“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.

“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.}