Ganesha (band)

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Ganesha is a small collective of experimental-yet unpretentious-Montreal musicians. Formed in early 1996 under several ridiculous names, the group finally settled upon Ganesha after the two mainstays viewed a large mural that incorporated the Hindu deity in a New York museum. The band plays to tape, "writes" no music, and performs no live shows. Largely instrumental, the group does produce many homemade albums of strung-together pastiches. The "songs" have no beginning or end and flow into each other, the end result is an album that is more like one piece. The band has had two steady official members, but has played with dozens of supporting band members over the years. Ganesha incorporates any and all instruments at their disposal (ordinary, unconventional, homemade alike). The music produced is often hypnotic and disorienting, which led to the coining of the term "Ganubis Effect".

The lack of vocals allows the band to name songs and albums anything they wish. Often absurd or nonsensical, the band takes many of them from literature (Louis-Ferdinand Céline,Sherwood Anderson, Fyodor Dostoevsky); art (Paul Klee, Franz Marc; Constantin Brancusi's Bird in Space); poetry (Charles Bukowski); comic strips (The Far Side, The Adventures of Tintin); film (Akira Kurosawa); titles and lines from children's books, archaic medical and scientific terms, obscure historical trivia, astronomy, as well as Engrish and other pop culture phenomena. The group also has a fondness for myth, and names most of their albums after gods.