Being assigned to cover a new music festival such as Montréal/Nouvelles Musiques is somewhat like being thrown into a different space-time (and sound) continuum—one suddenly has the impression that new music is all there is to be heard all over the city, with ensembles, performances, and venues filled with enthusiastic audiences experiencing nothing but newContinue reading “Montreal New Music International Festival: 5th Edition. Montreal, Canada. February 18–26, 2011.”
Genre Archives
Sound Symposium XV. St. John’s, Newfoundland. July 2–10, 2010.
Sound Symposium XV offered up in equal portions traditional concerts, sound installations, urban music, and everything in between. The festival itself became a nine-day art event, greater than the sum of its parts, and for that, the curatorial team deserves to be applauded. For the duration of the festival, the whole city became an auditorium,Continue reading “Sound Symposium XV. St. John’s, Newfoundland. July 2–10, 2010.”
Urbanvessel and Juliet Palmer
Suit-tail-clad Juliet Palmer sits at the top of a stepladder in the middle of the diamond-shaped ring. Tonight, she’s not wearing her Canadian composer hat. Tonight, she’s a sports announcer. “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to Voice-Box!” she booms. You can almost imagine her clasping a vintage mike hanging from the ceiling. LeaningContinue reading “Urbanvessel and Juliet Palmer”
Richard Marsella
“Good evening and welcome to the Friendly Rich Show. My name is Friendly Rich. Thank you. And I’ll be your loyal host this evening. Behind me, my mystery-meat orchestra, the Lollipop People. No need to clap, kids. Tonight’s show is full of the good stuff. We got dirty crank calls, burlesque puppets, circus cartoons, aContinue reading “Richard Marsella”
Yannis Kyriakides
“Why don’t you come by my place and I can sell you the CDs you’re seeking,” said the voice on the phone. It was the spring of 2005, I was in Amsterdam and looking for recordings from the Dutch label Unsounds. The voice on the other end of the line was that of Dutch-Cypriot composerContinue reading “Yannis Kyriakides”
Eve Egoyan and David Rokeby’s Surface Tension
Surface Tension is a thirty-five-minute collaborative interarts work that the two of us (pianist Eve Egoyan and installation artist David Rokeby) created for Disklavier piano and interactive video. The piece explores the relationship between what we do separately in our respective creative practises. It is an exploration of possibility, of ways to integrate our two very different approachesContinue reading “Eve Egoyan and David Rokeby’s Surface Tension”
Winter 2010
Summer 2010
Iannis Xenakis. Translated by Sharon Kanach. Music and Architecture.
It is commonly known that Iannis Xenakis was more than a composer; that he studied engineering rather than composition; that he worked for Le Corbusier as an architectural assistant; that he taught himself computer programming in order to create composition algorithms, new methods for digital synthesis, and a graphic music computer system (UPIC); that heContinue reading “Iannis Xenakis. Translated by Sharon Kanach. Music and Architecture.”
