Badge Époque Ensemble - Milk Spilt On Eternity by telephoneexplosion

Badge employs an eclectic cast of characters from the Toronto underground music scene, whose combined experience would take pages to spell out. It includes stints accompanying songwriters Andy Shauf and Marker Starling, outfitting heavies Blood Ceremony and Biblical, and respective careers spent gigging Django-jazz and the classical cannon. Badge’s distinctive sound arises from the diversity of these musical exploits, creating a palpable chemistry well captured on the live-tracked songs that form the group’s self-titled debut.

Part of this crucial chemistry can be attributed to the fact that four of the six players in the Ensemble have been at the core of the live, U.S. Girls band, a group that has scorched stages internationally over the past year and was hailed by Paste magazine as the best live band of 2018. Since 2015, when Turnbull released his final record as Slim Twig for DFA, he has largely concentrated his efforts as a producer and writer on the U.S. Girls project, together with making contributions to the theatrical rock outfit, Darlene Shrugg and the psychedelic jazz-funk collective, The Cosmic Range. Badge’s set of songs is yet another 180-degree turn for an increasingly collective-minded bandleader, who is singularly disdainful of any genre orthodoxy.