Great Vowel Shift

solo music project

Ranging from lo-fi bedroom experiments drenched in tape hiss to DIY attempts at pop production, Great Vowel Shift has become a catch-all name for my solo music projects.

Tasteful Erotica is a six-song EP that I released in 2011. It was written and produced quickly, in an attempt to get back to the lo-fi/bedroom experimental aesthetic of my early recordings, back when I was recording to tape. Although assembled digitally, the songs feature a lot of analogue sounds, including tape loops and sounds recorded on micro-cassette.

It was reviewed on the blog Argue Job:

Montreal’s Yan Basque, the mind behind The Great Vowel Shift, tastefully blends experimentation and pop rationale to create some highly magnetic jams on this new EP of his. His musical intuition is definitely the highlight of the ep. Basque knows how far to push the less palatable aspects without taking the well balanced pop concessions off the table.

Though it was technically released under the name Racine - when I thought I could be prolific enough to sustain two solo projects! - I would consider A Perfect Hand to be the first Great Vowel Shift album.

The album is an autobiographical account of my naive attempt to start a revolution by co-founding the Montreal art collective Lab Synthèse and the lessons learned from that experience. I was pretty depressed when I made it, but it sort of ends on a positive note.

I tried to make this album sound as clean and polished as possible. There are a lot of things I would do differently today, but overall I’m still pretty happy with this work. It’s the most personal and earnest songwriting I’ve ever done and there are a few gems on it.

Cover illustration by Nicole Aline Legault. Design by Kevin Yuen Kit Lo.