Montréal is a city with a certain atmosphere, a particular flavour. Multi-lingual to the core, it’s a welcoming port city, with different cultures, different neighbourhoods working together to foster something unique.
Jump Source formed in 2016 after long evenings in the city’s hyper-creative Mile End area, and their wide-open, ultra-creative stance on dance music mirrors the relaxed, anything-goes atmosphere of Montréal as a whole.
New album ‘FOLD’ is out now, and it represents their most potent and in-depth work yet. Daring and complex, it’s also unashamedly pop, utilising melody as a means to express intricate ideas.
Collaborators on the record include a host of CLASH favourites – such as underground rap hero billy woods, POiSON GiRL FRiEND, CFCF and more – with the glossy effervescence making some of their most potent production work to date.
CLASH sat down with Jump Source to discuss a few of the key influences on their new album.
Round One To Round Five series
These records have been a blueprint for us since the beginning of the project, but focused mostly on tunes like ‘New Day’ and ‘I’m Your Brother’ for this album. They’re subdued yet full of emotion — the same attention put into the dubbed out chords to the lyrics, vocal tone and idiosyncrasies captured by the mics and board. Distilled to the essentials.
Mary Ellen Mark
We both love photography and film, and we tend to shoot casually while traveling. We’re not trying/pretending to carry the same socio-political weight as Mary Ellen Mark’s work, but we have a deep appreciation for that kind of documentary approach. Her work, and especially Streetwise, has stayed with us. The grit, the candid scenes, the humour and the sentimentality are all things we tried to channel on ‘Fold’.
King Tubby
The real innovator. Building his own amps and pionnering countless studio techniques. We love that sound: tape echoes, phasers, distorted preamps, vocal echoes spilling into the next phrase. Plenty of gear makers still draw inspiration from his approach, including Soundgas, who recreated the preamp from the Grampian 636.
David Lynch
There isn’t much left to say about David Lynch that hasn’t already been said, but one thing we keep coming back to is his ability to move between moods through starkly contrasting musical choices. He’ll shift from smooth jazz to somber, uneasy chords, often overlapping them and embracing the dissonance. More it’s that signature blend of jazz, electronics, seduction, humor and tension. We think this comes through most clearly on ’Nice & Edgy’.
Underworld
They embody the rough yet refined approach we aspire to. Both their records and live show are a heavy inspiration for our project. The balance of pop elements, with a punkier execution in the context of dance music is something we’ve been driven towards: squeezing chord progressions and melodies through old effects chains and various distortion units to land on off kilter arrangements that fill a system but remain minimal instrumentally.
Lali Puna
The glitchier, mellower side of our album took a lot of influence from them: chopping live recordings in a very stark, unaffected way, embracing the digital clicks, hard panning, melodic live bass, Rhodes, late 90s effects (Nord modular and quadraverb), old converters and the overall blend of live band structures through an electronic lens.
—
‘FOLD’ is out now.
—
Robin Murray
Read More