HIGH TIMES

Montreal-based DIY Triphopper Amber Ladd releases her debut album on 4/20 and delivers an astonishing sound soaked in green.
 
“This is stoner music, made by stoner personas, because I get high and I make music, and I kinda make what sounds wicked when I’m stoned,” Amber Ladd laughs on April 20, the long-awaited day tRip, her first collection of high-quality triphop is available to the public. “4/20 was the perfect day,” she told HIGH TIMES. “It was just coming on to be finished and I was like, ‘Yeah’.”
           
Over two years in the making, tRip is 13 songs that hang together like a single highly textured piece of music. Ms. Ladd wrote, produced and the engineered everything on the disc, sings every vocal, plays every instrument and injects each recording with composed subtext, a reason for being there, that raises tRip above other electronic outings. “My criteria for what I kept on the album was whatever inspired me in a really genuine way. Maybe a line, a lyric, a beat. All of the songs on tRip were inspiring to me.” 
           
Two and half years ago, when she was twenty-five years old, Ms. Ladd committed herself to musical journey. “Any good album should be a trip from start to finish,” she maintains. 
           
“When I first decided I was going to make an album I was in an alternative band in Toronto for a few years and I did an acoustic thing myself after the band. I was waiting to find a new band and then I was waiting because I had no money, all those things.” 
 
Finally, she stopped making excuses. “I said to myself, I’m going to make an album. I’m going to make it my way. At that point I didn’t even have a computer. I had nothing. But the decision was made”
           
Impressively, Amber recorded tRip on borrowed and cobbled equipment, “on a Mac Mini in my apartment on equipment totaling a value of less than $500,” she recalls. “The thing is I didn’t know what I was doing.” She began with a single song. 
           
“’Girl From Jupiter’ was my learning curve,” she says “The first year and a half was ‘Girl From Jupiter’.”
           
Honing her craft by night, Amber had a day job as a graphic artist creating marketing materials for CB Richard Ellis, the world’s largest commercial real estate. Last year, when the economy took a downturn, she lost her safety net. “When I got canned from CB,” she said, “I was like ‘It’s serious’ and I started tRip. I’ve been working on tRip for almost a year.
           
Another enduring quality that sets both Amber and her music apart is her abiding and eloquent cannabis activism. tRip is imbued with her dedication to marijuana law reform. “It’s just as important to me as the music,” she insists. “To me, nothing outweighs the fact that innocent lives are being ruined. When you look at the fact that I could choose to go out in the morning, put vodka in my coffee, drink all day long and pass out at two in the morning – that I could do that every day and it would be completely socially acceptable and my joint smoking causes me to be looked down upon, to be a criminal, is just too silly. Enough is enough. The world has evolved to the point where we can educate ourselves. The whole thing is based on lies and manipulation and I just can’t stand to see people who I know and love and care about, people who are good people, being tossed in jail and having their kids taken away.”
 
Amber Ladd was born twenty-eight years ago in Chatam, “a really small town” in western Ontario. She arrived on Earth on the exact same day as Britney Spears. “I was different,” she says, “Maybe I made myself different, I don’t know... It took me awhile to fit in.” She describes her earliest years as “tumultuous” and says, “I moved around a lot, went to four high schools and I don’t know how many grade schools. It gave me my ability to adapt.” She left her mother’s home when she was sixteen and finished high school on her own, but she was called to music at an earlier age. 
           
“When I was eleven I went to my mom and said I wanted to enter this singing contest... I sang Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings”  and I  got second place. That was kinda the start of that.
           
“I started singing in churches...  We were kind of religious at certain points of my life, which I think really has an effect on my music today. There’s something about that music that’s designed to bring out emotion, that’s designed to move you. That’s definitely present in some of my stuff...”
           
She smoked her first joint when she was twelve years old. “I was in a small town,” she laughs easily, “What else is there to do in a small town besides get stoned? C’mon!” Amber points out that “In all my pot-headed days I have always been a hard worker. Hell, I finished high school living on my own, you know. So I wasn’t a full-on pothead at twelve but I did smoke my first joint. It was way too young.”
           
As hard as she worked, she partied harder. “In partying though that’s where the electronic music came in,” she recalls. “That’s where the dance came in.”
           
Blessed with a powerful voice, Amber crafted a unique amalgam of electronic music that leans heavily on vocals. “I always used to feel a struggle because with my voice. People wanted me to be Whitney Houston, to go into musical theater and pop music, and I had the stuff that I loved which was never pop. I was never going to buy Whitney Houston CDs. That’s not me. And I always felt the different musical sides of myself were at war until tRip.”
           
“Essentially when I went to make tRip I went back and I listened to everything that I had ever really loved. I listened to this stuff and what moved me, I paused and noticed. I didn’t try and copy, I didn’t write it down; I just paused and noticed. And in the end I think tRip is the result of all the genres I love married into one crazy album.”
           
Amber recalls that her brother turned her on to “good music” when she was sixteen and that she has been influenced by an extraordinary variety of genres ever since. 
           
I love electronic music, drum and bass, and especially dub step which is a new thing on the scene just now, like half-tempo electronic. People just smoke up. It’s all about weed – that kind of music. It’s dark and dirty and bassy and slow. It’s not like house music where people are bouncy. I love all that stuff. I love jungle. Anything with complicated beats and bass lines. In my music you’ll hear reggae, you’ll hear rock, some of that worshipy stuff, some of that slower stuff where it can almost feel like gospel sometimes.”
           
The first track on tRip, appropriately, is “Girl From Jupiter,” a perennial work in progress since it was the first song Ladd recorded. “This version is a lot different from the original. It’s evolved a ton.” she says, “It’s an avant-garde triphop which sets the terms for all that will follow.”
 
“Girl From Jupiter” establishes the musical language for the entire album: machine-gun polyrhythms on drum serves as a skeleton to frame her bass, guitar and her angelic voice. Think of her as the sweetly stoned daughter of Kate Bush and Tom Waits raised in the jungle on a powerful dub step. 
           
tRip features 13 songs and the CD includes a 14th “hidden track.” Standout tracks include the ethereal “love,” simple, slow and soaring surrounded by samples of found sound dropped like stones creating ripples on the pond. There is the joyous “Flying Machines” and the elegiac “My Friend,” about a close friend who passed away eight years ago. “It’s an expression of loss but I don’t think it’s a depressing song,” Ms. Ladd reflects. “It talks about how it’s easy to be angry and upset and sad but I’m also trying to be happy and know that my life is different. It’s a very meaningful song. It’s the last one I recorded and finished.” A uniquely stripped-down track, “My Friend” features a bare guitar and spare vocal. Amber says, “Really that one’s a lot of raw emotion. I didn’t think it need anything else.” 
           
“Brite” is perhaps the most realized track, a song that successfully limns Ladd's personal and musical philosophy. 
           
“It’s about how we have immense light inside us if we choose to see it, and that we’re the only ones who can prevent that light from shining and doing all the wonderful things that letting that genuineness show does for people in their lives. We’re the only ones who can stop ourselves from doing that,” Amber thinks it’s an important message. “Every single person has that magic in them equally and that every single person can make their own world what they want it to be.”
           
But certainly, to these ears, the most endearing song on tRip is “420,” Ms. Ladd’s musical shout out to the movement with which she identifies so completely. “The movement is a cool thing to be involved with and to be behind because the nature of the people I deal with and because of the reason we smoke, The reason we get together and blaze is to chill and to love each other and relate to each other and how could anyone find that to be wrong?
           
“I went to a rally for the Kindred Cafe raids in Toronto (in 2008). We were all in this room and everyone was stoned and there was a lot of terminally ill medical patients and a lot of people in recreational support and all these walks of my life were together in one room. This is when I actually decided to really really speak out for the movement – this night – when the speaker said, “Look around you and feel the love in this room right now. How can this be an illusion?”
 
tRip is available online at www.amberladd.com. $6 dollars for the digital download with art files and $9 for the full CD version with cover jacket and bonus track.
 
To listen to a sample track, [link|http://www.amberladd.com/player.html|click here]