Artist description 2 Dudes from tha T-dot with beats and songs

Music Style Indie Pop

Musical Influences Good tunes

Similar Artists Manitoba, Beta Band, Cornelius

Artist History Seemingly the only thing Toronto does better than take money out of the pockets of its penniless musicians, is to give them the ingenuity to create consistently astonishing music in spite of their lack of resources. Recently, lone electronic visionaries Matthew Hart (The Russian Futurists) and Dan Snaith (Manitoba) drew ecstatic praise from the international music press for making aural mountains out of financial molehills ― emotionally rich, sonically widescreen mini-symphonies produced in bedrooms for less than most semi-solvent artists spend consulting their stylists for an hour. A part of this gifted community of sonic paupers for years, but only now ready for their close-up, are Bill Halliday and Gareth Jones, collectively known as The Cansecos. Friends since their high school years in the slow-moving Toronto satellite city of Barrie, Ontario, the pair of 25-year-olds spent two years creating their self-titled debut CD using little more than some outdated, falling-apart computers and a four-track recorder. When not tending to the album’s protracted birth, Halliday forged a reputation as a promising director of short films and music videos (including Manitoba’s “Dundas, Ontario” clip); Jones, a burgeoning music-business entrepreneur, established Upper Class Recordings, home to The Russian Futurists as well as his own group and the hotly-tipped Toronto duo Girls Are Short. A constantly mutating but always engaging mosaic of cut-and-paste experimentation and classic pop melodicism, live instrumentation and imaginative programmed beats, dark ruminations and playful humour, The Cansecos is music made in the presence of one damned impressive record collection, but which transcends an apparent debt to anything in it. Among the scores of artists they were under the influence of while making the album, Jones cites artists as disparate as Madlib and the Neptunes; Pavement and Guided By Voices, King Tubby and Squarepusher. Admirable touchstones all, but listeners will be hard-pressed to find explicit references to any of them here. Like all truly forward-thinking artists, The Cansecos have combined what they’ve learned and what they inherently know in order to produce their own sonorous universe. At times vaguely menacing (“Are You Lonesome Tonight?”), at others unabashedly romantic (“This Girl and This Boy,” “Common State of Being”) or simply bewildering (“Stop, Breathe, Repeat”), these twelve tracks evidence every moment of intense creativity that was spent making them. “Tracks that sound full, rough, alive and new” is how Jones reluctantly describes the duo’s realized goal for the album. Halliday offers the altogether more irreverent assessment: “Music for the armchair listener with a lively toe-tap.” Those lucky enough to discover The Cansecos will have a field day thinking of descriptors and superlatives of their own.

Group Members Gareth Jones Bill Halliday

Albums The Cansecos (2003)

Location Toronto, Ontario - Canada

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