Montreal-based Noh-wave art collective Yamantaka // Sonic Titan is making their debut on the Canadian music scene with its entrancing live performances and stage personas inspired by cultural identity.
Noh-wave is an amalgam of No Wave, a short-lived collective of New York bands who reacted to new wave and punk and Noh, the classical form of Japanese musical drama.
Ruby Kato Attwood and Alaska B met at Concordia University in Montreal, and are currently touring their performance art masterpieces, a culmination of visual art pieces and the recreation of scenes and tableaus.
YT // ST pays “attention to duration” and how the members place themselves so the art overlaps and has impact, Attwood says.
They use different post-consumer products like paper and plastic for their set pieces, such as a dragon the band carried through the audience at a performance at Zaphod Beeblebrox on Jan. 11.
“It’s really a language of taking everyday items and putting it into a performance context,” Attwood said. “The kind of answers you come to about the objects are really how you experience the performance.”
The name Yamantaka itself is representative of a Buddhist deity, whose name means “terminator of death.”
“Music, I think for myself, is a very meditative act because you have to focus on something so small,” Attwood said.
“You’re not trying to get anywhere. You’re just trying to experience what’s happening. It’s in this single-mindedness that I think all musicians are able to play.”
Talking of their upcoming album, Attwood said it will be different to produce a record with the knowledge that there will be an audience of people listening.
Producing the first record was a different story, Attwood said.
“I just wanted to make the record, and I think I’m hilariously under-read in a lot of ways because I came from an art school background and grew up in a small place.”
Attwood said she didn’t have a personal computer until her early 20s.
“I mean I’m not a luddite, but I don’t have a Twitter account and didn’t really even understand the relevance of Pitchfork before I was on it.”
YT // ST was shortlisted for the 2012 Polaris Prize among other nominees including Feist, Grimes, Fucked Up, Japandroids, Drake, and Kathleen Edwards.
“It’s a bit of a country mouse, city mouse syndrome for me to have that kind of attention from the Polaris Prize. It’s a huge honour, but also a little disarming.”
The band incorporates personal cultural identities in their on stage personas in the way that each band member constructs themselves in a “culturally hybrid presentation that’s cohesive,” Attwood said.
During the performance, YT // ST dedicated a song to indigeneity ending with Ange Loft exclaiming “Idle no more,” the slogan of the recent movement fighting for indigenous treaty rights and target issues with the Canadian federal government’s omnibus Bill C-45.
Attwood spoke of her own performance, saying “my character, the monk, is a representation of different Buddhist deities, the Japanese idea of Kawaii and femininity and exotic beauty.”
“To subvert that in a very punk way was a goal of mine,” Attwood said. “These were very personal decisions for me. It was the act of saying the only thing you have to be is something that you choose, and that’s a very different form of art direction.”
