TORONTO, CANADA, March 8, 2019. For immediate release: Musicworks is thrilled to announce the winners of its 2018 Electronic Music Composition Contest. U.K. composer Manuella Blackburn (left)has won first prize with her composition Landline. An article about Blackburn will appear in Musicworks 133 (Spring 2019), available by subscription, from Musicworks’ shop, and on select CanadianContinue reading “Musicworks Unveils 2018 Electronic Music Composition Contest Winners”
Genre Archives
Overleaf. Overleaf.
The recently formed Overleaf assembles three of Toronto’s most distinct yet unsung voices in a compelling and elusive amalgam. Synthesist (and occasional bamboo flutist) Heidi Chan (aka Bachelard), saxophonist Kayla Milmine, and Mira Martin-Gray, who has an uncharacteristically acute grasp of mixer feedback, are indeed improvising, but this work trades many of the tropes of theContinue reading “Overleaf. Overleaf.”
Sarah Davachi. Gave in Rest.
Calgary-born and currently resident in Los Angeles, Sarah Davachi has quickly developed a significant reputation creating music that is ambient, minimalist, and highly compelling. She recently spent a summer in Europe exploring her fascination with the acoustic properties of ancient churches and the behaviour of early instruments, finding parallels to the latter in the behaviourContinue reading “Sarah Davachi. Gave in Rest.”
Muxubo Mohamed Dares to Represent
Compromise? What is compromising? Compromising for what? Compromising for what reason? . . . What is compromise? —Eartha Kitt That emphatic excerpt from a 1982 documentary is sampled at the start of “He(r)story,” the opening track on Obuxum’s beat-laden EP H.E.R. While Kitt is alluding to compromising with a man, Obuxum is zooming out further, asking whyContinue reading “Muxubo Mohamed Dares to Represent”
Event Cloak. Vague Definition.
Life Strategies, the 2015 record by Montreal electronic musician Nick Maturo, made one of the most compelling cases for sixteenth-note grids in recent memory. Like a revisionist history of early-1990s ambient music packed into a single LP, its dancing arpeggios and rhythmic flickers of sampled choir gave it a buoyant, fluorescent energy, making it aContinue reading “Event Cloak. Vague Definition.”
Vanese “VJ” Smith is Right on Time
Vanese (pronounced va-NIECE) “VJ” Smith and I are on the Spadina streetcar, chatting like old friends. Just minutes earlier we met for the first time. I arrived from up North (aka Thornhill) in a state of winter-blues petulance, but when I saw her bright smile and waving arm from across the street, I was gratefulContinue reading “Vanese “VJ” Smith is Right on Time”
Melody McKiver. Reckoning
Melody McKiver is an Anishinaabe musician, dancer, and intermedia artist with a background in classical music, whose broad and adventurous palette also includes jazz, blues, hip-hop, and contemporary classical music, performed primarily on solo viola and laptop. The music on Reckoning was originally composed as the soundtrack for a theatrical production about the impact ofContinue reading “Melody McKiver. Reckoning”
MUSICWORKS UNVEILS 2017 CONTEST WINNERS
Musicworks is thrilled to announce the winners of its 2017 contests. Erik Ingalls’ The Gravity of Plim has won first place in Musicworks’ 2017 Electronic Music Composition contest. Ingalls’ winning piece began as an accompaniment to a science-fiction short story written by his partner. “Being a classic science-fiction fan, I had in mind an impression ofContinue reading “MUSICWORKS UNVEILS 2017 CONTEST WINNERS”
Steve Roach. Structures from Silence.
Since the mid-2000s, a lot of ambient music has been moving into increasingly abrasive and gothic territory—at times even cozying into the coffin right next to doom metal. The recent reappraisal of New Age music, on the other hand, has brought some welcome sweetness and even humour back to electronic drift. Since Light In TheContinue reading “Steve Roach. Structures from Silence.”
Daniel Lentz. River of 1,000 Streams.
Daniel Lentz is one of a number of composers who emerged in the wake of American minimalism and used some of the movement’s primary tenets to leverage a distinct, hard-to-pin-down voice. But the sweeping River of 1000 Streams, a work for solo piano and cascading delays, is anything but minimal. It’s more like a slow-motionContinue reading “Daniel Lentz. River of 1,000 Streams.”