set fire to flames

set fire to flames (in lower-case letters for a reason) is a music collective of 13 musicians who come straight out of the current Montreal post-rock scene. Members from such bands as Exhaust, Fly Pan Am, godspeed you black emperor!, Hanged Up, and HRSTA are all present in this Montreal supergroup.

The band has only played once live in 1999, because of the obvious complications of getting all 13 members in the same place at one time, so the collective has their strong point in the records they create. The music the band makes is really all over the musical spectrum but people who like F# A# Infinity will really get into their sound. At sometimes hauntingly beautiful, sometimes noisy clutter, the music is diverse and unique and always full of life. This life is usually from the found sound and spoken word samples that find their way into the recordings. The band seems to love recording in strange places that harbor these sounds.

The first of their full-length releases, "sings reign rebuilder", was recorded in the summer of 2000 with the mixing being completed in the spring of 2001 and then a finished project finally released on October 9, 2001 on Alien8 Recordings. The album itself was recorded over five days in a building built in 1878 that used to be a 10 cent shoeshine parlor and then later a brothel in the forties. You can honestly hear this building through out the whole recording, whether it's with the people outside talking loudly about secretive things or the old staircase that creaks in protest to its new inhabitants. The music on this releases 60% improvised and 40% composed but 100% beautiful.

1. 'I will be true...' (from the lips of lying dying wonder boy #1) / reign rebuilder (head)
2. Vienna Arcweld/Fucked Gamelan/Rigid Tracking
3. Steal Compass/Drive North/Disappear
4. Wild dogs of the Thunderbolt/They cannot lock me up I am eternally free (from the lips of lying dying wonder boy #2)
5. Omaha
6. There is no dance in frequency and balance
7. Cote D'Abrahams Room tone/What’s going on? (from the lips of lying dying wonder boy #3)
8. Love song for 15 Ontario (w/singing police car)
9. Injur: gutted two-track
10. When I first get to Phoenix
11. Shit-heap-Gloria of the new town planning...
12. Jesus / Pop
13. Esquimalt Harbour
14. Two tears in a bucket
15. Fading lights are fading…/ reign rebuilder (tail out)

Their second album, which was released on April 8, 2003 with the title of "telegraphs in negative / mouths trapped in static", had a similar concept as the first release: find a weird location in Canada and record there. The first idea the band had was to take a mobileý recording studio across the country and record in random places they found on the way. This idea was eventually turned to ashes and they decided to record in an cathedral-like barn at an old, abandoned farm in rural Ontario. This album sounds extremely similar to their first release (in a good way) but it somehow seems less focused and composed and much more improvised. The band once again recorded this album at different levels of awareness, with most of the band working on little or no sleep or in various levels of intoxication. This is a double disc.

1. Déja, Comme des Trous de Vent, Comme Reproduit
2. Small Steps Against Inertia / Echo of a Dead End
3. Measure de Mesure
4. Holy Throat Hiss Tracts to the Sedative-Hypnotic
5. When Sorrow Shoots Her Darts
6. Kill Fatigue Frequencies
7. In Prelight Isolate
8. Tehran in Seizure / Telegraphs in Negative

1. Your Guts are Like Mine
2. Fukt Perkusiv / Something About Bad Drugs, Schizophrenics and Grain Silos...
3. Sleep Maps
4. Something About Eva Mattes in the Halo of Exploding Street Lamps...
5. Buzz of Barn Flies Like Faulty Electronics
6. And the Birds Are About to Bust Their Guts with Singing
7. Rites of Spring Reverb
8. Mouths Trapped in Static
9. This Thing Between Us is a Rickety Bridge of Impossible Crossing / Bonfires for Nobody...