For thirty years, Picastro has written songs that politely look the other way when it comes to the job description. Melodies surface half-hidden. Rhythms sag and creak like a frame carrying more weight than it was built for, and the silence between them counts for as much as anything played. Yet the Toronto project led by Liz Hysen has never been merely austere. Its music keeps a close, unguarded relationship with vulnerability, and on ‘Double On Time’ that closeness takes a new shape. Across five compact pieces, Hysen turns over memory, inheritance, influence, violence, and the slippery business of keeping a human life in the historical record.
Sonny Liston is where it starts. The heavyweight’s story has been flattened into a few fights, some photographs, a run of controversies, and questions nobody answered. During the pandemic, Hysen read voraciously about boxing and sank deeper into the sport herself, and Liston caught hold of her. The fighting was never the draw. What stayed was the startling lack of basic biographical certainty, since historians disagree, or go quiet, about the plainest facts of his origins. That absence hangs over the EP like a shadow. These are not biographical songs in any conventional sense. They are acts of attention aimed at someone whose existence was documented badly.
A fragment of Charles Ives opens “Fell The Family Tree,” cut short, warped, and set to recur like a tune that won’t stay put. Few composers make a better source, since quotation, memory, collision, and the remaking of existing material occupied Ives for a lifetime. Hysen does not treat the sample as decoration. The clipped piano phrase sounds like a damaged recollection, pulled from a larger context nobody can rebuild. Each return adds a small, odd pressure, and the EP’s central fixation takes root: fragments that refuse to grow into complete histories.
Hysen’s voice sits inside that uncertainty with real grace. Exposed, yes, but never confessional in the usual sense. Explaining the feeling behind the songs isn’t her way. She steps into their unresolved corners and stays put. Drums and doctored Ives samples keep company with acoustic guitar, piano, and synthesizer, while Tim Condon fills out the sound with synthesizer, both kinds of guitar, bass, harmonium, and piano, and Alex Fournier brings the double bass.
“Chance Striker” brings the boxing imagery closer to the surface, though the song resists any literal reading. Even the title lands like a surprise hit, one of those moments when timing is everything. In Hysen’s view, improvisation and boxing run on the same instincts: studying a partner or opponent, predicting movement, recognizing the exact second to act. The idea suits Picastro well. These arrangements often seem to be listening to themselves, with instruments slipping in at odd angles and shifting the balance without announcing it.
“Ring Description” is short and wants nothing to do with arcs or resolutions, which is exactly why it fascinates. The ring is a clearly marked box, yet the song lingers on what won’t stay inside it: memory, biography, reputation, violence, the stories laid over a life after it ends. Real room, image, or trap of the mind? Hysen wisely lets the question hang.
“Move Fast, Break” carries a more kinetic charge. Picastro has always been capable of aggression, but Hysen’s version is rarely straightforward, and loudness isn’t required. Fragile moments sit beside rough ones, familiar fragments are battered into strangeness, and any rhythm that dares to surface rarely holds its ground for long. Her work with Ableton Live, shaped partly by studying with Ben Vida, gives the EP a fresh vocabulary without straying from the band’s long taste for unusual construction. The Ives material offers no stability. It behaves like a memory barging into the present, an outside voice absorbed but never tamed.
“Believer End” closes the record with its most spacious writing, and the title cuts two ways, which fits an EP so preoccupied with belief, records, and identity. To believe in a person is not to hold an accurate account of them. To remember someone is not to know them. Hysen’s music settles into that gap. No final verdict on Liston arrives, and that matters. Five songs cannot repair a life that was never properly documented. Acknowledging the absence is all music can do, and that acknowledgment gives the EP its strange emotional force. Hysen has no wish to resurrect Liston as an icon or to dress up the mythology around his career. The uncomfortable ground between historical fact and lived existence holds her attention instead. Fame and obscurity can coexist. A photograph can turn iconic while its subject stays a puzzle.
Recorded in Toronto at Hysen’s house, Condon’s studio, and Alex’s home, the album keeps its intimacy despite intricate construction. Hysen and Condon produced together, Condon and Owen Pallett shared mixing duties, and James Plotkin mastered. The scattered locations never fracture the record’s identity. They add to its sense of gathered fragments. “Double On Time” could mean a repeat of the clock, a second pass at the instant when things change. Either way, then and now sit on top of each other. Original compositions carry borrowed sounds. A sport becomes a way of talking about improvising, and a name from the record books opens onto a meditation on absence.
The EP is an argument for closer attention to the incomplete record and less a portrait of Liston. Through five songs, Picastro turns documentation’s failure into musical material, and the EP that comes out of it is intimate, restless, and quietly devastating. It does not claim to restore a lost life. It simply refuses to let a missing record excuse forgetting that the life was there.
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