Figureskater recently sat down with Montreal based experimental art rock trio, SUUNS, when the band played Rickshaw Stop in SF during their current tour for latest album, The Breaks. Tune in on Tuesday, December 10th at 8:30pm to hear the interview.
On their sixth long player The Breaks – their second for Joyful Noise Recordings – SUUNS find themselves lost in limbo. For some artists, being caught in flux may result in songs that are either naive, out of touch or both, simply as a consequence of being cut off from human civilization. But for SUUNS, a band who have grown more than comfortable in the oblique and the intermediate, it actually had the opposite effect. The Breaks marks the outfit’s most emotionally resonant and tonally rich collection of music to date.
The trio of Ben Shemie, Joseph Yarmush and Liam O’Neill leans more zealously than ever into their pop instincts. Yet remarkably enough, with that same dauntless abandon, SUUNS have mined a more extreme sonic palette this time around, one that stretches far beyond their core fundamentals as a band.
The Breaks finds Shemie, O’Neill and Yarmush gleefully experimenting with loops, synths, samples and MIDI instruments like a post-millennial Tangerine Dream messing with downtempo triphop beats. The album doesn’t capture a band looking to move in one specific direction: SUUNS simply aim to advance.
