Fond of Tigers have been developing a complicated, beautiful sound since 2003. Featuring seven of Vancouver’s leading creative musicians, Fond of Tigers play a layered, nuanced music that explores musical possibilities ranging from the smallest gesture of extended technique, to the full avant-rock bombast possible with a wild, double-drumkit-led septet.

Although admitting that “jazz purists will find little to comfort them”, Coda magazine named the group’s debut recording, a thing to live with (Drip Audio) “one of the best releases of 2006”. In just under 50 minutes the band (variously described in print as "compelling", "eclectic", "transcendent", "hypnotic", and "post-everything") showcased their visceral combination of meticulous odd-time composition and improvisational abandon, resulting in a sometimes confusing, always exhilarating ordered chaos. Downbeat Magazine called it “spellbinding” and “remarkably vital”.

Fond of Tigers’ second album, Release the Saviours is an ambitious and focused synthesis of mathy freakouts, off-kilter jazz, ambient sound sculpture, abstract improvisation, and a rare feel for making music that is both challenging, and highly listenable. It’s what one writer called “beacon of hope in a year plagued by an excess of dull music”, helping the late-year release make several annual best of lists, including Exclaim! Magazine, Tiny Mix Tapes, CokeMachineGlow, and Germany’s Borderline Radio. Their third album will be released on Drip Audio on September 21, 2010.

The group has performed at the 2006 through 2010 editions of the Vancouver Jazz Festival, Toronto’s Music Gallery, The Guelph Jazz Festival, Sled Island Music Festival, the New Forms Festival, and the Festival de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, collaborated with Sandro Perri, Mats Gustafsson, and Secret Mommy, and shared stages with Deerhoof, Shad, the Grande Mothers, Tortoise, and others.

Fond of Tigers’ intense and idiosyncratic sound inhabits an undefined musical territory somewhere in the outlands of avant-rock: “prog, post-rock, or jazz -- whatever you want to call this, it rarely sounds this pretty, this expressive, this emotional, this bracing.” (CokeMachineGlow)

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