Badge Époque Ensemble has released a new video from director Alex Kingsmill for their new single “Unity (It’s Up To You).” The track is off their sophomore album, Self Help. The song features guest vocals, by multi-artist James Baley, whose urgent declaratives: “Water must pool, as a rule, before tasted/Or else the water is wasted.” The words throughout the song complement the ensemble music while riffing on the precarious nature of unity itself.

“The appeal of writing a song about ‘unity’ is its slipperiness as a concept,” says Max Turnbull. “It can be used as a dividing line, giving form to the particularity of things defined in opposition of one another, or we may zoom out wide enough to find all matter and all energy under its purview. It is a word which requires a frame. A recorded song is sympathetically flexible in its compression. We can single out a lead vocalist (easy to do on this song with returning BÉE guest, the incomparable James Baley) or soloist (guitar from Chris Bezant), or, as I am inclined, we can choose to hear the song as one sound. As the song says, ‘it’s up to you’.”

Of the video, Kingsmill says : “‘Unity’ is an exploration into correlation, symbiotic cohabitation, and the relationships that are an essential part of being in a sensory world. The video probes the ways in which we imagine, invent and impart meaning onto these interconnections- an immersion into systems, layers, sensations, emotions and feelings that we navigate everyday in our lives, and that sometimes overwhelm us. Inspiration is drawn from the visual language of “The Midnight Gospel”, Jan Švankmajer, “The Adventures of Mark Twain”, and the comic absurdity of Monty Python”.

Badge Époque Ensemble
Self Help
Track List
Telephone Explosion

1. Sing A Silent Gospel
2. Unity (It’s Up To You)
3. Cloud
4. The Sound Where My Head Was
5. Just Space For Light
6. Birds Fly Through Ancient Ruins
7. Extinct Commune

Badge Époque Ensemble now has a seventh member in Karen Ng, the saxophonist and sometime collaborator of Do Make Say Think, Feist, and others. In BÉE, Ng joins Chris Bezant and Giosuè Rosati, her bandmates in the Andy Shauf live band, as well as U.S. Girls co-conspirators Turnbull and Ed Squires, and other Torontonian cross-pollinators listed below. Guest vocalists across Self Help include Meg Remy, who sings with Dorothea Paas on the opener, James Baley, and Toronto singer-songwriter Jennifer Castle on the remarkable “Just Space for Light”.

PRE-ORDER SELF HELP HERE