Matt Murphy's Flashing Lights in 1999 in Toronto. After more than a few tours, a few albums, a few 1000 lbs. of hammond organ, and a spell in More Plastic, the Saffron Sect formed in 2004 in order to manifest Gaven's back catalogue of song. Rekindling the lysergic fire of nights spent in the attic of his friend, Gnostic brother and early mentor Dan Beer, Gaven sought to express a musical synthesis of all that inspired him from an early age to the present, on instruments that were considerably lighter and perhaps more familiar to the atavistic ear.
The irony of course, is that with the release of these songs as "Phosphorous Flash" (Fig Records) in 2006, it subjected The Sect to be be compared with the current batch of similarly inclined musical groups, never minding that most of the songs contained within had been written and recorded almost 10 years prior, on long winding rolls of magnetic tape, in various living rooms across Hamilton and Toronto. This is old magic.
Allthough they've been a shadowy group seldom seen outside Toronto, they've captured the attentions of a small band of similarly inclined musicians, artists, regressive futurists, forward thinkers, and assorted hirsute reprobates across the country.
The Saffron Sect were showcased prominantly in the "10,000 MICROGRAMMES OF MUSIC FESTIVAL" (Hamilton,ON) were also featured in this year's "BUMMER IN THE SUMMER FESTIVAL" (Toronto, ON) and have played alongside MV & EE & The Bummer/Golden Road, The Gris Gris, Josephine Foster, The Orange Alabaster Mushroom, Blood Ceremony, City Field, Emerald Cloud Cobra, Brent Randall & His Pinecones, The Michael Franklin Early Music Group, and such legendary Canadian (Hamiltonian) psych-rock legends as Bob Bryden of Reign Ghost /Christmas fame and Edgar Breau of Simply Saucer, with whom The Saffron Sect will be recording this fall. Local indie glip glops may have allready noted that the Sect share some members with The Old Soul (whos' album on universal/hand of god is well worth checking out!)
This is what the people over at FIG RECORDS have to say about the Saffron Sect....
"The Saffron Sect is born of overgrown gardens and shaded secret places. Songs of seas, smoke, and stone alike, these recordings offer glimpses of worlds that might have been, or should be. Hazy and mysteriously rollicking rhythms, an array of familiar yet archaic instruments coupled with Gaven's lilting voice and lyric betray his weird imagination, painted here with the palettes of the surreal, with a string pluck. Devoid of the self-awareness strangling many bands, The Saffron Sect conjure up a playful world in which to deliberate life's loves lost and won."
THE SAFFRON SECT
GWALCHMAI (GAVEN DIANDA): vocals, guitars, guittern, sitar, kortholt, recorder, kazoo, string things
CHRISTIAN HAMILTONb>: Glockenspiel, shruti box, tambourine.
MATTHEW MacLAREN: double bass, electric bass, cigarettes
KATIE IAROCCI: flute, dulcimer/langspil/epinette des vosges, glockenschpiel
JAY ANDERSON: drums, clanging boinging clinking things
RICHARD GIBSON: autoharp, occasional sitar, hoa-hoa
CALVIN BROWN: clink clinks, Mandoline, Tamboura/Tanpura, hoa-hoa
MICHAEL FRANKLIN: hurdy-gurdy, shawm, crumhorn, flute, shepherds harp, library
KRISTINA KOSKINNEN: transverse flute
Honourary Saffrons in Perpetuity
JIM BRAVO, JEFF BURKE, TOMAS MONTE, DAVE EWANSON, ELIZABETH ASTON, SAM PETITE, DAVE CHRISTIANSEN & IRENA
Floridly,
Clovis
