“Faith… is the substance… of things hoped for.” —Giorgio Agamben, Creation and Anarchy

“What I like about good art,” says the electronic musician Timothy Gowdy over a transatlantic Zoom call from his home in Berlin, “is that you don’t necessarily know what it is.”

We are riffing on a perennial favourite niche topic: the function and value of art in the age of its virtual overproduction. Can art, as it is often unfairly tasked, change minds, change the world?

Gowdy seems cautiously optimistic, mercifully, invoking the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and railing against art “caught in a productivity model,” as he describes.

“It wasn’t that before,” Gowdy observes. “And it’s not that underneath. It’s because of social media that we’re bombarded all the time with people telling you you should think things and do things. I think that there’s sometimes more power in subversive undertones that aren’t beating a drum at you right away. I’m definitely looking at that in my own music. I think perhaps good art manifests because it can’t be pinned down as one thing.”

It is that indefinable, polymorphous quality that best characterizes Gowdy’s iridescent forthcoming album, Trill Scan, his third and arguably most ambitious release for Montreal’s legendary independent label, Constellation Records. Therapy with Colour, launched in 2020, found Gowdy experimenting with off-kilter hypnotic IDM, while Miracles, arriving two years later, traded on a more arrhythmic form of low-fi analogue grain.

With his latest recording, a euphoric melange of the ancient and postmodern, Gowdy now reaches for a technicolour sound palette, including, in addition to the requisite synthesized pulses and waveforms, traditional timbres like lute and voice.

“I didn’t want to make just another electronic thing,” Gowdy tells me. “I’m fine with that genre and I love electronic music, but I just felt that I needed to expand. And the groundwork for that was going on for 30 years. It wasn’t a stretch. I didn’t have to look that hard, actually. I just had to look inward.”

Gowdy, 42, was trained as a young classical musician whose first experience was instruction in choral works. Hailing originally from Prince Edward Island, Gowdy relocated to Princeton, NJ, where he enrolled as a boarder at the American Boychoir, a choral school, at age 11.

“It gave me some experiences that I would not have had otherwise,” he says. “I always went back to choral music because that’s how I knew vocals the most.” Arriving in Montreal as a teenager, and inspired by a 1990s mashup of grunge, hip-hop, and punk rock, Gowdy picked up the guitar, but eventually reverted again to his classical roots.

On Trill Scan, he considered featuring an acoustic instrument. “But there was something that I didn’t really like about the guitar,” Gowdy reveals. “So, I decided to look at the origins of the guitar and found the lute. And I drove across Germany and bought myself a lute and started practicing and learning how to play that. And three years later, I am now reading the scores and learning how to play Baroque music. It was a full process of learning and unlearning,” he says.

There is an undeniable religious connotation to choral arrangements, an aesthetic that harkens back to the early modern period of western music. Gowdy was raised Catholic but “renounced it from the beginning,” he explains. “I was forced.”

Gowdy believes in the possibility “to disconnect something from its mainframe and repatch it into something else. I like that idea,” he confirms. “One thing that I’m trying to do on this record is take this feeling you get from music of the past and somehow disconnect it from what it was connected to and reconnect it to these other vibes. That’s consciously what I’m interested in doing at the moment.”

There is an exceptionally polished production value to all of Gowdy’s recordings, reflecting his expertise accumulated over 15 years working as a sound engineer in some of Montreal’s most prestigious studios. He paid his dues alternately at Breakglass, Pierre Marchand, and Studio 451 on Rue de l’Eglise, engineering albums for Ensemble, Ada Lee, and Suuns, among others.

Gowdy partly recorded Trill Scan with a small choir in a church in Mirabel and finished at his home studio in Berlin. “I’m really a person that does it all mostly in-studio,” he says. “I think that the recording and the composition go together. And I almost treat it as a performance, too. I tend to record long things. I press record and just go. I try not to have my cerebral mind guide it. For me, it works to fuse those three elements together. I find that you get something that your emotion is pushing more than if you were playing live.”

Gowdy is currently at work adapting the album for a performance setting, he says. “I’m planning on getting some shows going. I have a release here in Berlin and I’d like to do something in Montreal and a few other spots in Canada. That’s the plan.”

While he is based in Germany, Gowdy retains a connection to Montreal’s underground music scenes, in no small part because of his affiliation with Constellation Records. He confesses a soft spot for this city’s DIY spirit, something that doesn’t exist in quite the same way anywhere else.

“It’s difficult to find community in other cities,” Gowdy laments. “Montreal is just the right size. Because the Anglo community is kind of small and centralized, it is physically possible for people to bond together and work together on things and accomplish things together. In other cities that are more spread out, it’s more difficult to do that. There’s something about Montreal that people really have to work together and depend on one another to achieve art.”

Somewhere between Berlin and Montreal, Gowdy has cultivated a supportive public that responds in real time, helping him to determine if what he’s producing really resonates, something that reanimates the world if even in incremental steps, in an environment that more often replaces faith with credit, the good with the good enough.

Gowdy spent the first part of Trill Scan’s recording sessions “making songs that people that I respected didn’t like,” he laughs.

“Sometimes when you’re making new things, you don’t know if it’s good,” Gowdy admits. “But I think that it’s important to have people around you who can offer a second opinion. And based on what I did before, they were able to weigh the current work and see if there’s a relation, first of all, and second of all, if it moves them. Because essentially that’s what it’s for, music — if it’s moving us or not.”◼︎

Trill Scan is released 14 March 2025 via Constellation Records.

_{Cover image: T. Gowdy photographed for Constellation Records by Vika Temnova.}