Please share this news with your friends, collaborators, and community. Musicworks launches the Marcelle Deschênes Prize in Electronic Music / Prix Marcelle Deschênes pour la musique électronique as part of its annual Electronic Music Composition Contest [this was announced in September 2020] Donor-supported annual prize awards $300 to a self-identified female or non-binary composer 2022 EMCContinue reading “Musicworks launches the Marcelle Deschênes Prize in Electronic Music / Prix Marcelle Deschênes pour la musique électronique”
Article Type Archives
New Frequencies
This issue of Musicworks comes preloaded with guitars. Hollow, heavy, bowed, cracked, pedalled, flung. Trusty companions. Feedback demons. Easy to pick up, hard to put down. While I do not declare this as The Guitar Issue, I do aver that the guitar informed my aleatoric curatorial process for Musicworks 137. Last year Nova Scotia guitaristContinue reading “New Frequencies”
A message from the Musicworks Board of Directors
The Board of Directors of Musicworks acknowledges that the new and experimental music scenes covered in the magazine are built on a foundation of systemic racism, and that through our content we have facilitated and upheld that system. Musicworks is a long-standing publication dedicated to expanding the usual understandings of music by covering new andContinue reading “A message from the Musicworks Board of Directors”
FET.NAT’s Post-Punk Palimpsests
Around twenty years ago, a post-punk revival was supposedly upon us. Reissue compilations proliferated alongside a crop of new artists who audibly drew from the genre’s heyday. Where punk-rock wedded a rock ethos with rebellious politics (or sometimes just rebellious posturing), post-punk let exploratory radicalism infiltrate the music itself. Looking at that much-touted resurgence withContinue reading “FET.NAT’s Post-Punk Palimpsests”
The Many Trajectories of Erin Rogers
Erin Rogers and Dennis Sullivan are facing each other on the stage of Manhattan’s Le Poisson Rouge in late February of 2020, a small table of gear between them. They take turns triggering samples of sportscasters by pounding large, illuminated buttons as if playing bare-knuckle Whac-a-Mole, altering sample speeds with joysticks and catch-and-releasing looped phrases.Continue reading “The Many Trajectories of Erin Rogers”
Curtis Running Rabbit-Lefthand Ignites the Rhythm of the People
Blackfoot Confederacy member Curtis Running Rabbit-Lefthand is the founder and executive artistic director of Indigenous Resilience in Music (IRIM), a collective that supports Indigenous musicians and youth in their learning, performing, recording, and collaborating. The group’s Indigenous-led workshops and events address topics ranging from spiritual values and language reclamation to the basic practicalities of howContinue reading “Curtis Running Rabbit-Lefthand Ignites the Rhythm of the People”
Backxwash—The Healing Music of Productive Rage
If you want to win over rapper and producer Backxwash (Ashanti Mutinta), start a conversation with her by talking about the outlier sounds of American rapper–producers Missy Elliot and Timbaland. I’m speaking with her a couple of days after she fired up audiences at her first-ever Toronto show—the February edition of the eighth annual LongContinue reading “Backxwash—The Healing Music of Productive Rage”
music, interrupted
A barrage of media releases announcing the cancellation or postponement of concerts and festivals—in my hometown of Toronto, in music hubs across Canada and beyond—began hitting my inbox with increasing intensity the second week of March. Like many who actively follow, attend, present, or document live music, I had been aware that a sound-dampening waveContinue reading “music, interrupted”
Alex Buck’s Screaming Trees
Convergence is often the magical force in the creative process that leads to an ear-catching work. Two or more seemingly disparate elements meet in the imagination of an artist who unites them into something new that resonates with both universal and personal meaning. This is the story behind Brazilian composer Alex Buck’s evocative eight-minute sonicContinue reading “Alex Buck’s Screaming Trees”
Ian William Craig’s Sonic Alchemy
To many listeners, Ian William Craig’s debut LP, A Turn of Breath (Recital, 2014), seemed to materialize out of thin air—and not just because it was his first commercial release: one can hear almost spectral voices attempting to penetrate layers of electromagnetic detritus, like choral music trickling in from the spirit world. One can definitelyContinue reading “Ian William Craig’s Sonic Alchemy”
Qikiqtaaluk, Nunavut
Mount Thor Sometimes the Arctic sun never goes down, never rises. Today though, in the middle of the Akshayuk Pass, I wake up just before the sunrays reach the thin layer of ice on my tent. It is early, dark, and cold. The wind is tirelessly beating against everything that comes in its way. IContinue reading “Qikiqtaaluk, Nunavut”
Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi is just scratching the surface
“My relationship to sound is [an] obsession with texture and how sounds affect each other, and also [with] playing with the human psyche.” Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi then bursts out laughing, saying, “That’s a lot in one sentence.” Koochakzadeh-Yazdi is very funny, and she’s also very focused. The Iranian-Canadian Simon Fraser University student is just twenty-one yearsContinue reading “Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi is just scratching the surface”
Tim Olive’s Flexible Aesthetic
It’s a typically humming Saturday night at the Tranzac Club. Different events are in progress in each of the Toronto venue’s three rooms. The Tiki Room (the smallest and most living-room-like of the three) is hosting a special edition of the Audiopollination series, which is usually held elsewhere; its regular events are self-curated affairs, whereContinue reading “Tim Olive’s Flexible Aesthetic”
Emilie LeBel’s Field Notes
For many composers, a work in progress comes with strings attached—no pun intended. There are arts councils and concert presenters to satisfy, musicians to liaise with, premiere dates that draw ever closer. Deadlines, of course, can get the juices flowing, and creative constraints (such as writing for a specific ensemble) can certainly focus the mind.Continue reading “Emilie LeBel’s Field Notes”
Sami Blanco’s Experimental Atmospheres
Yellowknife-based experimental electronic-music artist Sami Blanco plays me a snippet of a soundbank he made for late-night broadcast on Yellowknife’s francophone radio station, CIVR-FM, familiarly known as Radio Taïga. Emerging from a Korg MS2000—the virtual analog synthesizer Blanco dreamed about owning since he was sixteen—is a dazzling sequence that twinkles like stars on a clearContinue reading “Sami Blanco’s Experimental Atmospheres”
Mystery & Wonder Records: Extending the Sound
A striking musical and visual aesthetic distinguishes Mystery & Wonder Records from other artist-curated labels. The recordings are concise yet complete musical statements. High-definition sound with a lively, in-your-face feel results from microphones placed very close to the instruments. Releases are downloadable from the label’s Website but are more fully appreciated on vinyl or CD,Continue reading “Mystery & Wonder Records: Extending the Sound”
The Quiet Waves of Silla and Rise
In early 2016 Ottawa-based DJ, producer, and dancer Eric Vani, aka Rise, was hired to create music to be played at the Canadian Museum of Nature’s Nature Nocturne—a themed-evening series that Vani describes as a “rave in the middle of dinosaur skeletons.” “They hired me to remix a bunch of music from around the circumpolar—differentContinue reading “The Quiet Waves of Silla and Rise”
Webber/Morris Big Band
On a cold January evening in 2019, Angela Morris approaches the bandstand of Manhattan’s Jazz Gallery and announces that she will be able to conduct her piece that night. A few days ago it was still uncertain. Weeks earlier, on Christmas Eve, she broke her shoulder, making the arm movements required to lead the bandContinue reading “Webber/Morris Big Band”
Chroma Mixed Media’s Water
Water, the second-place winner of Musicworks’ 2018 Electronic Music Composition Contest, is a multimedia performance piece structured around changing states of water. It was composed collaboratively by three members of Chroma Mixed Media for a performance with the Co.Crea.Tive collective that took place at the Golden Saucer in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Earth Day (April 22)Continue reading “Chroma Mixed Media’s Water”
HAVN Records: Fronting Art Music in ‘The Hammer’
First came the band, then the space, then the label. The band is Haolin Munk, a jazz and hip-hop quartet formed in the early 2010s by drummer Aaron Hutchinson, tenor saxophonist Connor Bennett, alto saxophonist Chris Ferguson, and bassist Josh Wiener. The space is HAVN—Hamilton Audio Visual Node—a gallery and performance space just off JamesContinue reading “HAVN Records: Fronting Art Music in ‘The Hammer’”
Carmen Vanderveken is full of surprises
Quebec-born composer Carmen Vanderveken was commissioned by the Dutch annual festival Gaudeamus Muziekweek to write a piece for a quartet featuring Dutch bass clarinetist Fie Schouten. An earlier piece sheds light on the shape and sound of the music Carmen Vanderveken is after. In about two and a half minutes this “very short étude,” asContinue reading “Carmen Vanderveken is full of surprises”
The Musical Colours of Dominique Fils-Aimé
On the 2004 live-concert recording Tour de Force, the renowned American poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron introduces his 1981 song “Is That Jazz?”: “Go to your record store . . . look at the bottom shelf, you will find a box called miscellaneous. We are miscellaneous. We did not mean to be miscellaneous. Somehow itContinue reading “The Musical Colours of Dominique Fils-Aimé”
Manuella Blackburn’s Landline
In the pantheon of sounds, the tone, whirr, and ring of the rotary phone belong in the “gone but not forgotten” gallery. If someone’s mobile phone rings à la Ma Bell—as opposed to the usual pulsating buzz, pop-tune riff, or synthesized animal sound—we might get nostalgic and think something like, How quaint . . . that is,Continue reading “Manuella Blackburn’s Landline”
Raven Chacon’s Harmonious Language
“I loved the Beatles so much that I totally exhausted listening to their music. I wanted more.” For Raven Chacon, the answer was easy. “I recorded all of their albums on cassette, then took the tape out of the shell and flipped it so I could have all the albums in reverse. So I hadContinue reading “Raven Chacon’s Harmonious Language”