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The Thing Is has been the splashy, luxuriantly instrumented vehicle for the compositions of Tova Kardonne since 2006. She runs around the playground of Toronto musical communities, picks up obsessions, gnaws them down to sonic bones, and then bakes them into layered cakes of the song-like persuasion. The bone-cake layers are strange bedfellows. Their heterogeneity interlocks, pleasurable and inexorable. With one 2012 self-titled The Thing Is album floating about, Kardonne keeps chipping away at the post-production side of the second, in all its hilarious elaborateness. After the 2014 Rex Hotel work-shopping and 2015 presentation of The Lanka Suite at the Music Gallery, The Thing Is, along with Alex Samaras’ GREX vocal ensemble and guest soloist Jane Bunnett, put lots of 15-part music into the digital raw. It’s a-coming. But it’s not here yet. In the meantime, we play sometimes and Kardonne writes tiny tiny musics for few instruments, to recover from all the commotion.

tovakardonne.com

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