Following March's CD, ‘Wallet’, HOMESHAKE - the solo musical project of Montreal-based singer songwriter and musician Peter Sagar - presents his second album of 2024, ‘Horsie’. Written and recorded at his home studio in Toronto, it explores Sagar’s complicated feelings about returning to live performance. Deepening his relationship to loneliness and anxiety, the record examines those themes in the context of touring. ‘Horsie’ employs various textures influenced by artists like Four Tet and My Bloody Valentine, the rhythmic forms of D’Angelo and Sade, and moments of ambient Americana found in the works of Ry Cooder. The cornerstone pieces of gear used were an Ensoniq EPS and Roland Juno 60, though the album also employs a great deal of electric guitar, along with his beloved SP-404. He maintains a philosophy of ‘less is more’, finding the simplest route from one point to another. HOMESHAKE is an expression of adjustment and contortion within the world as he experiences it, and the sounds he wants to hear in it. Hallucinatory and heartbreaking in its cries for connection, Sagar’s sound is often imitated but has proven to be entirely his own; textural and profound, uniquely honouring his diverse influences but adrift within its own transportive imagination.