Glissandro 70 - G70 2: Bones Of Dundasa Glissandro 70

20 years after its self-titled debut, Glissandro 70’s follow-up straddles the Album and Archive.
Comprised of a decade’s worth of recordings that were abandoned, lost in a hard drive mishap, recovered in the form of rough stereo mixes, reappraised with the balm of time, and restored/augmented/enhanced, they are finally seeing the light of day.

Back in 2016, Craig Dunsmuir asked Sandro Perri to meet for a drink, and dropped a bomb: those recordings they’d been working on over the past few years? Well, he’d gotten cold feet and wanted to shelve them.
Perri then dropped a bomb of his own: he’d accidentally deleted those very same recordings during a computer upgrade.
Hesitation had met destruction, the double negative all but sealing the material’s fate.
“It was meant to disappear,” says Perri.
When the COVID lockdowns hit, Perri began poring through his vast archive of old recordings and works-in-progress, and though the Glissandro 70 multi-track sessions were definitely gone, in early 2024 he discovered rough stereo mixes on another hard drive.
By his own admission, it felt really good.
“The aging process flattered it.
It was like, oh, maybe it's time to try and do something with this.” By that point, Dunsmuir was also primed for the work’s reappraisal, as he’d loved how Perri repurposed some of their other collab material for his second Off World LP.
A meticulous rediscovery and re-creation process began in earnest.

Glissandro 70’s beguiling mechanics are perhaps best understood through the dissonance of the duo’s respective approaches as solo artists and bandleaders.
Dunsmuir, a human music encyclopedia and 20-year veteran of Toronto record stores, leads the Dun-Dun Band, a group that mines the ferment of three towering Fs (Fela, Philip, Pharaoh).
Equally inspired by math-rock, Dunsmuir’s scrumptious G70 riffs don’t aestheticize complexity or pester the listener into noting they’re in 13/8: rather, rhythm materializes as a mere fact of the riff, sharing more with the tranced coalescences of gnawa and afrobeat.
Perri is the consummate studio dog and might be Toronto’s own Caetano Veloso, crafting loose, sprawling songs of quixotic beauty whose textural virtuosity and joy in repetition refashions pop music into sound sculpture.
Together, they’re each other’s perfect foils, and Glissandro 70 is also informed by the intersection of their respective leftfield electronic projects, Kanada 70 and Off World.
On G70 2: Bones Of Dundasa, Dunsmuir plays the role of “riff referee”, while Perri assumes the mantle of jester, destabilizing the “obstinate ostinatos” with his signature textural tics, editing, and dubby interjections.

G70 2: Bones Of Dundasa begins in recognisable territory with an expansive 8-minute workout of Arthur Russell’s “Lucky Cloud”, where Dunsmuir trades the original’s murk for an achingly vulnerable vocal that sits somewhere between Rick White and Lou Barlow, while Russell collaborator Peter Zummo’s trombone contribution is teased with a single squelch at 0:37 before playing out the song’s hypnotic second half in a beautifully oblique and restrained excursion.
On an album of bookends, this opener is itself a bookend: it’s the album’s first recording chronologically (from 2004) and contains its last recorded element (Zummo’s trombone, from 2025), making it simultaneously the oldest and newest track on the record.

Such oceanic sound is then immediately dammed up and a series of diverse experimental tracks escape in drips and drops, like strummed elastic bands rendered crystalline through Perri’s crisp production.
Second song “Jackpot Pothole Eleven” introduces the album’s prevailing spirit of disturbance, discontinuity, and a plunderphonic playfulness that bubbles up within various subsequent tracks.
As the album proceeds, G70’s departure from its 2006 record come into focus: where riffs on the 5-song debut anchored durational mantras in the 7-13 minute range, these new tracks relish in their incidental intentionality, compact strangeness, and comparative brevity.
Sometimes there aren’t riffs at all, acceding instead to Dunsmuir’s vintage Roland HandSonic drum pad (literally pictured on the back cover album art) which he works into damaged prisms of jagged angles, funneled through Perri’s alluring mutations.

Darker, muggier vibes are also part of the mix, notably on the sultry cover of Moondog’s “You The Vandal” and the skittish industrial stutter of “Aquatint”, where Dunsmuir draws on his love for early post-dubstep—a fractured-beat sensibility that also rises to the fore on “Howler Hiccup (VC-10 Eternal Selectric)”.
“Pad Tide” references both the Eventide H3000 used to thicken up the song’s drum machine and Dunsmuir’s preferred dish at Toronto’s Phở Phương, where he and Perri frequently dined.
Elsewhere, Ryan Driver and Jeremy Strachan contribute flute and saxophone respectively, each laid over Dunsmuir’s handmade HandSonic beats and providing two different expressions of the skewed-lounge post-tropicalia that often lurks in much of Perri’s other musics.
The album’s closing track hands the sampledelic floor to Dan Bodan’s previously unreleased 2006 remix of “Bolan Muppets” from Glissandro 70’s debut—a fitting 20th anniversary ribbon to wrap up the effervescent revivification celebrated on G70 2: Bones Of Dundasa.

RIYL: Sandro Perri, Arthur Russell, Cluster, Beak>, Boredoms, Sun Araw, Black Dice, Tortoise.