Thanya Iyer

Montreal’s Thanya Iyer, sweetheart and songstress, has just released her debut EP. Don’t miss out on these beautiful and peaceful jazz-folk gems, built on deep string arrangements and her soft, dreamy vocals. - Amelia Robitaille

Thanya Iyer shot us a live session of her song “Painting” and we couldn’t have been more pleased. The Montreal-based singer-songwriter specializes in lilting, jazzy compositions heavy on piano, stand-up bass, and light on percussion. The video not only highlights Iyer’s voice and the group’s expert-level musicianship, it is also effected with chill animation. Fans of Norah Jones, Regina Spektor, or Adele would dig Thanya’s tunes.

You can grab Thanya Iyer’s latest studio release, Do You Dream, via Bandcamp. - BuffaBlog

Do You Dream? is the debut long player from Montreal-based composer and bandleader Thanya Iyer. The record proves to be a significant journey, clocking in with nineteen unique compositions, resulting in somewhat of a magnum opus-style work. Previously described as “atmospheric” and “dreamy,” Thanya Iyer and her band craftily combine elements of jazz, folk, and pop into an eloquent amalgam that flashes tastefully with electronic nuance and compositional space.

When asked about the central themes living within the record, Iyer responded declaratively that, “the theme of the album is change.” As much is proven time and again in her writing. Whether through observations of change or through figurative, musical explorations of it, Thanya consistently captures the nature of this elusive thematic element with magnificently playful songwriting. Do You Dream? seems to shift gears on a dime whenever it pleases, ambling serenely between the changes in mood, time, and key.

The album’s recording process began when the group went to a church in the Eastern Townships to lay down bed tracks. By exploring the foundations through experimentation and overdubbing, the band was able to define their sound exactly to their specifications. Thanya describes the resultant new sound of the band as “drastically changed.” Patching pieces together in this way encouraged them to begin experimenting with electronic sounds, such as synths and effects. Involving these sounds at the production level eventually brought them to the fore in the group’s live performance, as seen in their live take on “Daydreaming,” performed at Redpath Hall at McGill University. The scope of the band’s approach to the album poetically captures its central theme of change. According to Thanya herself, “change is beautiful and can be a wonderfully positive thing.” Compositionally speaking, it is the driving force behind Do You Dream?‘s impressive multiplicity, asserting faithfully to the world that not all change is bad.

Iyer’s debut full length officially launches Saturday, September 3 at Café Resonance, with support from harpist Sarah Pagé and visuals from Elysha Poirier. Stream the record in full below, and RSVP at the launch show’s facebook event here. - Stack Your Roster

Voix. Piano. Jazz. Violon. Synthés. Trompette. Éclats. Harpe. Field recording. De petits points de croix de couleur unissent tous ces éléments dans le dernier album de la Montréalaise Thanya Iyer, à l’image de la coquette pochette de Shaina Hayes. Expérimentation folle et zigzag entre nombreux styles, Do You Dream ? témoigne d’une maturité singulière et captivante. La voix d’Iyer valse dans les graves du jazz telle une élève modèle, notamment dans Hold On. Le plus souvent, le plaisir de chanter en bonne compagnie s’entend, comme dans Daydreaming, la pièce la plus magistrale de l’opus. Mais le coeur peut facilement flancher pour la courte Tender Thunder Theme, délicieuse prière d’inspiration carnatique. S’il manque un tantinet d’élagage dans ce bel amalgame, on ne peut plaider que la générosité. Car c’est ce que nous offrent les fils tissés entre les rêves de Thanya Iyer et nous, des morceaux de prodigalité. - Marie-Pier Frappier

Thanya Iyer sat in a sea of mattresses.

In a spacious Jean-Talon St. home turned intimate concert venue, Iyer was surrounded by people draping themselves over each other. Iyer rested her head on someone’s shoulder. There was a calmness in the room as she reconnected with old friends, some of whom she hadn’t played with in years.

Iyer and her eponymous band recently released their debut album: Do You Dream? At the moment, she’s finishing up the last year of a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Concordia University, working in a lab, studying the connections between music and the brain. She also teaches piano and violin lessons.

“In the fall semester, I realized that I couldn’t balance performing music, school and work,” Iyer said, admitting that she recently had to re-think her lifestyle after the album release.

The core band is composed of multi-instrumentalist Alex Kasirer-Smibert playing upright bass, synth, and occasionally guitar; Daniel Gélinas on drums; Simon Millerd on the trumpet; and Shaina Hayes, who weaves her floral vocals through the album. Together, the band achieves a wonderful collage of complimentary sounds.

Do You Dream? marked September 2016 as a milestone for the band. The album was the culmination of their adventures in music that began when Iyer, Hayes and Kasirer-Smibert first met in Cegep at Vanier College years ago.

Bouncing in and out of each other’s lives since young-adulthood, the band has created a beautiful, intricate web of friendship and collaborative musical effort. They play in each other’s musical projects, like TEA—an indie folk band—or when jamming out at Shigawake Agricultural Fair & Music Festival during the summer. Their music has grown and developed much in the same way they have grown together as people.

At the heart of it is Iyer.


Simon Millerd and Thanya Iyer get lost in their music at a cozy house show on Jan. 7, 2016 in Jean-Talon. Photo Ocean DeRouchie
Even so, while the band produces and performs under Iyer’s name, there’s no doubt that each musician brings something of their own to the sound. The group fluctuates between three to five musicians, and they often invite other local musicians to play with them live.

“It’s fun. We always make it a little bit different each time [we play],” said Hayes. “It’s like being with family. No matter what the show or event, no matter what we’re all feeling, it’s always comfortable.”

It shows when the band connects on stage. At their performance on Dec. 31, Iyer, Gélinas and Kasirer-Smibert’s improvisations went in a direction away from the lushness of their album. Layering glitchy electronic melodies over Iyer’s radiant voice, paired with synthy-experimental noises, it was clear that the band won’t stop evolving after the LP.

“We want to focus more on the balance between the crazy improvised sections, and bringing it down to bare nothing,” Iyer said of the set. “For [the Ritz] show, we decided to not make a set, and whatever happened would happen.”



The band continues to accumulate love in the local music scene by delivering magical shows with their now-unpredictable sound post-album.

“Change means letting go of what something was, in order to let it become something new,” said Millerd, the trumpeter. “Thanya has a lot of courage in that sense.”

“Change means letting go of what something was, in order to let it become something new. Thanya has a lot of courage in that sense.— Simon Millerd, musician
There is also bravery in being honest, and Iyer’s lyrics reflect her own determination to accept and acknowledge the love, loss and transformations that took place through her twenties. Right now, she’s looking forward from this fruitful part of her life.

“I’m usually taking a part-time [workload] this semester, and I try to balance school and music evenly. But this year, I am working on my thesis on musical abilities in children. It was cool that I found that niche,” she said.

Iyer walks a fine line between keeping options open and spreading herself too thin. With the best intentions, she tried to give herself to all of passions, but found that she eventually had a choice to make. Between the album launch, her thesis, and studying and teaching music, Iyer couldn’t balance everything the way she used to. “You can’t do everything forever. So I decided to focus on this last year of school,” Iyer said.

While most people in her year of her program applied for Master’s programs, Iyer wondered if she too, should follow suit and look into post-graduate studies. “But I was like no, you gotta do you. You gotta do you.”

To her, that means giving herself to her path and to her music “for an undefined amount of time.”

Do You Dream?‘s tender narrative of internal division, change, and clarity, is fittingly reflective of Iyer’s post-release feelings. In the track, “MindBody,” there’s a relatable feeling of not knowing where you’re headed, or where your path will take you in the lyrics, “Late at night/I stay up counting cards until persuaded that I’ll save… I can’t wait not knowing when I’ll finish writing this and hoping to/ brave be brave.”

As Iyer looks forward to completing her BA at Concordia, the band has equally exciting opportunities in the horizons. They’ll be kicking off on an U.S. tour this spring. While there, they’ll perform a show and hold a workshop for kids at the True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri. With their path rolling out slowly but surely under their feet, Iyer stays optimistic and content.

“It’s the balance—that’s the biggest thing.” she said smiling. “I was so pulled by all of these directions… but I have so much passion for songwriting and performing. I believe in it so much.” - Ocean DeRouchie

Do You Dream? Thanya Iyer asks us. It’s an unusual question, mostly because of how it’s phrased. Iyer is seemingly uninterested in what or who we dream about but simply if, like all humans, we experience the involuntary process of dreaming. The answer is so obvious that instead of giving us a stock of her own dreams to use, Iyer gives us a soundtrack for our subconscious. A complex labyrinth of sounds that morphs to the uniqueness of an individual’s mind.

Iyer builds this soundtrack with an all-star cast of Montreal musicians including Daniel Gélinas – who on Bandcamp is credited with playing “Dried Clementine Peels” but can also be seen playing water in the live video for “Daydreaming,” which captured our attention earlier this year – Alex Kasirer-Smibert, Sarah Pagé (Barr Brothers), and lots more. The resulting group make a rapidly spinning and entrancing carousel of jazz, orchestral-pop, and experimental music that doesn’t stay still long enough to be labeled as something singular. Do You Dream? risks spinning off its perch entirely if it wasn’t for Iyer’s unfailing and dynamic vocals – a constant source of intrigue and emotion throughout.

Songs like “500 Hours,” “Daydreaming,” and “Sail Away,” are ghostly and mysterious in their piano and string tinkering, vocal distortions, or swirling background noises but lyrically they are very much of the body. Other tracks are no less mysterious sounding but are warm to the touch: the welcoming sound of the oboe (Krisjana Thorsteinson) on “Loss” or the group vocals of “Can We Be Still” are all signs of life, love, and comfort among the chaos.

The “themes” scattered throughout the album act as intermissions from the ongoing instrumental intricacies. Adorned with whimsical names, (“Flower Person Theme”, “Tender Thunder Theme”, “Dragonfruit Theme”, and “Polyester Chu Chu Train Theme”) these songs do sound like they were made with classroom instruments or children’s toys found at someone’s yard sale. The latter theme – stretching over five minutes – is the most exhaustive of the bunch. Beginning with the whistle of birds and a train, “Polyester Chu Chu Train Theme” barrels through a barrage of hazy instrumentals, picking up the threads of previous songs (“500 Hours” being the most recognizable), and dropping us off in some weird delirious state.

In all, Do You Dream? is an extensive, engrossing listen and a dreamer’s paradise.

Top Tracks: “500 Hours”; “Can We Be Still”; “Polyester Chu Chu Train Theme”

Rating: Proud Hoot (Really Good) - Laura Stanley

Do you dream? Truly dream? Do you give yourself clearance to take off on flights of fancy? Ask permission to imagine the unimaginable? Dreaming is different than believing, which is different than doing, but the line between all three states is fine. It’s the width of a thread.

Montreal’s Thanya Iyer want to know if you dream. And if you do, do you believe them? And if you believe them, what do you do with dreams? What they do is make whimsical, wonderful musical figurines out of their dreams. Like those tiny, porcelain knick knacks your great aunt had arranged on a low shelf, dioramas of smiling frogs, rabbits stand on their hind legs wearing petticoats, a squirrel in a top hat and monocle. The stuff of dreams made physical and arranged to tell a magical story.

“Can we go far and sail away?,” asks instrumentalist Thanya Iyer (who lends her name to the collective of musicians that came together to record Do You Dream?), certain that wherever the journey takes her and her friends, whether a physical or spiritual one, it could be better than they’d ever imagined. Throughout the 19-song album, Thanya Iyer are closing the gap between the ideal world and reality. On the mildly hallucinogenic “Bridges”, Iyer asks “Would you rather hum in silence? / Make regrets through all the violence / Or would you rather make a sound that people can sing”. The answer is not a foregone conclusion, but you sense it’s there in the instrumental interludes sprinkled throughout Do You Dream?. It’s in these reflective moments that Thanya Iyer allow your mind to settle, gives your thoughts room to breathe, and nurtures the seeds of imagination planted a few songs earlier.

It comes as no surprise to hear from Iyer that, like dreams tend to do, Do You Dream? came about as the band explored ideas and inspirations that came to them as they worked on the album over the course of a year. They may not have been able to settle on a band name (the ‘theme’ tracks on the album are named after potential band names they discussed during recording), but Thanya Iyer certainly struck musical gold during their year of experimentation. The result is a prolonged, blissful slumber, and comes about about as close as you’ll get to experiencing dream-like sensations while fully awake.Do You Dream?’s idyllic, experimental folk songs will make you a dreamer and believer. - Jim Di Gioia