Ten years ago, Frosty Valentine left an anthropomorphic mouse-shaped hole in the cartoon industry. Working a thankless grind in the less glamorous recesses of animation recording studios, she burned out on contract work ghost singing for a series of movies and television shows. With no spotlight to call her own, she called it quits, consulted a psychic, and started plotting her return.

The music Anna Yarmamedova makes as Annacetaminophen is automatic and of distant means. Feverish and desolate, the project’s self-titled debut plays out like a horror movie set in a hospital, words and production processed through generative patches Yarmamedova developed on MaxMSP. 

While alien bleeps call out as if through featureless hallways and click tracks build tension like leadened IV drips, the words Yarmamedova invokes through detatched gasps of electronic processing land like echoes from visits with doctors and social workers: “rejection,” “panic,” “light-headed,” “dysphoria.” 

The Music Gallery is taking a field trip. Heading west of its current base at St. George the Martyr Church on John Street, on March 19, the Toronto centre for promoting and presenting innovation and experimentation in all forms of music joins Long Winter to co-curate its final flagship event of its 2015/’16 season at the Great Hall. That also means going home.

Every edition of this season’s Long Winter, we’re releasing a free split seven-inch, each side featuring a song from one of the night’s featured artists. To compliment the releases, we’ve issued a seven-part questionnaire to each of the artists involved, giving the subjects an inch (about 85 words) of space to answer each of our questions.

Pet Sun’s music relishes, values, and evokes garage rock’s social origins: hazy, beer-splattered suburban spaces that are at once detached from and connected to both the domestic and the public. So it seems appropriate that, in advance of their performance at Long Winter tonight (Feb. 19) and the release of their track “Wish It Was” on this month’s split cassette with Pavilion, the Hamilton four-piece answered our seven-inch survey collectively over beers from a cottage this past weekend.

Shortly after releasing a demo tape as Mercury Girls this past April, Grace Scott, Julie MacKinnon, Jonah Falco and Mike Grdosic rebranded under the name Pavilion. Specializing in gloomy, dramatic post-punk, they’ve kept busy since, and in March they’ll release another cassette, Vexation of Spirit. In the meantime, you can catch them at Long Winter tomorrow night, where Scott says the band may incorporate “performance elements” eluding to a project the group’s been working on since November, and in an appropriate departure from our regular seven-inch series we’ll also have a cassette featuring their track “Pale Shades of Green” and another from Pet Sun available free at the door (despite the format change, we had Scott fill out our monthly seven-inch survey anyway).

As diasporic Filipina-Canadians, Pantayo’s seven members pursue traditional kulintang (gong-chime music from the Philipinnes) as a means of (re-)accessing their culture and building community. In advance of their performance at Long Winter this Saturday (Jan. 16) and the release of their track “Binalig Bahala Na” on this month’s split with Indoor Voices, Pantayo collectively answered our seven-inch survey to explain their approach to the traditional form and discuss their experiences as diasporic people living in Toronto.

After Junetile called it quits and stopped making their sonic chicken soup dream pop in 2004, singer-guitarist Jonathan Relph couldn’t stop making music. Bedroom sketches quickly grew into more, and eventually, Relph formed Indoor Voices together with Owen Davies, Ryan Gassi and Kate Rogers. Markedly more propulsive, Indoor Voices steps further into the poppier end of shoegaze territory, their songs all blanketed with swirly guitar washes. Grab a copy of our January seven-inch this Saturday (Jan. 16) for as-of-yet unreleased Indoor Voices track “Indifferentiator” and another from Pantayo, and check out our seven-inch survey with Jonathan Relph below to get caught up to speed.