Badge Époque Ensemble Air, Light & Harmony (Black Ice)

On November 3rd, Toronto’s Badge Époque Ensemble return to Telephone Explosion Records with their new album Air, Light & Harmony. The release keeps up the jazz-funk group’s torrid pace of releases for TER; A,L&H being their 6th LP release, and 4th proper album for the label since 2019. The release completes a trilogy of triptych-titled works, following 2019’s Nature, Man & Woman, and 2021’s Future, Past & Present. All 3 of these releases feature compositions which resample loops and stems from prior albums. Air, Light & Harmony takes this gambit further with in-house recycling of snippets from dusty LP copies of their own work (ala Portishead’s famed approach) featured throughout to create warped and ambiguous moodscapes. This emphasis on texture is befitting of BÉE’s only entirely instrumental album.