by RAF KATIGBAK

Like the cover photograph on Avia Gardner’s debut album More Than Tongue Can Tell, the music within is hauntingly familiar. It’s a lullaby, a ghost, a lost history pieced together and stitched with tattered instrumental fragments into a lush fabric of spectral melodies and warm, moody layers. Those who are already familiar with Avia Gardner know that the project isn’t so much a who, but a what.

“When we were looking for a name,” explains Jenna Robertson, who supplies the delicate, classically-trained voice as one half of the Avia Gardner duo, “we started thinking of maiden names in our families. My great grandmother was named Grandma Gardner and she was my mom’s hero, she saved her many times throughout her life. I grew up on stories about her—she was a state auditor elected to office and worked in women’s prisons. She was a really interesting person. I started getting interested in family histories and I was reading a book set in ancient Rome, and one of the characters there was a grandmother and her children called her Avia.”

Only after More Than Tongue Can Tell was completed did Robertson and her partner, producer Mitchell Akiyama, realize that the album had become less a shiny new package full of new ideas and wild directions than a dusty old shoebox where they could gather bits of lace, lullabies, old stories and feelings that were both foreign and familiar.

“It’s not a schtick,” states Akiyama. “It really came about organically, and became an almost Victorian thing under our noses. It was more like embodying this spirit that was there, working its way through the project from before.”

Montrealers might recognize Akiyama from his own Intr_Version label, which has been spearheading Montreal’s folk-tronica movement for the last few years, with his own self-titled releases as well as his Desormais project with Cincinnati’s Joshua Treble.

“Music making is a real non-intellectual thing for me,” continues Akiyama. “The fact that it’s Avia Gardner is also a metaphor. I feel like I grow songs—I sort of plant seeds, and they have their own properties. Like, you can plant a dozen seeds and they won’t grow an identical plant, yet you tend to them and create conditions for them to grow and emerge, you don’t actually sit there putting the cells together building a leaf. That’s kind of how I feel about making music. Plus, Jenna and I are avid gardeners.”

Indeed, it’s the natural, organic qualities of the songs that hold the listener’s attention, a quality that the pair is eager to translate live. “We’re really letting go of the recorded sound,” reveals Robertson. “After going crazy on eBay, buying tons of instruments, we’re rearranging a lot of stuff so that we can play it live.”

“What’s become clear in the wake of electronica,” adds Akiyama, “is that no matter how much processing or effects you use, if it doesn’t translate, if you can’t play it with an instrument or voice, then what is it? Our hope is that our songs are strong enough to be covered or played different ways and still retain heart and soul. What we’re realizing is that in some ways, we’ve really always been a folk band, except we have this patina of digital stuff happening.”

CD launch with Blunderspublik at le Divan Orange
on Wednesday, Dec. 14, 9 p.m., $5

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