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Lesley Sohl was an art student, occasional singer
and a poet who hazarded upon Montréal's
musical underground when she joined cousin Peter
Bowman-Pease and Charles Kos in a band called
Leviticus.
She ventured into the world of nouvelle vague
upon joining Visiting the Zoo, a moderately
successful band that featured Kos on lead guitar,
Mack Kenzie on rhythm/lead guitar, and Stewart
G. on Drums. Lesley played bass and sang lead
and backup alongside Kos.
VTZ disbanded in late 1981 only to be reborn
with an entirely different lineup, under the
artistic control of Johnstone, who pulled the
band further into punk. Kos and Sohl continued
to work together.
When Sohl won a scholarship to study visual
art at the Banff Center, Kos followed. It is
in Banff that these songs were recorded, alongside
"One Day," a song project that Kos
was working on at the time. Five of the eight
songs presented on the maxi single were recordings
that were made for "One Day," the
others are all new takes on songs that had appeared
on "Ion Transfer Process," released
in 1981. Sohl made a compositional contribution
to all of the songs on this maxi single, and
that is why she chose them.
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Sohl worked with Kos on two projects
following "super vedette." Neither
featured her as a vocalist. Although Kos
recorded one song with Lesley during this
period, it was but a brief three minute
song on a music project that exceeded
four hours, and it was not included on
the one-hour digest of "Frequency,"
released in 1984.
During autumn 1985, Sohl recorded two
songs for "When We Lie Irate,"
which Kos didn't release. They also worked
on "We have all the time in the world,"
a cover song. It was never completed (although
a version with only voice and piano was
mastered for, but did not make it on to
the 1994 retrospective titled "After
the lost decade").
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Lesley Sohl is currently working on "Kinky
Boots" with The Terminal Dissonance, and
is developing a concept album comprised of other
artists' music. She is also working on a follow-up
to "super vedette" that will be titled
"Starwoman." It will feature songs
that she wrote with Kos in the early 1980's
but didn't record. Until any one of these projects
is completed, "super vedette" is the
best way to hear what Sohl's voice, shiver up
your spine and all, is all about.
  
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