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Night Plow
Night Plow
We Are Busy Bodies - 2023
Michael Panontin
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"It's kind of a funny story...there's so much set up, though."
Gregory Macdonald, one-time Limblifter and long-time Sloan keyboardist, carefully walked Canuckistan Music through his circuitous hook-up with Tim Lefebvre, who together make up the electronic duo Night Plow.
Macdonald has spent over a decade with Limblifter, which even undergrad Canuckistani studies majors will know is led by guitarist Ryan Dahle. Dahle headed off to New York a few years ago to play jazz with saxophonist Donny McCaslin in a group that also included Lefebvre on bass.
"McCaslin assembled an incredible band of players," Macdonald gushes, "so incredible in fact, they'd been handpicked by David Bowie to be the band on his final album, Blackstar. Tim Lefebvre is a legend in his own right. Read his Wikipedia, it's insane."
Next up in the saga is Limblifter's drummer Eric Breitenbach, whose noise/drone/metal project New Age Doom somehow managed to corral Lee 'Scratch' Perry to sing with them on his 2021 set Lee 'Scratch' Perry's Guide to the Universe. Macdonald and Lefebvre both contributed to that Perry LP. "That's how Tim and I became more aware of each other. After that record came out, Tim and I just started chatting on Instagram, and discovered we had a lot in common."
Those familiar with Macdonald's earlier foray into electronica, the extended atmospheric tracks he released several years ago as Cola Wars, are in for a bit of surprise. Night Plow is a different beast altogether. For one thing, Macdonald and Lefebvre are much more economical, with just two of the twelve tracks exceeding the three-minute mark. But more to the point, the headphone ambience of the former record has given way to the sort of glitchy pyrotechnics made famous by the likes of Autechre, Photek and many of the acts on the revered Mille Plateaux label .
The album's hopped-up industrial energy is especially evident on tracks like 'The Frumper' and 'Crow Moving', the former a playfully frenetic take on video game soundtracks and the latter a full-on digital assault. But Night Plow is most successful when it pulls itself out of that nineties nostalgia. The funky 'Amanda' could by rights be easily fleshed out for another ten minutes on a 12", while the closing 'Tim Ruins Everything', a more subdued drone piece, edges close to Zoviet France territory (which from these hoary old ears is about the highest form of compliment you can get).
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