We invite you to a concert as part of the Hranice Experimentu series, featuring the Montreal-based group NO HAY BANDA. 

In 2024, Canadian composer Sarah Davachi composed the piece Three Unisons for Four Voices for NO HAY BANDA, featuring violin, cello, bass clarinet, trombone, percussion, and ondes Martenot/electronics. It is a remarkable 70-minute piece focused primarily on texture and aleatoric harmony. The ensemble’s four “voices” (strings, wind instruments, percussion, and ondes Martenot/electronics) proceed in a slowly unfolding monody that, through open and shifted timing, becomes a kind of variable canon. As the players gradually come into harmony and then drift apart again, the listener’s attention begins to focus on the acoustic spaces between them, calling into question what it actually means for sound to be perceived as unison. 

Three Unisons for Four Voices explores the subtle laws of timbral and temporal space and employs extended time segments and carefully crafted harmonic structures that highlight gradual shifts in texture, the complexity of overtones, psychoacoustic phenomena, and intonation. Davachi, inspired by the principles of minimalism and long forms, early musical concepts of interval and modal harmony, and experimental techniques from the electroacoustic studio environment, creates an intimate and patient experience that blurs the perception of the familiar and the distant. 

NO HAY BANDA is a Montreal-based collective dedicated to the production, performance, and presentation of music rooted in experimental and avant-garde practices. NO HAY BANDA organizes an annual concert series in Montreal, featuring a variety of local and visiting artists, and represents a flexible ensemble of musicians—a “house band,” so to speak—that presents and performs its own productions. Through these activities, NO HAY BANDA strives to provide a space for artists working on the fringes of established genres, enabling them to realize projects that would otherwise never see the light of day. NO HAY BANDA also records and produces albums, which it releases on its own label, No Hay Discos. NO HAY BANDA was founded in 2016 by three Montreal-based musicians—Daniel Áñez, Noam Bierstone, and Geneviève Liboiron—and in 2026, the ensemble became the proud recipient of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation’s Ensemble Prize.