Ky - Power Is The Pharmacy

Ky is the new “solo” project of Ky Brooks, best known as vocalist and lyricist of noise-punk trio Lungbutter and a slew of other Montréal-based out-music projects like 8-person queer punk band Femmaggots and experimental/improv trio Nag. Power Is The Pharmacy is an album of cerebral and visceral outsider artpunk “mainly about grief, death, the fear of loss, losing dreams, losing youth, people, public space, ultimately oneself”—an emotionally electrifying, genre-spanning collection of songs fuelled by Ky’s piercing poetry, both spoken and sung, that delivers an acute blend of incisive socio-political observation and spiritual sadness, swirling through vortices of disenchantment and re-enchantment.

The seeds of Power Is The Pharmacy were planted in pre-lockdown performances where Big|Brave’s Mat Ball played tape loops to Ky’s poems, with their intent “to figure out how to make music that involved singing in a more melodic way and getting to use some parts of my voice that I wasn’t using with Lungbutter and other noise/punk projects I had played with.” Then pandemic hit, along with Canadian pandemic income support, allowing for Ky’s strategic acquisition of a couple of mini-synths. Songs took on all kinds of further shaping and re-shaping in isolation, especially through Montréal’s long and intense lockdown winter of 2020-21. Coming out of that time, tragedy then struck devastatingly hard (as it had for so many) in spring 2021 when Lungbutter drummer and dear friend Joni Sadler died suddenly of a brain aneurism at the age of 36. Ky describes “All The Sad And Loving People” as “the most direct piece of writing I’ve done in response to Joni’s passing” and the song’s haunting, devotional simplicity is a numinous album highlight among many.

In 2021-2022, Ky worked through grief and workshopped the songs further in real life, seeing them “coalesce around an improv recording session” with a trio of fellow-travellers, all of whom appear on the final album. A diverse crew of Montréal iconoclasts was ultimately enlisted to flesh out this gripping voyage through unruly stylistic and mood swings of experimental song. Collaborators include the aforementioned Mat Ball (now laying down his trademark incendiary electric guitar), synth maven Nick Schofield, saxophonist James Goddard (Egyptian Cotton Arkestra), bassist Joshua Frank (Gong Gong Gong) and drummer Farley Miller (Shining Wizard). Ky composed all the music, plays synths and guitars, asked all these friends to “not under any circumstances play any particular thing” and then mixed the album “for 10 million years.”

Power Is The Pharmacy careens through hissing bruitist synthscape, free/jazz sprinkles, soft-focus gauze, coldwave and ambient-to-thick sludge, all anchored by Ky’s superbly sly, searching, serrated lyrics and voice. The album ranges from trenchant spoken-word tracks like “Teeth (Power Is The Pharmacy)” and “Work That Superficially Looks Like Leisure”—which repeats the line “Suddenly! / No not suddenly! / But with a fantastic regularity and remarkable softness! / I woke up and decided I knew how to work!” with increasingly declarative breathless intensity over ambient synths progressively swallowed up by pummelling drum rolls—to the haunting electro of “All The Sad And Loving People” (which most overtly evokes the recurring touchstone of Big Science-era Laurie Anderson) and “The Dancer”. The album’s second half brings Ball’s noise-improv guitar and Ky’s voice more fiercely and soulfully unleashed, on heavy and utterly incantatory cuts like “Revolving Door” and “Dragons” or the quasi-operatic cabaret of “Listen! Avoid Magic! Be Aware!”

The album draws its title from A Critique Of Black Reason by Achille Mbembe, as quoted in the liner notes:

Power is the pharmacy, thanks to its capacity to transform the sources of death into a seeding strength, or to convert the resources of death into the capacity for healing. And it is because of its dual ability to be the force of life and the principle of death that power is at once revered and feared. But the relationship between the principles of life and death is fundamentally unstable.

Ky Brooks is a shining fixture of Montréal’s music underground, not only as a brilliant, committed, hugely active and participatory artist in their own right, but as a recording engineer, live sound person for Big|Brave and Safia Nolin, and house tech at mainstay Montréal indie venues Sala Rossa and Bar Le Ritz PDB. They were also a central co-conspirator at the pivotal and fertile DIY loft space La Plante throughout the 2010s, where much of their musical and artistic community was formed, and to which Power Is The Pharmacy also testifies.