“In composing, I am trying to express something that I remember but does not yet exist,” the contemporary composer Mark Molnar tells me.

Although he is a classically trained multi-instrumentalist, Molnar has spent most of his life outside the incentive structures and institutional norms of neo-classical chamber music.

When he began working on the musical triptych that would make up EXO, his 2025 debut with Constellation Records, he says, “I had no funding, no ensembles awaiting my work, no creative directors or conductors programming these pieces.”

Instead of lamenting these conditions or waiting for an invitation that might never come, Molnar decided to play and record everything himself — piano, percussion, synthesizers, and half a dozen stringed instruments. Growing up in the 1990s punk and post-hardcore scenes, Molnar has stayed true to one of its central tenets. “Whenever possible, do-it-yourself.”

DIY comes naturally to Molnar. Though he has collaborated with dozens of artists ranging from metalcore heavyweights Buried Inside to kaleidoscopic psych-supergroup Land of Kush, Molnar largely works independently when it comes to his own compositions. With methods akin to a one-man musical nose-to-tail, Molnar writes, plays, and records the pieces, mixes them, and often self-releases them through his own Black Bough label.

“Almost all of the things I have written start with a pencil, an eraser, a ruler, and a blank page,” he explains. “When writing music, I don’t work up the melodies or parts on an instrument until after they are written. I don’t want my conception of them to be limited to my meagre ability on any instrument, or the common keys or positions my hands may casually be most comfortable in.”

Playing each part himself gives Molnar the ability to craft and control every element of his desired sonic tapestry, he says, “from body and frequency, vibrato across instruments, bowing, timbre, phrasing, volume, distortion, and resonance in a space.” He describes the process as a combination of “problem solving, merciless editing, erasure, and a honing or carving down to the essential elements.”

This meticulous and hermetic process has been a feature of Molnar’s solo artistic practice since at least 2007, when under the moniker “Kingdom Shore” he released …And all the Dogs to Shark as Black Bough’s inaugural record. Launched at a time when indie rock was becoming big business and affected ennui and ironic detachment were giving way to hyperbolic, performative sentimentality, …And all the Dogs to Shark was a middle finger to it all: a searing work of uncompromising, discordant string music that owed as much to Drive Like Jehu as it did to Stockhausen.

In 2007, a bygone era of iPod battles and New Atheism debates, there was nothing quite like it. The ars poetica Molnar included in the album’s liner notes firmly established his commitment to the musical margins and his refusal to chase fashion or climb the cultural ladder.

This is not a bid for relevance. This is not modern.

In the nearly 20 years since …And all the Dogs to Shark, time marked in a wider context by the normalization of global forever wars and the subjugation of all facets of aesthetic life to algorithmic whims, Molnar has quietly and steadfastly released a number of solo and ensemble works — with Horseman, Pass By with Bennett Bedoukian, and 1/4 Tonne Overdrive with Montrealers Eric Craven and Nick Kuepfer.

Although he resides in Ottawa, Molnar is something of an honourary Montrealer due to his longstanding ties to the city’s experimental music community. He played at Constellation Records’ legendary Musique Fragile series in the late ‘90s and has performed and recorded with fixtures of the city’s out-music scene such as Thierry Amar, Sam Shalabi, and Vicky Mettler. His previous records have garnered Molnar a modest yet devoted following, and the release of EXO with Constellation brings him overdue national and international visibility.

For EXO, Molnar tells me that he wrote, learned, and recorded the three pieces that make up the album over the course of three weeks. He began with harp tracks, then reinforced them with piano, and subsequently added parts for nearly a dozen instruments. From there, Molnar mixed EXO in such a way that, “the patina of it became its own body of sound.” What results is a singular suite of dense, elegiac, and immersive electroacoustic chamber music with shades of drone, holy minimalism, doom, ambient, and musique concrete that ultimately transcends these genre prescriptions.

EXO, which comes from the Greek prefix ἔξω meaning “outside” or “external,” nods toward Molnar’s kinship with that which falls outside of and resists normative culture and processes.

The album’s opening track, “Sub Luna,” begins with a musical calm after the storm such as might traditionally be found in the repose of a classical piece. Only here, it is as if the traditional structure is reversed, and we quickly descend into more disquieting and discordant territory.

Resonating piano chords, down-tuned double-bass, and sustained tones from an MS-20 usher in a cradling envelope of sound. Syncopated harp notes and strings shimmer like filigree within the sonic undertow. Between what Molnar describes as the opposing shorelines of the piece, tidal currents of low-end drift and interweave with melodic tendrils in the higher registers before eventually returning to the opening motif.

There is an elemental heft to EXO, a disquieting sublime immensity, reinforced by Edd Allan’s stark ocean photography that accompanies the record. “My true realm of passionate experience of sound is in the sonic oblivion of low-end and its resonance, always,” Molnar says.

Nowhere is this passion for sonic oblivion clearer than on “Terre Sacer,” a ghostly dirge in which ominous melodic figures move in and out of focus in slow motion, ebbing and flowing, brooding and resisting until settling into a repeating three-chord structure; within this maelstrom, a processed human voice mournfully cries out like a siren going under.   

Music critic Harry Sword, author of Monolith Undertow, proposes that low-end drone, “exists outside of us, an aural expression of a universal hum we can only hope to fleetingly channel.” Accessing this universal hum as a listener can cradle and console, but Molnar is skeptical when I suggest that music is an escape. He suggests that the tendency to look for escapism in art is ultimately misguided. “I prefer Yeats’s contention that there is another world,” he says, “but within our world.”

It is hard to disagree with this rationale. Escape implies fantasy, which in turn suggests the spell cast by entertainment. Entertainment, a variation of well-established aesthetic territory, might provide a reassuring distraction from the hardships of life, but when the distraction is over, “the suffering is waiting,” Molnar warns, “blood-thirsty and merciless.” Only by transforming suffering into a vector for connection can music exceed escapism and become art. “I don’t tend to look to art for escape,” he suggests. “I find it brings me closer to reality and lessens my removal from it.”

Molnar may be an outsider. But his vision is grounded and decidedly anti-utopian. He stoically strives to maintain grace in the face of applause and derision, both of which he claims are distractions from self-knowledge and craftsmanship. Whatever is nascent within him, Molnar finds a way to attune to its cryptic hum.◼︎

EXO is out now via Constellation Records.