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”
Genre Archives
Charles Barabé. La lente histoire de l’oubli.
Based in Victoriaville, Quebec, the prolific electronic composer Charles Barabé has become a preeminent figure in the North American tape-label underground with a varied five-year streak of releases for notable imprints such as Jeunesse Cosmique, Orange Milk, Crash Symbols, and Astral Spirits. Encompassing screwball collage, synthesizer vision quests, and hyperreal ersatz-orchestral sonorities, his catalogue intriguesContinue reading “Charles Barabé. La lente histoire de l’oubli.”
Pursuit Grooves. Bess.
For some, the name Bessie Coleman will not ring a bell. She was the first African American–Indigenous female to receive an international pilots’ licence in 1921. Famous in her time, Coleman died at age thirty-four, nearly 100 years ago. Although her life is rarely discussed today, time has not diminished her importance and relevancy. OnContinue reading “Pursuit Grooves. Bess.”
MUTEK Montreal, Twentieth Edition. Montreal, Quebec. August 20–25, 2019.
MUTEK Montreal has long served as the high-water mark around the world for a festival presenting leading artists in the fields of electronic music and digital art. The twentieth edition of the five-day festival confirmed MUTEK’s enduring relevance and commitment to promoting fresh ideas and perspectives within the audiovisual field. While electronic music is stillContinue reading “MUTEK Montreal, Twentieth Edition. Montreal, Quebec. August 20–25, 2019.”
Amy Brandon is Capturing Intimate Chaos
The first time I met guitarist-composer Amy Brandon, we talked about the lineage of a particular sound. Her 2019 composition Mimic—written while she participated in the Canadian League of Composers’ Pivot mentorship progam (presented in partnership with the Canadian Music Centre and Continuum Contemporary Music)—contains a percussion technique in which a woodblock set on topContinue reading “Amy Brandon is Capturing Intimate Chaos”
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”
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”
Bekah Simms’ Skinscape and Elliott Lupp’s Hinge
Bekah Simms’ Skinscape received an honourable mention from the jury of Musicworks’ 2018 Electronic Music Composition Contest. Skinscape is a work for flute and fixed media inspired by the transformation of something intimately familiar into something processed and alien, particularly through the lens of tattooing. “Using almost exclusively flute samples for the fixed media part,Continue reading “Bekah Simms’ Skinscape and Elliott Lupp’s Hinge”
Sonic Acts Festival 2019: Hereafter—An Exhibition in Three Acts.
In Promised Lands, an installation by British artist Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, alluring landscape emerges through foliage in the distance. Vegetation, lush and green, stretches all the way to hills on the horizon. Watching it makes you wish to enter that scenery, to wander around in it, to explore it up close. The camera that captures thisContinue reading “Sonic Acts Festival 2019: Hereafter—An Exhibition in Three Acts.”
Terry Rusling. The Machine Is Broken.
Despite his collaborations with notable poets (Gwendolyn MacEwan, Bob Cobbing), affiliations with pioneering studios at stalwart institutions (BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music, and others), and ties to that legendary beacon of Toronto subculture the Bohemian Embassy, composer Terry Rusling (1931–74) and his works remain on the periphery, even among curiousContinue reading “Terry Rusling. The Machine Is Broken.”