Danseparc [Enhanced, Original recording remastered]

The band had, by this point shedded founding members and decided to rename themselves M+M (a name that was later to stand for remaining members, Martha Johnson and Mark Gane). Having already relocated to their native Toronto, their previous album (This Is The Ice Age, 1981) had been produced by Daniel Lanois, and it was he who went back into the studio with them in 1983 when, dropped by Virgin, they signed to indie label, Current Records. Lanois' sister, Jocelyne also joined the band.

Danseparc's angular funk and tribal modernism revolved around a loose concept of the park in modern urban life. ie: The way in which it attempted to recreate a Waldonian wilderness within the heart of the city and all the contradictions that this raised.

Such a lofty concept took its cue from Eno and Byrne's 'fourth world' primitivism, especially on Talking Heads' Remain In Light. In fact the players here represent the next wave of art rock's adoption of ethnic forms and ultra-modern technology. The father of plunderphonics, John Oswald, makes an appeartance on sax on Boys In The Bushes, while the touring version of the band (included on a live bonus version of Danseparc) included future ambient guitar legend, Michael Brook. Both he and Lanois were of course to work with their hero Eno. And it's Lanois who really makes his mark here. A veritable fifth member of the band during the recording, he pushed the sonic limits of what might have been a functional new wave album. Guitars are flanged into insanity while the pallette of percussion rattles teases and gets the white boy hoodoo down straight. It constantly takes risks - for instance the blistering guitar overkill about a minute and a half into opener, Obedience. On top of this the album features film samples, manages to slip in singing pygmies and even what sounds like cistercian chanting.

Amazingly, for such an intellectual record, Danseparc's title track did enter the Canadian top 40 and critical acclaim ran high. Even to this day it sounds fresh and brave. --Chris Jones

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The fourth album from the Muffins canon, the second of three production collaborations by the now legendary and critically acclaimed producer Daniel Lanois (U2, Peter Gabriel), Danseparc will be reissued by Cherry Red for the very first time on CD in the UK.

The digitally remastered 25th Anniversary edition of Danseparc will be the first of two major releases from the Muffins this year. In November, the band will release their brand new studio album Delicate, mixed by David Bottrill (Peter Gabriel, King Crimson, Tool).

With songs written and performed by original founding Muffins, Martha Johnson (vocals, inverse guitar, keyboards, percussion) and Mark Gane (guitars, vocals, keyboards, percussion and treatments), Danseparc also features the musical expertise of Daniel Lanois' sister, Jocelyne Lanois (bass), Nick Kent (drums), and the Plunderphonics' John Oswald on sax.

Hailed as their most quintessential collection of songs to date, this beautifully packaged 25th Anniversary Edition CD edition captures the Muffins at their creative peak.

"When we worked in the studio," reminisces Mark Gane, "Dan became the fifth member of the Muffins. Suddenly he'd play a percussion part, and then we worked on a treatment for the sound together. He constantly came up with great ideas."

The album was digitally re-mastered during January and February 2008 by Peter J. Moore at The E Room in Toronto. Moore is best known for his production and engineering work on the Cowboys Junkies' critically acclaimed The Trinity Sessions album as well as albums with Chris Spedding, Wild Strawberries and Ian & Sylvia Tyson.

Danseparc 25th Anniversary Edition includes three bonus tracks including the original 12" inch dance mix of Danseparc, plus the accompanying b-side These Dangerous Machines, plus a previously unreleased live version of Sins of Children taken from the band's July 1983 concert at Toronto's Ontario Place Forum, featuring Michael Brook (guitar).

"The songs are an exciting mixture of the experimental and traditional pop," says Liam Lacey of the Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper.

"The point of view, as Gane has said in the past, is middle class. It shows, not only in the obsessions with privacy and with personal revelation, but also in the concern with such classic Canadian literary themes as isolation and the precariousness of civilization and, at a deeper level, with sexuality and the tension between energy and order."

"Some people frequent parks to romance each other," observes Mark Gane, "but for others it can also be a place where you can get attacked and mugged. It's a synthetic jungle, similar to a dance club at 3am in the morning when some people behave wildly and strive to become primitive, but don't know how to achieve it. It's impossible because we're two million years ahead of the jungle."

It's no surprise the songs on Danseparc embody themes from the urban jungle. "When we originally recorded the album, we had an obsession with parks," says Gane. "The concept of the park is an attempt by urban man to get to a point of naturalness again."

Says the Globe & Mail's Liam Lacey - "Between them, the songwriters define a dialectic, with Johnson favouring the songs about breaking down the restrictions of the world, and Gane leaning toward songs that attempt to define another kind of pleasant centre, into the almost infantile consciousness of dreams and mythology."

"Rene Girard (the author of Violence and The Sacred) has said that cultures anxious about peace and security," says Lacey, "are those most subject to destruction through violence, and that theme, or something like that theme, is often intimated throughout Danseparc."

"If Johnson's songs Obedienceand Sins Of Children, delineate the social restrictions and traps," continues Lacey, "then Gane's Several Styles Of Blonde Girls Dancing is the song about seeking pleasure through dreams and myths. It was inspired by Gane's dream of walking through a park, looking at trees inhabited by copulating monkeys, merged with seeing Indian fertility symbols carved on a rock face.

The title track, Danseparc (Every Day It's Tomorrow), is about people in their native urban city centers: structured and fearful, and imbued with complacency about society that is deliberately evasive.

Johnson's wry commentary on What People Do For Fun addresses rarely-mined contemporary topics with disarming precision and unassailable musicality. Gane uncovers the existential angst in everyday social situations and ignites them with abstract ideas, accentuated by irrepressibly rhythmic music.