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Gus’ cult debut album Death & Transfiguration turned 4 on January 24th 2024! Here are a few words from Gus: ”We released our first album Death & Transfiguration 4 years ago today. It was recorded in 3 winter days in Quebec city after several failed attempts. Estée started playing drums two weeks before we recorded it. By the time we released it, I was feeling pretty exhausted by the whole process of writing and recording. I had blocked out everything else in my life, moved to Quebec from Alaska, stopped snowboarding and put all my energy into songwriting for 4 years by the time it was released. But the response I received gave me the motivation to keep going. So thanks to everybody who took the time to listen to it and to those who reached out to me.” -Gus

A little inside on all it all started: ”When we finished our first album, we realized pretty quickly afterwards that we were going to need some music videos. It seemed like a tall order at the time and we weren’t really sure what direction to go in visually speaking. At first, everything we tried seemed to turn out wrong and just when we were ready to throw in the towel, I decided to buy a couple books (The Bare Bones Camera Course For Film and Video, Film Lighting). Then we borrowed our friend Dragos’ Bolex camera and we set out to make our first video on 16mm film. When we got the results back from the film lab, we were so thrilled and luckily Estée knew how to edit from her days back when she was making all female snowboard movies. Everything we’ve made since has been shot either on super 8 or 16mm film. The biggest thing I learned from the books I read was the power of storyboarding. Hitchcock said if an architect can put down a building on paper a director can do the same with a movie.” -Gus

If you’d like to catch up on all the acoustic versions released so far, we’ve created a playlist here: http://tinyurl.com/b9w75cv2

Today marks the 2 year anniversary of the release of Tarantula. For the occasion Gus and Estée made a special acoustic version with their friends Bibi Club and their manager Gabriel Aucoin-Lo on the sax.

Here’s an acoustic performance of The Flea from Dungeon Master recorded on the Battlefields of Québec city, October of 2023.

Here’s an acoustic performance of My Own Paradise from Death & Transfiguration recorded in a forest around Québec city, October of 2023.

”In the 1940s, Alan Lomax set out on the road in search of blues and folk songs with the intention of capturing them in a great archive before they disappeared and were lost forever. He recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Songs and helped start both the American and British folk revival of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. I’ve always loved listening to these unadorned songs. I’ve always been a little bit torn about whether or not I should try and produce my albums into rock and roll or if I should just leave them alone and let them be folk songs. And then I figured why not do both, so with Estée we’ve decided to make a series of our very own field recordings. We will be releasing the first one next week! ” -Gus

Tune in to see how Gus writes his songs. Spoiler alert: it’s mostly in his bathrobe. Also travel plays an important role. As you move from place to place, you’re constantly inspired by the newness of your surroundings. But the most important ingredient is an ever burning obsession with creation. So we present you with a couple candid clips of Gus writing from apartments, basements, hotel rooms and train stations.

”Filming water is fun! You can pan along with it as it rushes past you, you can frame it up and watch it bubble and gurgle as it cascades off a rocky precipice. That’s probably why we ended up with so much footage of it as we documented our travels. So here’s an acoustic performance of a heretofore unreleased song entitled ”Find Your Depth” that I thought fit well with all that H₂O.” -Gus

”We have decided to make our band the subject of a long term cinéma vérité type documentary that will slowly drip out of our super 8 cameras and onto the internet. Being in a band nowadays requires a steady stream of content and at first that felt like a burden. But the wonderful thing about creativity is that you can usually find a way to shape any dilemma into just yet another creative outlet. Here’s a playlist that will be updated any time we get a batch of film back from the lab: https://tinyurl.com/bdzrcmvv ” -Gus