Canadian experimental/drone/post-rock project Thisquietarmy announces new album »Langue Hybride« coming out April 18th!

Celebrating 20 years of his career, Eric Quach and his experimental/drone/post-rock project Thisquietarmy announce new album, »Langue Hybride«, which will be released on April 18th, 2025 via Consouling Sounds / A Thousand Arms.

Listen to the first single »Respirer l’instabilité« below!

Trackslist:
01. Les rayons cosmiques
02. Respirer l’instabilité
03. Les radicaux libres
04. Organismes en aérobiose
05. Solastalgie impalpable

Courtesy of Discipline PR:

Thisquietarmy celebrates two decades of immersive guitar drone mastery with an exclusive, one-of-a-kind full band performance conceived specifically for Dunk! Festival. More than just a significant occasion. But the 10th anniversary for thisquietarmy’s infamous performance in the forest at Dunk! Festival in 2015. Following the festival announcement, the one-man-project of Eric Quach is happy to reveal the details for his upcoming LP – »Langue Hybride«. Written and arranged in less than a month during thisquietarmy’s music residency at Centre d’Expérimentation Musical (CEM) in the region of Saguenay – Lac-St-Jean, Québec.

“The goal of the residency was to perform one hour of music ready to be played live, recorded and filmed in front of an audience, which meant I had to write new music from scratch from the first day there, with people I’ve never met nor played with before.” – explains Eric Quach talking about the nature of the writing process. “I’ve been working with assigned local session musicians contracted from the music center, where I did my residency. It turned out to be a mix of classical musicians who were used to playing strictly sheet music and jazz/funk/rock musicians who were really into the “jamming” spirit. We had to find ways to push everyone out of their comfort zone in order to bridge the open improvisation of jazz with the austere classical, including my own! Working with several people all at once while trying to compose the music, sorting through the improvised ideas and blending everything together was incredibly overwhelming and intense. I had to do a lot work outside these jam sessions, listening to recordings and creating diagrams for structures and to explicitly express what mood, motifs, emotions I wanted out of all the different parts. So »Langue Hybride« also extends to musical and sonic languages.”

Photo credits: Manon Cornieux

By the end of the third week, the collective of artists lead by Quach managed to collect 100 people in a hall presenting the results of their work: “…it was really a full year or two of work, condensed in a month”. Enough for the material Eric calls his “most ambitious work”. But also, a full circle, in a way. While Eric’s first project, Destroyalldreamers was a purely, band-effort. It lead to the beginning of thisquietarmy with the release of »Wintersleeper« EP in 2005. “Destroyalldreamers (2002-2007) was really the first time I started making music in general and thisquietarmy was an anti-band, anti-rule, anti-label solo release.” – as a reference to that era of his work, Eric resurrected one of the musical ideas presented on »Organismes en aérobiose« which was shelved during the Destroyalldreamers era. The circle is complete right now. You have to live through, breath it and get lost in the space of a sound.

Mixed by Eric Quach and mastered by Harris Newman (Goodspeed You! Black Emperor, Constellation Records), »Langue Hybride« is coming out April 18. Pre-order the new LP via:
● A Thousand Arms in the US here.
● Consouling Sounds in the Rest of the World here (CD | LP).
● Bandcamp here.

Thisquietarmy is a solitary one-man experimental drone-based music project from Montreal, Canada. Active since 2005, Eric Quach constantly furthers the boundaries of his sonic guitar experimentation to create an impressively wide range of dynamic soundscapes by combining textural & structural elements of ambient/electronic, drone/noise, shoegaze/industrial, post-punk/krautrock, black/doom metal.

Photo credits: Zoe Nameche

As a nod to the hybrid of languages Quach grew up with in Québec, the title also aptly refers to the hybrid of musical languages encountered during this residency involving musicians from different backgrounds such as jazz, metal and classical, blending seamlessly with Quach’s self-taught sonic experimentations and improvised style. The resulting album reflects the exploration of a wide range of genres, skillfully blended with his post-drone vision as a rich, ambitious, elaborate body of work.

His live performances, often presented as an improvised real-time score to his own hypnotic ethereal visuals, can be as heavy and face melting as quiet and introspective. With over 40 different releases on 25+ different labels and hundreds of performances across the globe, Quach remains one of Canada’s leading experimental artists.

FFO: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, MONO, Year Of No Light

Bojan Bidovc // music enthusiast, promoter, misanthrop and sometimes a journalist as well