For the past 30 years, the Toronto-based project of Liz Hysen, Picastro has been evolving an intense and idiosyncratic variant of indie rock songcraft, embracing unique instrumentation, unsettling dissonance, and an ultra-personal approach to form and dynamics along the way.
This week sees the debut release from Picastro for Toronto imprint We Are Busy Bodies. Double On Time recognizes strong parallels between boxing and music, particularly with improvising. The new EP retains the blunt-yet-elusive approach Hysen has honed throughout her career, it’s hard to regard these five songs as a document of boxer Sonny Liston, whose life Hysen studied in depth. In its oblique homage to him, this EP certainly stands to advocate for his humanity.
Liz now joins us for a Why I Love on American musician, singer-songwriter, visual artist, and activist, Diamanda Galas.
UNLIKE ANYTHING
I joined my first band in high school and it was primarily goth and some punk. I was around 16 when my band mate put on the record The Singer by Diamanda Galas. Being a formative time, almost everything I heard in this period was pretty critical but the sheer force with which she played her instrument and sang was completely unlike anything I had heard up until that point. The fact that I didn’t even know what genre it was was also pretty mind-blowing. I know Picastro doesn’t directly sound like her but there are definitely things I lifted from her and in general, the attack with which she approaches her instrument and total transformation of songs had a huge impact on me.
TRANSFORMING
This track is effective in a different way than some of her other works and opened my eyes a bit to some other kinds of music I hadn’t heard before. I found her piano playing and arranging arresting as usual but the delivery of everything here is so stark and beautiful and very human. There is something a bit more to her than other musicians; she creates this whole other world and language and you start to see how she doesn’t just add to a song, she completely transforms it. It was a way of composition that I think probably had the biggest impact on me because I was self-trained and could intuit what I wanted but started to understand that composition had more to do with style than anything.
THE VOICE AS AN INSTRUMENT
I didn’t really get her more experimental stuff until I saw her live a few times and was starting to discover new music composers on my own so I had a bit more of a vocabulary to understand Panopticon. I have never seen her perform any of this material but it basically shot me down a rabbit hole where I discovered Xennakis and gave me ideas on how to create the kind of texture in music I was seeking. It definitely came out in some of the record Become Secret and in the way I wanted to try vocal layering, I was never really interested in the voice as just conveying words but as its own instrument.
CATHARTIC
There is something so cathartic about this one. The freedom of release like this, it’s so mesmerizing! I really can’t think of anyone who plunges the depths like her, such a breath of fresh air to have this kind of technically perfect and yet beautiful soulful music.
Our grateful thanks to Liz for sharing one of the inspirations for her own music.
You can read more from our extensive archive of Why I Love pieces from a wide array of artists on an even wider array of subjects, here.