25 Years of LAL

A(n incomplete) timeline-interview with LAL’s Nicholas Murray

Photo by: Nadja Sayej.

As agitators, space makers, shapeshifters, soul searchers, and future finders, Toronto downtempo veterans LAL have spent 25 years transforming radical street-level observations and out-of-body activism into Do-It-Together anthems, producing constantly evolving sounds at the intersections of techno, deep house, desire, poetry, and grassroots action.

The open source, open door braintrust of Nicholas Murray and Rosina Kazi, the project has routinely swollen and exhaled to suit the moment, welcoming in communities of experience, always navigating sound like it’s an untapped reservoir of potential, drinking in and giving back. Even when the world is at its most violent and chaotic, they’re on the dancefloor measuring the temperature, applying hope like a balm.

Ahead of the band’s September 24 Garrison rooftop performance as part of Together Apart, we put together a timeline of LAL’s 25 years and spoke with producer-instrumentalist Nicholas Murray to help us fill in the gaps.

1996-2002

It’s late in the ’90s, and Rosina Kazi is hitting up Nicholas Murray for beats. 

Murray, AKA Murr, a producer with second-wave Toronto hip-hop trio Da Grassroots, is in the middle of putting together the group’s breakthrough debut Passage Through Time, and Kazi — who spent formative early teen years schooling herself on house and hip-hop community radio station CKLN-FM and grew up in Brampton entrenched in Bangladeshi and Bengali music culture — has ideas. 

“At the time she would make these cassette tapes where she would be singing over songs. Like there would be rapping and she would just be singing on top of them rapping and it would be like, okay, so you want beats like this and she would be like, yeah,” Murray tells Long Winter. “I didn’t do it at first because I was a really self-absorbed elitist rap dude at the time, [laughs] so she just bothered me and bothered me, and then at one point she just got really frustrated and her dad bought her an [Ensoniq] ASR-10, which was really expensive at the time.” 

The pair are retail co-workers in the dance music department at HMV’s flagship location on Yonge when Kazi makes a connection with Public Transit Recordings label owner Kevin Moon (AKA Moonstarr).

“Right away she was like, ‘Yo, you gotta meet this guy Moonstarr,’ so I went down to his house which was around U of T campus, and he had this Octave CAT set up, which is an English-made synthesizer which is pretty amazing, and he showed me that. At the time I was just like a sampling record dude, so he kind of blew my mind with the whole synth thing, and that’s where I started to get into synths.”

Moon hears “Circus” — an early solo track Kazi made singing through a headphone jack into her ASR-10 — and wants in. Public Transit Recordings releases the song on the 1998 compilation Code:416, which also features a solo track from Murray, “You Don’t Know,” credited under the project name Murr.

“At that point, I was like, okay, cool,” Murray says. “People are into your music, so let’s work on something.”

The pair get to work recording, and in 1999, PTR issues their paradoxically titled first track as LAL, “Last Stop,” on a four-song label comp called Metropass. The same year, Da Grassroots releases its seminal second-wave Toronto hip-hop record Passage Through Time, featuring Choclair, k-os, and Saukrates, among others. According to Murray, Kazi’s vocals also feature on the album. At some point in there, Kazi and Murray also begin a romantic relationship.

“After that, we’re like, okay, cool. We should do a record together,” Murray says. “And then we started performing.” 

When LAL starts working its sound out live, they gravitate to bass-filled rooms like the basement space at the late three-storey Dundas West venue We’ave. “The music went all over the place,” Murray comments on the space’s curation. “It went from house to jungle to drum ‘n’ bass to everywhere, and it was just a very eclectic time in Toronto. Not as kind of formal as it is these days.”

When they set down to write their first record, Kazi fills it with observations of the humanity they experienced close up living at Jarvis and Gerrard at the time (“sex work, a lot of poverty, mixed in also with people who were [university kids] partying with [their parents’] money,” Kazi later tells Anupa Mistry in a 2020 episode of the writer and producer’s podcast Burn Out,) and in 2000 they emerge from the studio with Corners, a full-length of downtempo tracks built on loops of Herbie Hanckock and French recordings, Rose cooing over the patter, citing influences like Massive Attack, Tricky, and Asian Underground.

The record makes the charts and garners critical acclaim (a five-N rating from NOW locally, a spot on British tastemaker Gilles Peterson’s top-10 chart) and HMV gets behind its employees in a surprising way.

“I guess [HMV] were just flush with cash at the time because this was still during the days of CDs,” Murray reflects. “They actually gave the record label $1200 to press a 12-inch. Which was kind of like, what? A record store?” 

“From there we started taking it a little bit more seriously.”

2002-2006

Eventually, LAL brings on drummer Rakesh Tewari, guitar player Nilan Perera (known in experimental music circles for his prepared guitar technique), and bassist Ian De Souza. As a five-piece, the group records the project’s sophomore release, Warm Belly High Power, the beginning of a period in the group’s work that Murray says marks a conscious effort to connect with avant-garde traditions.

“I came from sample culture, and my influences were [jazz labels] like CTI Records and ECM Records,” Murray tells Long Winter. “It was like ’94-y kind of hip-hop ideas, A Tribe Called Quest and all that. We were all sampling jazz loops. That was basically all my record collection. I listened to rap music and jazz and rock and my whole thing was anything from ’60-1978,” Murray says. “I would comb Queen Street just looking for records. I still do, actually. Which is a bit of a problem.”

In a 2006 interview with Exclaim!, Kazi explains the new dynamic ushered in a highly collaborative process.

“We did a lot of the initial ideas then we brought in Nilan or Ian or Rakesh and they'd hear it and either take it home or play something on the spot,” Kazi tells Exclaim! “Nic then usually takes what they've done and he either cuts it up or puts it back in.”

Gradually, de Souza steps into a new role as LAL’s third producer.

“Ian produced a couple of tracks where we worked laptop to laptop,” Kazi continues. “We'd give him the piece and Ian added this beautiful orchestration and instrumentation. It happened naturally; it wasn't forced and it was done in an intimate setting.”

Everything’s in place for the new five-piece to tour the album out in the United States, but plans are derailed when half the band gets pulled off a plane to Minneapolis.

2007-2015

In 2007, LAL takes a trip to India, and it changes Murray’s life.

“I think before I went to India I was all about trying to be an amazing hip-hop producer and navigate the world of it, and when I went to India, I think I came back and was like, oh my god, there’s so much more to existence, just seeing other people’s ways of life” Murray tells Long Winter. “I’m also part Indian. My grandfather’s Indian, so I kind of connected to a lot of things; I didn’t really understand a lot of things until I went there.”

The trip has such an impact that moving forward, the band makes a habit of going back every year or so.

LAL’s third album, 2008’s Deportation, takes a village — nearly 40 guest musicians, activists, and dancers filing in and out the studio doors to lay down features around the core trio of Kazi, Murray and de Souza. A radical, bright burning treasure in LAL’s still shifting catalogue, its far reaching, melting pot ambition is reinforced by the concentration of its conceptual framing. Inspired by the collective experiences of Indigenous and migrant communities living in so-called Canada and LAL’s work with migrant justice organizations like No One Is Illegal and Solidarity Across Borders, it’s a chill but invigorating agitprop collage incorporating everything from international folk sounds to the percussive footwork (read: steps) of flamenco and classical Indian kathak dancers.

By this point, LAL has tried and tested a pair of approaches to live performance: one featuring the band, one just Kazi and Murray.

"We can, if we want to, drop a completely electronic set in a club, or we can take it to a bigger venue,“ Kazi explains in a 2006 Exclaim! interview. “That's what I really like about this band, we have the ability to do both.”

July 2008 also sees Kazi and Murray release a side project 12-inch, Fables and Fairytales, under the project name Murr featuring Rosina, and it gains some traction in Europe.

In the same year, Kazi and Murray team up with permaculture worker Toyin Coker and interdisciplinary performing artist Ange Loft (also of Yamantaka // Sonic Titan) to open an informal creative space on Sterling Road called Unit 2. 

“Rose just wanted people to have a space for people to perform who didn’t,” Murray tells Long Winter about the original goal for the space. It quickly becomes a spot for outsider concerts like “deafiningly loud” 1 a.m. noise shows, but it also serves as practice studio and meeting space.

In 2011, LAL puts the finishing touches on a new record, and after six weeks touring India as a trio at the start of 2012, the group comes home with a new record. Perhaps a nod to the new beginnings suggested by its lyrical content, it arrives curiously self-titled. 

“[T]he ideas here are about imagining a bright future instead of the apocalyptic one that comes up in sci-fi or the media,” Kazi tells Toronto Standard, but it’s also a reflection on the work that’ll have to happen along the way. “Coming out of the activist and social justice scene I recognized there’s fucked up shit happening there that happens in the corporate world. Power really messes with people. So, for me lyrically, this record is about how power plays out and affects people from the left to the right.”

Speaking of unchecked power, in September 2014, LAL performs at a downtown Toronto demonstration marking the first anniversary of a Lindsay, Ontario prison hunger strike protesting indefinite immigration detention. In an interview with Torontoist, Kazi draws attention to the convenient blind eye Canadians turn to undocumented migrant workers when their labour benefits themselves.

“A lot of people refuse to realize who’s doing some of those difficult jobs in farms and factories. People are being used internationally as slaves,” Kazi says after the group’s performance. “The same colonial system has oppressed both peoples, so I think there’s a lot of opportunity for solidarity among these people,”

In November, LAL drops a video for “Tiny Mirrors” a pulsing new track about the importance of ceremony and the ways we reflect each other’s experiences. It arrives with the promise of a new album titled All You Need To Know for spring 2015. But the year goes by, and there’s no record to show for it.

2016-2021

You’ll never know All You Need To Know, but LAL makes good on its promise for a new record in 2016, Kazi and Murray dropping Find Safety, their first LP as a duo since their 2000 debut in April. Released via Rae Spoon’s Coax Records imprint, it also marks their first apart from Public Transit Recordings.

“We actually did a whole record, mixed and mastered it, and then decided that we didn't like this,” Kazi tells Exclaim! about the lost record in a story about Unit 2. “So we scrapped it and we did it again.”

Dedicated to the memory of DJ/musician/producer Sam Zaman, Masimba Kadzirange (Toronto DJ Sun of S.O.U.L.), and artist/activist/OCAD professor Wendy Coburn, it’s also a love letter to Unit 2, which over recent years has developed into an around-the-clock hub for community organizing and interfacing, hosting everything from workshops and training sessions to potlucks and festivals (fun fact: Long Winter received Safer Bars and Spaces training from Dandelion Initiative at Unit 2). 

“The vibe is, If we’re going to work some shit out, we have to get to know each other, and not just from marching together,” Kazi tells NOW. “Let’s sit down and eat and dance and just be in the space together.”

“[Unit 2] taught me a lot about just not having a part in the curation, not really paying attention to detail stuff, just allowing people to live basically, occupy your space of living. Which was a hard stretch for me, but there were some really beautiful shows and really beautiful experiences,” Murray tells Long Winter.

In 2018, Kazi co-founds the grassroots queer fest Bricks and Glitter, with 10 days of programming offerin an alternative to corporate PRIDE events in July. Speaking with NOW, Kazi says the festival is intended to build sustainable community events that are grounded in a “for us, by us” approach. 

Then, after five albums and 19 years slowly releasing records in four-year cycles, in May 2019, LAL releases Dark Beings, a dark and moody techno album steeped in what the pair call an “ancient futurism,” it’s concerned with resurrecting lost futures, nods to the energy potential of acknowledging racialized, trans, two-spirited, and Indigenous experiences — breaking ground, underground.

In November of that year, Da Grassroots tours Japan.

In February 2020 LAL remounts Corners for a special 20th anniversary performance commissioned by Wavelength, and the next month they take Dark Beings out on the road for a nine-date tour of the U.S. and Eastern Canada. But wth COVID-19 cases surging across North America, on March 14, Donald Trump and Justin Trudeau announce the Canada-U.S. border will close to non-essential travel, and the band has to turn around.

“We were in Olympia, then we went to Seattle, and then we… there was nothing, everything was locked down,” Murray recounts. “We barely got out of Seattle and then we came home and we were like, what are we gonna do now?”

With regular life on hold and Unit 2 to themselves, he and Kazi write a new record, Meteors Could Come Down in the space of a month.

“Somehow there was just this huge stream of consciousness and we just completely focused, because there was nothing happening here,” Murray says. “It was just us sitting in our studio and kind of figuring out what we wanted to do.”

While the album draws on adrienne maree brown’s 2019 text Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, its sound calls back to Murray’s trip to Japan.

“I’d never been to Tokyo before and I was just blown away by the record stores and how much they loved rap music and how much they just loved specific types of rap music, specifically ’94 hip-hop rap music,” Murray explains. “Initially it was supposed to be– not necessarily a throwback, but something that was greatly influenced by that.

“I definitely wanted to make something that was like Rhodes and drum breaks and something from that [era]. Kind of Corners-sounding, but not influenced by that,” he continues. “My whole thing was to do something that I could sell to the Japanese, but it didn’t really work out that way. It kind of turned into a LAL record.”

Meanwhile, inspired by the queer DJ scene’s pivot to digital and the massive international popularity of Toronto’s LGBTQ+ Zoom dance party Club Quarantine, in April 2020, Kazi releases “Dance Alone,” a new version of a song she wrote when she was 16 under the name Rosina, twinkling electronics produced by Vancouver producer Phen Ray.

Meteors Could Come Down arrives in November 2020, followed by a series of remixes from Phen Ray and local producers Ciel and Prince Josh. In a press release, Kazi writes that through the album, the pair found beauty and hope in the big pause: “After fighting for our lives for so long, we’ve been actively dismantling a world that wants us dead; we’re more than ready to enter a new paradigm. Being together to witness this old world fade away is humbling and hopeful.”

LAL performs Sept. 24 alongside Fiver and Status/Non-Status as part of Together Apart’s outdoor rooftop concert series at the Garrison in Toronto. Tickets $15 in advance (reserve a spot) or PWYC at the door. More information here.

Meteors Could Come Down is out now via Coax Records.