I’m sitting in Lina Choi’s sunlit studio on the edge of Montreal’s Parc Ex neighbourhood on a warm late-winter day. Water is dripping everywhere. Through the large industrial windows, under a brilliant afternoon sun, little rivulets can be seen pouring off a neighbouring roof into the parking lot below: Heaps of snow are dissolving, iciclesContinue reading “Lina Choi is Floating in Spaces”
Article Type Archives
Arkora’s Cloud Chamber
Arkora, a Toronto-based electric, vocal, chamber consort, includes an eight-voice choir and an accompanying ensemble, with irresistible composer bait—the Lumiphone. A giant, three-octave, thirty-one-tone, equal-tempered (31-TET) glass marimba, the Lumiphone was designed and constructed by Benton Roark, who cofounded Arkora with Kathleen Allan in Vancouver in 2012. The choir sings in 31-TET harmonies; the electricContinue reading “Arkora’s Cloud Chamber”
Pleasure Calls, by Camae Ayewa and Carmel Farahbakhsh
Pleasure Calls is a collaborative, interdisciplinary installation and performance by Camae Ayewa and Carmel Farahbakhsh that activates revolutionary ways of loving one another. The installation is the culmination of a week-long residency in early March of 2019 at the Khyber Centre for the Arts, an artist-run centre for noncommercial work located in the historic HalifaxContinue reading “Pleasure Calls, by Camae Ayewa and Carmel Farahbakhsh”
wnoondwaamin | we hear them
Inspired by the idea that sound travels and has purpose beyond the human ear, wnoondwaamin | we hear them is about the materiality of sound, the social implications of the transmission and reception of sound, and the politics of being or not being heard. Artists Autumn Chacon, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Melissa General, and Suzanne MorrissetteContinue reading “wnoondwaamin | we hear them”
Tomoko Sauvage’s Waterbowls
Delicate clusters of tones sound and resonate. An orchestration of chimes and drips, they mix to form a potent brew of sullen melodies and serene reverberation. Adrift, immersed, submerged—there are many metaphors one might use to describe a close listening of Clepsydra, the opening track on Tomoko Sauvage’s latest album, Musique Hydromantique, and most ofContinue reading “Tomoko Sauvage’s Waterbowls”
Julie Andreyev and Simon Lysander Overstall’s Biophilia
November, some might say, is not the ideal time to visit the wild West Coast. The days are short, the leaves are down. In any normal year, monsoon season will have kicked in, producing alternating bands of drizzle and downpour, both equally grey and almost equally wet. But when the International Society for Contemporary MusicContinue reading “Julie Andreyev and Simon Lysander Overstall’s Biophilia”
Artificiel’s “Three Pieces With Titles”
“I had never seen such new things before. I didn’t even know what a new object could be,” the poet and art critic André Salmon wrote, after visiting the studio of Pablo Picasso in the spring of 1914. Of particular interest to Salmon was Guitar, a wall-mounted 3-D collage of a semi-exploded guitar built withContinue reading “Artificiel’s “Three Pieces With Titles””
Amanda Dawn Christie’s Requiem for Radio
In 2012 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) began to tear down its Radio-Canada International towers in Sackville, New Brunswick (home to some 6,000 people and best known as the locale of the beloved SappyFest). The dismantling of the towers wasn’t just another chapter in the public broadcaster’s ongoing fight to keep its funding, but somethingContinue reading “Amanda Dawn Christie’s Requiem for Radio”
Erin Gee Sings the Body Electronic
SHOULD YOU EVER FIND YOURSELF IN A CONFINED SPACE WITH ERIN GEE, PREPARE TO BE ENTERTAINED, AND PERHAPS ALSO PUZZLED—AT LEAST BRIEFLY. “If someone meets me in an elevator,” she tells Musicworks in a telephone interview from her office in downtown Montreal, “my elevator pitch is that I explore the communicative potential of the human voice inContinue reading “Erin Gee Sings the Body Electronic”
Dasha Rush: Dark Hearts of Space
The prospects are grim for a person who has fallen into a black hole. The gravitational forces exerted by these mysterious regions of space are so strong that nothing—not even light—can escape, once it passes a certain proximity threshold. From a safe distance, the unlucky soul would appear to stretch and smear as it approachedContinue reading “Dasha Rush: Dark Hearts of Space”
The Retro Aesthetic of Le Révélateur
THE OCEAN RECEDES INTO THE DISTANCE, awash in thick bands of golden-purple sunset hues. Its surface ripples in loose synchronization with a burbling synthesizer score. Suddenly, a shimmering plane materializes and obliquely bisects the scene; the plane spins and the textures of the two surfaces soak into one another. The projection of these abstract seascapesContinue reading “The Retro Aesthetic of Le Révélateur”
Myriam Bleau spins Soft Revolvers
In a darkened room, an artist is manipulating four translucent circular objects on a tabletop, moving from one to another. Audience members gather around. The objects emit light. Their spinning motion activates deep tones and beats that crackle and whir, and snippets of voice that drop in and out. The sounds fade as the spinningContinue reading “Myriam Bleau spins Soft Revolvers”
Gil Delindro’s instruments of nature
Earlier this year, an eight-foot-across circle of solid ice was hung from the ceiling of Winnipeg’s RAW: Gallery of Architecture and Design. Why would anyone in the world’s second-coldest city (after Ulan Bator, Mongolia) want that legendary cold brought indoors? The occasion was the mounting of a new work by Portuguese-born, Berlin-based sound artist GilContinue reading “Gil Delindro’s instruments of nature”
Elastic Planets
Stepping into this black cube is like entering an intergalactic observation deck. Enveloped by mechanical whirs, buzzes and clicks, a parade of heavenly bodies is presented for inspection. This particular set is kaleidoscopic in colour, malleable in shape, kinetic in nature, frenetic in texture, as if the Painters Eleven had created their own solar system.Continue reading “Elastic Planets”
SlowPitch’s “Emoralis”
On a rainy April evening in Toronto, in the darkened hush of historic St. Anne’s Anglican Church, the first frame of the 2013 Images Festival appear—a live black-and-white projection of the deft hands of turntable artist SlowPitch. As the frames progress, you can literally hear and see a needle drop. Then comes a hard tectonicContinue reading “SlowPitch’s “Emoralis””
Resonate
At first glance, Resonate appears to be a static, glowing, string structure in a dark, drone-filled room. But enter the space and pluck any of the glowing strings and dynamic pools of light suddenly appear, as sound objects form a rhythmic and spatial counterpart to the drones. The interactive light and sound installation was designedContinue reading “Resonate”
Jörg Piringer’s Sound Poetry App
FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY The iPod touch is hissing loudly as two s’s move about the screen leaving a trail of fading s shapes in their wake. I drag the image of an r onto the screen with my finger, wanting to hear what effect that will have on the soundscape, but itContinue reading “Jörg Piringer’s Sound Poetry App”
Avatar Orchestra Metaverse
FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY Avatar Orchestra Metaverse is a global collective making new music within the virtual-reality platform Second Life, an online three-dimensional program that allows users to interact through in-world avatars (users’ digital representations within a given online environment). The Orchestra had its beginnings in early 2007 with the coalescence in SecondContinue reading “Avatar Orchestra Metaverse”
Scenocosme’s Kymapetra
FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY The title Kymapetra is a combination of two ancient Greek words, kyma meaning a wave or vibration, and petra, which means stone. Every stone is forged by time—broken, polished, composite, or fossilized—and each has a natural history and vibration. In the interactive installation Kymapetra, five stones surround a bowlContinue reading “Scenocosme’s Kymapetra”
Sarah Peeble`s Audio Bee Booth
FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY Pollination Wunder Station is a wunderkammer—cabinet of curiosities—full of fascinating living things. The piece is part habitat interpretation, part bio art, part sound installation, and part sculpture. It is one in a series of audio bee booths that are amplified habitat installations for solitary nesting bees and wasps. TheseContinue reading “Sarah Peeble`s Audio Bee Booth”
Hyposurface
FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY On a 2004 visit to the MIT Media Lab, I encountered a small, flat wall with a skin of silver luminescent triangles covering a background of cables and metal frame. My host, the creator of Hyposurface, Mark Goulthorpe (dECOi Architects, and Professor at MIT) turned on the compressor, causingContinue reading “Hyposurface”
Years
Years is a sound installation for modified record player that examines the disparity between the experience of time passing and time as an objective quantity. The piece uses a turntable to “play” a vinyl-Lp-sized cross section of a tree. A camera fitted with a microscopic lens replaces the needle on the record player’s tone arm. DuringContinue reading “Years”
Binatone Galaxy
Binatone Galaxy is an installation for used cassette players that looks on their obsolescence not as an ending, but as an opportunity to reconsider their functional potential. Superseded by digital audio players as recording and playback devices, cassette players become, in this work, instruments in their own right. The piece takes irreverent delight in disposingContinue reading “Binatone Galaxy”
Tristan Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony
Tristan Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony (2009–10) is an electronic composition in five movements on a single microchip housed in a CD jewel case. 1-Bit Symphony is not a recording in the traditional sense; it is a complete electronic circuit that literally performs its music once it is turned on. Programmed by the artist and assembled byContinue reading “Tristan Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony”