With BRONTO, The Hidden Cameras deliver an album that pushes the boundaries of pop. Joel Gibb, the visionary mind behind the legendary music project, dedicates an unconventional meta-dance-pop album to his adopted hometown of Berlin – and collaborates with electronic heavyweights such as Pet Shop Boys and Vince Clarke. Nightclubs have always been central places of resistance and community in the history of gay liberation and self-empowerment. BRONTO explores the dazzling facets of this history in its own unique way, paying tribute to the pioneers – and rightfully placing itself among them. Hardly anyone has translated the topic of gay love into music in a more original way over the last 25 years than Joel Gibb, the mastermind behind The Hidden Cameras. Founded in Toronto in 2001, the collaborative project broke the boundaries of the classic band formation with its fluid member structure. With his “gay folk church music,” Gibb sang about homoerotic love on stages – and in church halls – long before those topics had arrived in the pop mainstream. With his seventh studio album BRONTO, Joel Gibb follows in the footsteps of pioneers such as Lou Reed and David Bowie and releases an album inspired by Berlin but recorded almost exclusively in his second adopted home of Munich. The Canadian has lived in Berlin for over 15 years – and this has by no means left his sound untouched. After folk and country, Gibb has worked with Munich-based collaborator Nicolas Sierig (Joasihno) to create BRONTO, an unconventional electronic meta-dance-pop album. On BRONTO, which means “thunder” in Greek, Gibb puts the folk guitar aside and, in the best disco tradition, uses the studio as an instrument in which he creates highly emotional, dazzling worlds of sound. Instead of hyper-reflective linguistic acrobatics, on BRONTO Gibb deliberately plays with common phrases and questions which you might have heard a hundred times – but not like this. Thanks to his unique approach to songwriting, Gibb manages to tell stories that are still wonderfully strange and touching at the same time. BRONTO thus becomes a decade-spanning time capsule on which Gibb enters into a dialogue with his younger self and recalls the roots of The Hidden Cameras almost 25 years later.
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Growing up in a distant region of Planet Ontario, young Randy Gagne (the multidisciplinary artist behind Man Made Hill) found himself fascinated by a man-made hill running alongside a busy road, built to filter out the din of the local traffic. This hill, an organic but also strangely unnatural feature of the landscape, was the genesis of the project’s namesake, and it’s fertilized a rich creative terrain on which Gagne has ploughed 20+ DIY solo albums of lo-fi homegrown weirdness. Delicious Logo, the result of two years of close collaboration, marks Gagne’s second foray into a professional studio setting with Greenspan behind the mixing board. Building upon their 2022 joint effort, Mirage Repair (Orange Milk Records), this latest heap of miniature fantasies finds the pair widening their scope of sonic surveillance, and galvanizing their off-kilter pop sensibilities into a bewildering prismatic smorgasbord. This time around, the two set no deadlines and naturally deepened their creative relationship, working hard at a pleasurable pace to boil down and fully digest the sound of Man Made Hill, creating a uniquely mystifying transmission beyond time that leaves the listener wondering where they came in. The tantalizing atmosphere offers a tsunami windfall of sleazy synth pop, jagged funk, and sinister existential disco. A Man Made Hill performance is a contingent event: a staging of the punishment (of self, and of audience) that performance demands and most performers deny. No risk is spared in the flagrant discharge of libidinal currents, with performer injury remaining a dizzying hazard. Like classic pro-wrestling, with its destructive posture toward the line between 'reality' and 'theatre', but with the content replaced by home brewed electro-funk. While the first reaction is often to laugh, the chuckle soon curdles as we realize the depths of commitment (and/or hell) that the bit will be dragged down to. New album tudio Shower is a self-produced work, drawn in part from archival recordings and live material spanning 2016 to the present, that feels less like a traditional studio document than a sedimentary build-up of time, performance, and media debris.