Artist

Joshua Van Tassel

Data may be outdated

Last updated: 3 weeks ago — Click refresh to get the latest statistics.

“There’s a lot of really ugly shit happening in the world,” says Joshua Van Tassel, “and I wanted to make a really beautiful album.”

Like the instrument that inspired it, the Ondes Martenot, Van Tassel’s Dance Music vol. II is elegant and expressive, the score to a movie inside your head.

“It’s becoming cliche at this point to say ‘I want to make something for people to slow down,’ something that’s simply beautiful,” he says. “It’s music that can serve a function, rather than music with words that is very specific, like a breakup song. With instrumental music, there’s more room for you to plant your own story within it.”

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). Rare collectible now, there is an option in the Ondea: Itself an exclusive membership, they’re Ondes modernized by Calgary’s David Kean.

Once Van Tassel found himself off the waiting list, with an Ondea in his Toronto studio, his new album began to take form. “It’s this instrument I was totally enamoured with, it felt new all the time and it felt like work,” he says.

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.

Monthly Listeners

1,003