Avec le soleil sortant de sa bouche

Over the past few years, Montreal kraut-funk quartet Avec le soleil sortant de sa bouche has established itself as something of a local supergroup – its members have been active in this city's experimental rock communities for well over a decade, including participation in Panopticon Eyelids, Pas Chic Chic, Red Mass, Set Fire to Flames, and, from the Constellation roster, Fly Pan Am – and gained a local reputation for irresistible and levitational live sets combining a contemporary/avant-garde sensibility with infectiously angular, rubbery grooves.

Avec le soleil formed in Montreal in 2011 as a trio of bassist, singer and composer Jean-Sebastien Truchy (of Fly Pan Am), guitarist/engineer Sebastien Fournier and drummer Nasir Hasan, with several lineup expansion and contractions over the following couple of years. Summer 2014 found the group solidified into a tight four-piece unit (Truchy, Fournier, Eric Gingras on guitar and, with the departure of Hasan, Samuel Bobony in the drummer's chair), careening towards mastery of a highly original, deeply satisfying, giddy and heady avant-funk.

The band's debut LP, 2014’s Zubberdust!, featured a pair of exquisite and exhilarating 20-minute pieces and manifests the culmination of the group's first two years of conceptual and somatic development. Pas pire pop, I Love You So Much, due out in January 2017, picks up where Zubberdust! left off: sinuous bass, chiming guitars and wordless vocals are interwoven with fizzing and squelching electronics to propel the band's signature, methodically exuberant grooves. Sonic collage and cut-ups wonderfully destabilize the new album, creating little disturbances and wake-up bells along the overriding trance rock journey. Avec le soleil deploys a panoply of buoyant musical ideas, subtly sumptuous sonic treatments, and joyous stylistic nods — while remaining fundamentally devoted to working the groove, from a kaleidoscope of angles. This is post-modern psychedelic electronic funk-rock the likes of which we can honestly say we’ve not heard before.