Yamantaka//Sonic Titan is an inter-media collective that uses visual art and music to explore its members’ diasporic cultural experiences as Asian-Canadians and members of First Nations. Founded in 2007 by performance artists Ruby Kato Attwood and Alaska B, the collective quickly became an important node between Montreal and Toronto’s many musical scenes by alternately performing in art galleries and punk houses. Armed with homemade and hand-wired versions of Chinese and Japanese traditional instruments, the band wowed one and all with a live show that placed them somewhere between opera and noise rock. It was an exploratory period, to be sure, but these experiments soon led to the grandeur that is captured on the band’s self-produced debut album on Psychic Handshake Recordings.

The key to the band’s exciting sound lies in its uninhibited admixture of East and West, its commingling of sounds to represent the complications and contradictions of dual identity. Through reference to a variety of cultural forms the band shatters the comfort with which colonialist cultures have appropriated the image and art of Asian and First Nations peoples to assemble a unique hybrid form. This is Noh-Wave, and it simultaneously recalls pop and J-pop, British prog and Japanese psychedelia, punk rock and Iroquois social songs, black metal and Chinese Opera, noise music and Noh theatre. In live contexts, the collective presents this material amidst a theatrical fusion of the aesthetics of Japanese, Chinese, and First Nations’ mythology; black and white television; rock opera; and manga-influenced set design.

In addition to Attwood and B, the Yamantaka//Sonic Titan touring band includes traditional Mohawk singer and MC, Angela Loft on additional vocals; Brendan Swanson on keys and bass; John Ancheta on guitar; and Alana Ruth controlling the band’s DIY lightning rig.