Batalla honours Leonard Cohen’s legacy

Perla Batalla was in Europe, 2

determined to escape the dawn of an ugly period in history, when she got news of a death that overshadowed everything happening at home in the United States. The Grammy Award–winning Mexicanamerican singer had got on a plane just as Donald J. Trump shocked the world by winning the presidency.

“It was the day after our election here in the U.S. and I didn’t want to talk about that with anybody,” Batalla relates, on the line from her home in Ojai, California. “So going to Europe was this wonderful relief for me. But then I get to Paris, get the news, and it’s devastating.”

That news was the passing of Leonard Cohen, which had actually taken place the day before America headed to the polls in 2016. When the death was made public, Batalla was harder hit than most, considering that the Canadian icon was not only a mentor and a lifelong supporter of her career, but, above all, a cherished friend.

“I got to Paris, checked into my hotel, turned off my phone, and then went to sleep in a sort of jet-lagged haze,” she says. “When I turned my phone on in the morning I had hundreds of messages about Leonard’s passing. It caught me completely by surprise. We were in touch constantly, texting back and forth. I knew he was sick and I knew that it was getting worse, but it never occurred to me that he wouldn’t be there.”

Batalla decided the best way to pay tribute to Cohen’s life is by honouring his legacy. That led her to create Perla Batalla in the House of Cohen in 2017. The show has Batalla—who began touring with the legendary Montreal songwriter and poet in the late ’80s as a teenage backup vocalist—performing some of Cohen’s most cherished songs. And, just as importantly, giving those who never saw the singer insights into who he was as a person.

“I love telling stories about my relationship with Leonard, and also sharing the stories that he would tell me,” Batalla says. “The tradition of storytelling is that people tell their stories over and over again, and that way they are passed on. In my effort to keep Leonard alive, then, I tell some of his stories that he used to tell me. What I remember is that he was so funny—he was someone who always had me laughing.”

Cohen was also supportive. While he got to know Batalla as his backup singer, he encouraged her career aspirations as a solo artist. To date she’s released seven critically praised full-lengths, including the Grammynominated 2007 Cohen tribute album Bird on a Wire. She’s also appeared alongside Nick Cave and Rufus Wainwright in the concert film I’m Your Man, worked as a voice coach for the likes of Will Ferrell and Jeremy Piven, and been an advocate for underprivileged youth in the States.

For House of Cohen, she’s headed to Vancouver with pianist Michael Sobie.

“A big part of the show is that songs remind me of certain things,” she says. “Experiences on the road, or even at home, because sometimes we’d go out and do things. My memories of him are very vivid because he was such an enormous influence in my life.”

And the impact Cohen had on her life made that morning in Paris one—for all the right reasons—she’ll never forget.

“I was very upset, but at some point in my haze, I decided that I was going to go for a walk,” Batalla says. “I wanted to avoid all the newspaper stands because I also didn’t want to see any pictures about what was going on in the U.S. But most of the covers were of Leonard Cohen. So it was incredibly comforting seeing that in Europe, where I spent a lot of time with Leonard. From France I went to Spain, which was one of his favourite places on the planet. That made it all, I don’t know, somehow more comforting.”

> MIKE USINGER

Perla Batalla brings Perla Batalla in the House of Cohen to the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre on Sunday (March 11) as part of the Chutzpah Festival.

Skim Milk’s Sam Davidson probes instrumental space

For a lesson on how musicians 2

grow, look no further than local act Skim Milk’s three releases. Sam Davidson’s instrumental project made its debut in 2014, with an eponymous effort that’s pleasant background music, impossible to classify by genre but also not especially rich in terms of its emotional content. The following year’s Ghosts of Jazz is just bigger all round, with stronger melodies, more adventurous soloing, and a greater sense of improvisational freedom. And now, with the just-released Fingerprints, Davidson has expanded his world yet again.

Yes, the overall aesthetic is still cool, and Davidson’s reverb-laced approach to production can be opaque; Skim Milk comes by its name honestly. But the Brasstronaut multi-instrumentalist is happy to agree that he’s making progress.

“With the first album, I was going for that relaxed, ambient aesthetic,” Davidson tells the Straight, on the line from his Burnaby home. “With the second album, Ghosts of Jazz, it was really about trying to draw from more, like, R&B roots and funk. And now, with Fingerprints, it’s more about identity,” he continues. “It’s about me coming to terms with my own influences.…and it’s called Fingerprints because it’s about all the people and all the points in my life that have put their mark on each of these songs.”

Davidson is still working with loops and samples, but says his quotes are now more deeply “encoded”—like the snippet of 17th-century recorder music that inspired his new disc’s title track.

“What I like to do with the old music is go through it and find those elements that are used in a way that is still kind of contemporary,” he explains. “So it’s just a little loop, and then I wanted to dress it up with some subtle electronics, and then I got my friend Terri Hron, who I’ve been collaborating with for a long time, to play some legit recorder on it. She worked in a consort in Amsterdam for 11 years, so it was really good to have her bring these elements of the Old World and the New World together, using the fingerprints of the original composer, Jacob van Eyck.”

Davidson is an exceptional clarinet player and a skilled manipulator of recorded sound, but there’s a third element that helps define Skim Milk’s identity: his use of the EWI, an “electronic wind instrument” that’s responsible for many of the music’s more intriguing textures.

“I think of it as kind of a supercharged recorder,” he says. “It uses a very basic woodwind fingering setup that’s kind of transferable, in a way, to all the wind instruments. And it’s pretty limitless; it just takes a bit of time to figure out how to use it musically, I think. Especially dressed in reverb, it can be a very ambiguous texture that kind of gives a glow to things, in a way.”

That glow will be especially appropriate at Skim Milk’s next performance: on a Planetarium double bill with ambient postrockers Plasteroid. “This whole idea came about because of Owen Connell from Plasteroid,” says Davidson, noting that for the night he’ll debut a new, drummerless Skim Milk, in which he’ll be joined by guitarist Tom Wherrett, bassist James Meger, and trombonist Ellen Marple. “We went down to the Planetarium a few weeks ago and met with the manager and the projectionist, and we got to do a walk-through of all the different things that they can do.…they have programs for pretty much anything imaginable in terms of space and space exploration.”

So what will we be seeing when Skim Milk and Plasteroid convene under the digital stars?

“It’s programmed so that over the course of both sets you’re basically going to see every aspect of our solar system,” Davidson says. “It’s really just an amazing chance to get a glimpse of the vastness of the universe that we live in.”

> ALEXANDER VARTY

Skim Milk and Plasteroid play the H.R. Macmillan Space Centre’s Planetarium Star Theatre next Thursday (March 15).

Hi-ranger (Independent)

Ever wonder what the world 2

sounded like when bands recorded exclusively on tape, records came out on either vinyl or cassette, and Spotify didn’t exist (mostly because Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet)?

For the answer, look no further than this eponymous four-song EP by Hi-ranger, which could have been dug out of a crate from a time when SST and Dutch East India Trading were the American underground’s hottest record labels.

How strong is the affection of the trio for a time it presumably never knew firsthand? Well, let’s just say that four out of five Name That Tune contestants will confuse the riff in “Down the Drain” with Nirvana’s “About a Girl”. And goddam if the opening bass line in “Wake Me Up” doesn’t sound suspiciously like someone rearranged the intro to Fugazi’s “Waiting Room”.

Larissa Loyva is a mainstay of 2

the Vancouver music scene—or at least the corner of said scene dominated by Mint Records. A member of p:ano, the Choir Practice, and most recently the duo Fake Tears (with Elisha Rembold), Loyva is also a solo artist, releasing music as Kellarissa.

Her third album under that name, Ocean Electro finds Loyva in a contemplative space, pondering matters ecological (on “Black Sea”) and personal (“Too Drunk to Be Afraid”). Sonically, the LP expands upon the relatively spare ambiance of Kellarissa’s previous outings— namely 2008’s Flamingo and 2011’s Moon of Neptune.

Loyva still clearly has a knack for the ethereal. “Hey Hey Rosé” is a droning wonder of synth loops over which more and more vocal tracks are added until the singer has become an angelic one-woman choir.

The record kicks off, though, with a one-two punch of more uptempo numbers that recall Fake Tears’ more beat-centred tracks: the new-wave-esque “Ocean Electric” and the electro-disco banger “Black Sea”. Thematically, Ocean Electro isn’t the cheeriest album you’ll hear this year—“poppies in

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