a reputation as a producer and composer of electro-acoustic music that is both highly sophisticated and easily digestible. His music, which has been featured on the Outdoor Life Network’s program “Departures” and “Descending”, is a tapestry of traditions; the familiar plucking of folk music floats amongst drum machines and ambient field recordings, driving bass lines melt into flowing synth melodies. His albums has received critical acclaim from the CBC, The Toronto Star, NOW Magazine, and won East Coast Music Association and Music Nova Scotia awards for 'Electronic Album of the Year.'
“haunting...The alchemy is remarkable” - Toronto Star
“Come for the music, stay for the cyborg fish armies, giant gorillas and Daniel Craig. They all come to play in Joshua Van Tassel’s amazing new album Dream Date” - Laurie Brown, Host of CBC2′s The Signal
“Whether it is the Kid A-inspired sounds of Sneaky Beard or The Warmest Heart, Van Tassel’s uncluttered approach to making music is one that demands your attention.” - Ken Kelley, Music Nerd Chronicles
- ARTIST: Joshua Van Tassel
- TITLE: Dance Music volume II: More Songs for Slow Motion
- CAT#: BKWRD021
- FORMAT: Digital
- RELEASE DATE: September 11, 2020
Like the instrument that inspired it, the Ondes Martenot, Van Tassel’s Dance Music volume II is elegant and expressive, the score to a movie inside your head.
The Ondes Martenot (OHND mar-tə-NOH) is an elegantly intricate, deliberately complicated hand-built machine that lives with the theremin as one of the world’s earliest electronic instruments (c.1928). Its inventor, the cellist Maurice Martenot, was a radio operator in WWI and wanted to duplicate the accidental overlaps of tones between radio oscillators, but with the expressiveness and emotion of cello. The Ondes is a rare collectible now, but there is an option in the Ondea: Itself an exclusive membership, they’re Ondes modernized by Calgary’s David Kean.
Van Tassel, no stranger to concepts and themes, made the first Dance Music, 2014’s Songs For Slow Motion, as a gift for his dancer wife to play in her sessions as a craniosacral therapist.
“meditative meditative, shifting chords, like sand reshaped by wind” – Aquarium Drunkard
“elegant and expressive, the score to a movie inside your head” – Headphone Commute
“if you’re able to lose yourself in Van Tassel’s compositions for even a few minutes, you’ll feel a bit lighter” – CBC Music
“peaceful” – John Schaefer, WNYC’s New Sounds
“undiluted gorgeousness” – PopMatters
“powerful” – Magnetic Mag
“a beautifully album for ugly times” (9.5/10) – Higher Plain Music
“meditative, focused, and pure” – Surviving the Golden Age
“as soothing as ASMR” – The Coast
“a real gift” – Tom Allen, CBC Radio
“gradual and mesmerizing, leaning into the idea of sound in slow motion.” – The Road To Sound
“stylistic and visionary” (8/10) – Exclaim!
“a masterpiece” – Deepest Currents
“nothing short of gorgeous” – HearFeel
“that type of an album that you just keep on pressing the repeat button on and on. Particularly very, very late at night.” – Echoes & Dust
“geradezu hochgeistiger, üppig produzierter Musik voller Strahlkraft.” – unter ton
