The first release from Heavy Fog, a new avant-classical imprint from stalwart Halifax outsider label Divorce Records, is spellbinding. It offers over an hour of shifting, tangled melodies from some of Toronto’s finest players. With introspective strings, blooming autoharp and ebbing cymbals, Bespoken moves the mind of the listener to a position of lightness. Which is not to say this is explicitly joyful or positive music: it is thorny and it has mixed feelings. The lightness herein stems less from an absence of heavy things and more from an acceptance of all things (light and otherwise).
