Tasseomancy and Chikiss at ACUD / Tuesday, 07.03.2017

Tasseomancy are a Canadian psychedelic pop duo comprised of twin sisters Sari and Romy Lightman. Their latest album was released in Nobember 2016. For the seasoned loners, stoners, and lackadaisically laid, Do Easy was written as a dead-beat anthem for a generation who was told that anything is possible after the possibility slows. Written in both Toronto and Montreal, Do Easy was created as a lamp shade of hope; of soft survivalism. Serene, strange and magnetically sung, it’s an album that honours its free-thinking forebears without being weighed down by them, creating immersive worlds of loving allusion.

Genesis P-Orridge and Kathy Acker believed William Burroughs to be a vibrant beam of clarity. P-Orridge, a disciple of Bouroughs, referred to “The Discipline of D.E. as a smooth hand of magic”. Romy Lightman of Tasseomancy stumbled upon the Discipline of D.E. (Do Easy), a short story outlining a-don’t-bust-a-gut Buddhist philosophy and “like a gentle old cop making a soft arrest”, she was deeply touched and set out to find the easy way.

Soft synths and crystalline harmonies merge hypnotically on ‘Dead Can Dance and Neil Young’, an invitation to “fade into folk song”. If folk song this is, it’s folk of great idiosyncrasy, where vocoded chorales provide atmospheric shading and alto-saxophones drift like cigarette smoke from a David Lynch dream-film. Between the new age synth of “Claudine & Annie”, ambient swoon of “29 Palms”, Kate Bush-like prog-psych of “Missoula” and gently lapping title-track, Do Easy plays like pop from a parallel world.

https://youtu.be/QrTo7vbJnNI

Sari and Romy Lightman are former members of queer cold-wave band, Austra. Channelling their former forays in psychedelic folk into a kind of lushly accessible, warmly experimental dream-pop along with bandmates Johnny Spence and Evan Cartwright, they explore manipulated sounds, all with mood in mind. Assisted by friends Brodie West (alto-sax), Ryan Driver (flute) Simone Schmidt (voice of a young Neil Young) and Alex Cowan (Blue Hawaii) that exploration reaches full bloom on Do Easy, the sound of a band hitting their richly imagined, luxuriously executed stride. And, wealth of evocative references included, making it all sound easy.