Secret Society’s LP release party for SSS: Year Two brought Toronto’s underground dance music community together on December 22nd to celebrate the city’s local talent. The evening connected old and new faces, showing the impact that artistic production has on an ever-growing social collective.

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Highlighting the LP through it’s energetic flow, This is What You’ve Done by Alberto Jossue and Aleksandar Kojic starts off the album with ambient clicks that set a seductive mood, entering your mind into a state of trance that transitions into Clouzer‘s popular Between the Stars. Make sure you wait for the second half of this track, where the introduction of a new, warm beat is sure to grab your attention. The energy maintains here until Petrikhor’s Big Wind kicks it up a notch with a driving beat and inspirational vocal about collective awareness. By Mustafa Ismaeel’s Beyond the Wall, we’ve changed from a bit of funk into a sexy, mysterious groove with a sultry Spanish vocal. The album ends with Alan Guzman’s deep kick on his Intersections, which carries you through to the end of the LP, gently placing you back down into reality.

Mid-way through the LP, your ears have the treat of hearing SpeakOf’s Azure, a track that is musically spacious, and simultaneously dark yet hopeful. SpeakOf takes you on a journey through space with a pulsating kick accompanied by futurist sounds that ebb, flow, and intertwine with the percussion in order to disassemble your sense of time, if only for a few minutes. The repetition of various melodies that appear and disappear throughout the track jog your memory and keep you alert and interested while also in a state of musical rapture. The suspension of the fifth at the end of the melody creates an unfinished touch that leaves you tense, wanting more, which is only satisfied when the harmonics of the ambient pad focus on the tonic and fills up the rest of the space, bringing the track to a close.

Start the New Year off right and support Toronto’s talent by purchasing your very own copy of the album on Beatport or by listening on Spotify. Secret Society are also working on making their merch widely available to all you community members who want to sport their icon consistently throughout your days – stay tuned for more news on this flourishing social collective’s bright future!

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Article by: Jillian

Jillian Fulton is a PhD candidate at York University in Toronto. Her work explores electronic music scenes of Toronto and Montréal. For more information on her project, find her on social media @chebakhadijah or email her at jillian@husasounds.com.

Photography by Ded Pixel.