One Friday evening in early May, I jumped on my bicycle and dipsy-doodled to the Music Gallery along Toronto’s pothole-ravaged streets. Musician–producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh was premiering a new work by Jerusalem In My Heart, the evolving performance project he founded in 2005. With a Canadian tour in the early summer, and European dates inContinue reading “The Intimacy of Summer Listening”
Author Archives: Musicworks
Quatuor Bozzini
Quatuor Bozzini is poetry, sweat, talent, idealism, determination, love, survival, fate, and a wonderful wild dance with the spirits. For fifteen years, the Montreal ensemble has steadfastly explored the notion of what contemporary music means today. The players are irrepressible creators and innovators, whether working in the far lands of experimental sound art, the closeContinue reading “Quatuor Bozzini”
John Preus’ Slow Sound
On a brisk fall afternoon in October, about two dozen people hunkered down in the intimate main room of Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio. They watched some of the city’s more open-minded musicians—including guitarist Leroy Bach and drummer Mikel Avery—improvise on instruments that looked and sounded familiar, yet stood apart for their sculptural beauty. The instrumentsContinue reading “John Preus’ Slow Sound”
Nate Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain
Jump into an early version of Nate Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain, and you land in dark and turbulent, almost infernal terrain. Sounds are dense and blur into one another: trumpet amplified to distortion levels; prerecorded tape of unidentifiable noises; dense, rapid drumming of indecipherable rhythms. Later versions add more orderly elements: passages of stable pitchContinue reading “Nate Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain”
Healing Power Records Hits Toronto With a Sonic Balm
The last place you’d expect to hear a comprehensive showcase of a modern experimental music community is on a dance mix. But with Heart of Toronto, a 2013 CD and download compilation, the Toronto-based label Healing Power has done just that. A compelling snapshot of North America’s fourth-largest city’s dizzyingly interconnected underground music scenes, HeartContinue reading “Healing Power Records Hits Toronto With a Sonic Balm”
The Blessed Riders of Streetcars in Vienna
Streetcars in Vienna are blessedly quiet. The machines—brand new, high-tech plastic platforms—announce themselves on approach with only a slight electric hum. I now react to their high pitch with the same short sprints I used to make to catch the lumbering College streetcar in Toronto. Riders of streetcars in Vienna are blessedly quiet. This isContinue reading “The Blessed Riders of Streetcars in Vienna”
Victor Gama builds a brave new soundworld
Wherever Victor Gama plays, you can be sure clusters of people will be jostling to percuss the upturned metal bowls of his tipaw (so called because the surface of the instrument looks like the pads of a tiger paw), to bow the eight metal strings of the tahra, or simply to wander the length ofContinue reading “Victor Gama builds a brave new soundworld”
Margaret Noble’s Safer Is Better
With an underground club DJ’s flair for performance and a conceptual artist’s commitment to the rigorous investigation of ideas, San Diego interdisciplinary artist Margaret Noble explores in her sound work Frakture the resonance in contemporary society of George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. First presented as a solo electronic–acoustic performance at the experimental musicContinue reading “Margaret Noble’s Safer Is Better”
Music from the New Wilderness
What can sound tell us about a place? Listen to British Columbia, and it might sound something like Music from the New Wilderness, a multimedia performance work that conjures B.C.’s past and evolving present by incorporating historical and current field recordings into new compositions. One piece relies on the fast-changing sounds of a remote coastalContinue reading “Music from the New Wilderness”
Tanya Tagaq Grabs The World By The Throat
Watching Tanya Tagaq perform is more than just an auditory and visual experience: it’s physical. As the Nunavut-born, Manitoba-based throat singer moves around a stage, she unleashes something fierce and powerful that comes from deep within her body, yet seems positively unearthly. She mostly improvises her performances, tapping into traditional Inuit throat singing—growling, cooing, howling,Continue reading “Tanya Tagaq Grabs The World By The Throat”