Improvised noise on cassette…I think we’ve known about Toque since 2010, at which time they were a duo of Tim Olive and Kelly Churko, and they surfaced on a comp called Test Tone Anthology from the Medama label in Tokyo. There were at least three Test Tone releases in that series, documenting the musical activity of the SuperDeluxe location under the auspices of Cal Lyall.
Well, here are Toque again, transformed into “Supertoque” through the addition of Cal Lyall himself, captured on a 2011 recording (although some sources claim it was made in 2014) made at Ochiai Soup and issued on cassette as Lemtat Unit (PUBLIC EYESORE EH? 132). This startling blend of spiky guitars, pickups, and electronics has only recently surfaced, ten years after the death of Kelly Churko, and it’s been restored from his “original mix”. Regular listeners will recognise Tim Olive as a frequent name in these pages, but I don’t think I realised until now that Kelly Churko was, like him, a fellow Canadian – and indeed they grew up in the same part of that country in the fabulously named area of Moose Jaw. Lyall (from Montreal) is likewise Canadian, and often makes us wonder why so many Canadian improvisers seem to thrive better in Japan.
I am enjoying this cassette, but somehow find I still prefer Tim Olive solo or in duo settings – where his intensity can draw us into a strange dimension with its obsessive focus. Lemtat Unit, even though Bryan Day does not appear on it, still tends to follow the label’s aesthetic for producing “broken” and disjointed passages that aren’t quite so compelling. Even so, the electric guitars don’t sound anything like they ought to, which is a plus, and there’s plenty of crackle, distortion and hum to remind you of the physical construction of these instruments as their owners maul them lovingly. Cover image by Vera Olive and Tim Olive makes a statement about the human condition, God’s lonely man adrift on a blue sea of ice. (25/11/2025)