Band: Jasper Sloan Yip
Album: Post Meridiem
VÖ: 27.10.2016
Label: Afterlife Records / Membran
Website: www.jaspersloanyip.com
Jasper Sloan Yip’s start was humble. A self-taught musician, he gave his first performance in 2007 on a stage he built in the backyard of his Vancouver home. Three days later he boarded a one-way flight to Paris, the first stop of many in a year-long voyage that spanned fifteen countries and three continents. In the cafes and one-star hotels of Europe, Jasper wrote much of his restless and wide-eyed debut Every Day and All at Once. Released on his 23rd birthday, the 10-song debut album charted on college radio, appeared on network television and led to showcases across Canada.
Three years later, at the helm of an experimental folk-rock sextet, Jasper released his ambitious follow up, Foxtrot. The earnest naïveté that characterized Every Day and All At Once was gone, replaced with pensive introspection and orchestral instrumentation. The result was a mosaic; nine very different songs that, taken together, offered a unified narrative about the pains and joys of love and art.
Foxtrot was an immediate success. Its first single “Show Your Teeth” climbed to top ten positions on CBC Radio 2, 3 and several other campus charts across the country. The song also landed Jasper a $10,000 “Best of BC” award the following May, while the album’s title track received a $5,000 Public Records Video Grant award that June. Capping off the release year, CBC Radio 2 and 3 both included “Show Your Teeth” on their respective “Best of 2013” lists, while the Province named Foxtrot one of 2013’s top ten indie records.
Fast forward to 2017, ten years after his debut backyard performance, as Jasper sits on his most realized collection of songs yet. Produced by John Raham (Dan Mangan, Frazey Ford, Dralms), Post Meridiem refines the elements he has become known for, with eloquent reflections of life and loss woven through arrangements that climb from whispered confessions to soaring soundscapes. As Jasper puts it, “Continuing the pattern of my previous releases, Post Meridiem is a self-portrait. Or rather, a series of vignettes that, when considered together, give a sense of the whole. It is reflective by design; a distorted recollection of one's own life created with the hope that listeners will see some part of themselves somewhere in the hazy patch-work narrative before them.”
Post Meridiem will be released in October 2017 on Afterlife Music, and distributed by Membran. It will be supported with tour dates around Canada as well as a return to Europe – perhaps inspiring the next chapter for this introspective troubadour.
