Crown Lands

Wolf Performance Hall presents

Crown Lands

Saturday March 28

Doors Open: 7:00pm Show Start: 8:00pm

Advance: $50 Door: $60

----------------------------------------------

Formed in 2015, the Canadian progressive rock duo Crown Lands have garnered acclaim in recent years with their self-titled debut album released in 2020, followed by the brilliant 2023 follow-up, Fearless. Now signed to InsideOutMusic, the Juno Award-winning group is poised to take the next step in their journey. While the duo, made up of vocalist and drummer Cody Bowles and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Comeau, work on their third studio album, they are first set to release a pair of ambitious instrumental albums titled Ritual I & Ritual II. Both albums are layered with drums, synths, and various bits of percussion to create a complex tapestry of music unlike anything they have created before.

Recorded during the uncertain period of the pandemic, with the band unable to enter the studio or tour, Bowles and Comeau looked for a creative outlet. “I suppose this record became our act of defiance against stagnation, in a time when so many familiar lights around us flickered out in the deafening silence. It was a glimmer in our darkness,” claims Bowles. “Ritual I was made during a tumultuous time in our lives, alongside producer Justin Meli in our little B Room at Chalet Recording Studios. It served as a reprieve from the upending haze of the pandemic, far from the high-pressure studio sessions that typically accompanied the pursuit of our mainstream sound.”

Beginning each day with a communion of Psilocybin, followed by yoga and meditation and equipped with a handful of demos created over a few weeks, Bowles and Comeau, started working on the music that would become Ritual I.

Bowles explains, “The Serpent,” was the first we recorded, and it wasn’t even one of the demos we’d made to track. It all came together spontaneously within a single day. Perhaps it was the excitement of it all, of beginning something new, or maybe it was the moment Graham Shaw walked in with a collection of the coolest African percussion instruments I’d only ever dreamed of playing— now sitting right there in front of me. Whatever it was, it was magic.”

Bowles continues, “I had studied West African hand drumming, dancing, singing, as well as Afro-Cuban kit drumming for five years in university, so I saw this as a perfect chance to showcase a dimension of myself (and by extension, the band) that few listeners might come to expect from a loud Prog Rock band. We knew right from the onset this record was going to be out-there, with me playing an array of flutes while drumming polyrhythmic bliss over Kev’s undulating and expansive aural matrices of synthesis.”

Other songs follow naturally, eventually resulting in the completion of Ritual I. A couple of years later, the idea of Ritual II came to be. This time, they recorded the music themselves with Comeau spearheading the recording.

“We wanted to record this one ourselves as our own decompression from the mechanical precision of the Fearless sessions with David Bottrill. It didn’t follow the same process as the first time around, and it was certainly not as fungal! The only constant between the two was the ritual of coming together under a different pretence to the norm—not to fulfill a specific expectation or outer pressure, but rather to create solely with the joy of creation in our hearts. In a special way, this record was truly our own in a way none other had been before,” says Bowles.

While most of the tracks began without a plan and even without direction, the resulting music mysteriously fell into place. The process became a rhythm of its own, a natural cycle that guided the pair.

Bowles concludes, “It felt liberating to be so free with our creativity, and it was the next logical step for Kev and I, both in musicality and in scope: more textures, more strings, more complexity. We hope you enjoy these two journeys into unknown realms, and uncover the mysteries of the Ritual for yourself.”