Do Make Say Think formed in 1995-96 in Toronto, Canada. Founded by two pairs of musicians with backgrounds as varied as punk, jazz and industrial metal, the group has included a number of additional musicians over the years contributing to both live shows and recordings. Core members Charles Spearin (bass, keyboards, trumpet) and Ohad Benchetrit (guitar, saxophone) first played together in high school and birthed the Toronto punk band Dead Lemmings in the late 80s; both have gone on to work in sound production and engineering in Toronto. The other founding pair, Justin Small (guitar) and James Payment (drums), are seasoned downtown rock players who’ve done time in a long list of bands, among them the post-industrial rock group Malhavoc. During the summer of 1995, these players came together to score the music for a Canadian youth drama production, sequestering themselves in an empty schoolroom for rehearsals. The four basic verbs “Do”, “Make”, “Say”, “Think” adorned the walls of said classroom, and these elementary-level educational placards were adopted as a project name for the nascent group.

Over the course of the following year, Do Make Say Think confined themselves to a rehearsal room in the basement of University of Toronto radio station CIUT, joined by now-departed member Jason MacKenzie (drums, keyboards, electronics) and occasional contributor Robert Brasz (synths, treatments, effects). Equipped with an 8-track recorder, the station facilities allowed them to track various pieces as they evolved; combined with home tape experimentation, the band began to knit together scintillating instrumental soundscapes that combined rock riffing with dub and psych elements. Using the CIUT studios, as well as the studios of a local art college, their eponymous first album was completed in 1997, with all members participating in the splicing and mixing of final tracks. Far from compromising the process, this collective approach to composition-production yielded a stunning debut record that teems with exuberant sonic texture and a brilliant blend of highly structured and improvisational parts. Each song is finely honed, while the record as a whole is an undeniably unified effort. The band self-released the album on CD in a run of 500; Ian & Don at Constellation heard the record in early 1998, were duly blown away, and offered to re-release it as their first non-Montreal-based recording. The album came out on Constellation in the summer of that year to international acclaim.

1998-99 saw the band working full-time, adding Dave Mitchell (drums), embarking on tours of North America and Europe, finishing home recordings for the Besides 12” (on UK imprint Resonant) and commencing new recordings for a second full-length on Constellation. Between tours in the summer of 1999, Do Make Say Think moved to a barn in rural Ontario with a remote recording system and tracked the songs that would appear the following spring on Goodbye Enemy Airship the Landlord is Dead. Released in March 2000, this second record found the band working again with a conjunction of ragged repeating guitar lines and electronic textures, while expanding the canvas to incorporate modal jazz idioms in their extended horn passages and revealing a greater attention to subtlety and detail in overall compositional approach. Goodbye Enemy Airship… is a more varied body of work but carries a stronger narrative thrust, evoking a melancholy tension between forms and environments (jazz/rock, city/country, repetition/collage). This sophomore effort similarly met with near-universal critical praise.

Their third full-length, & Yet & Yet, marked another quantum leap towards sonic and compositional mastery. Released in March 2002, the album finds space- and drone-rock foundations continuing to serve as the launching pad for experimentation with jazz-inflected motifs, but the group’s pop sensibility is also on fine display. Melodic themes laid out by guitars and horns wind along a burbling brook of fat analogue synths and phased percussion, tiny subtle details are worked into the mix on every track, and the whole record just pulses with warmth and soul. The band followed up with two separate, month-long tours of Europe, and a full-scale tour of North America in the autumn of 2002 with labelmates Fly Pan AM. & Yet & Yet received ever-widening international critical applause and concert dates on both continents saw solid and enthusiastic turnouts.

Do Make Say Think are one of Canada’s hardest-working and most prolific experimental rock bands. Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn is an amazing record of unparalleled depth for the group and is sure to build on their fine reputation for challenging, inventive instrumental music.