Joshua Van Tassel releases new LP, Dance Music Volume II: More Songs For Slow Motion

Dance Music Volume II, Van Tassel’s sixth LP, is held together by a string quartet, electronics to create beautiful sounds in a time replete with ugliness, and the Ondea – a contemporary re-creation of the famed french synthesizer the Ondes Martenot.

The Ondes Martenot (OHND mar-tə-NOH) is an elegantly intricate, deliberately complicated hand-built machine that lives with the theremin as one of the world’s earliest electronic instruments (c.1928). Its inventor, the cellist Maurice Martenot, was a radio operator in WWI and wanted to duplicate the accidental overlaps of tones between radio oscillators, but with the expressiveness and emotion of cello. The Ondes is a rare collectible now, but there is an option in the Ondea. Itself an exclusive membership, they’re Ondes modernized by Calgary’s David Kean.

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No stranger to concepts and themes, Van Tassel made the first Dance Music, 2014’s Songs For Slow Motion, as a gift for his dancer wife to play in her sessions as a craniosacral therapist. Between that volume and this one, he’s busied himself with his regular gigs as an in-demand accompanist playing with Great Lake Swimmers, Amelia Curran, Donovan Woods, and Rose Cousins; producing albums for Sarah Slean, Rosie & the Riveters, and Megan Bonnell; and composing music for Laurie Brown’s podcast Pondercast.