People often describe sound as something that reverberates outward into space, but the music of interdisciplinary artist Roxanne Nesbitt seems to move inward; it has an audiovisual geometry that focuses the eye and the ear, pulling you closer to the source. To perform her 2010 composition Distaff, thin strings are threaded through the strings ofContinue reading “Roxanne Nesbitt’s Sonic Investigations”
Genre Archives
Civvie. Inheritance.
Weaving is a frequent metaphor for music-making, especially when the interplay of discrete elements creates a single cohesive texture. The Winnipeg trio Civvie’s overcast, mahogany-hued sonics lend themselves to such a metaphor, but their peculiar instrumentation adds another dimension to that analogy. In fact, it’s no longer a metaphor in their case: percolating beneath longContinue reading “Civvie. Inheritance.”
Kelly Moran. Bloodroot.
You know you’re onto a captivating recording when you’re so mesmerized by the music that you barely notice the unusual manner in which it was created. Pianist Kelly Moran employs various preparations, including screw-and-bolt obstructions à la Cage and long tones sustained via ebows and inside-the-piano string plucks, recording them all for further electronic manipulationContinue reading “Kelly Moran. Bloodroot.”
Senyawa plays the music of the universe
On a chilly, rainy Thursday May night, a crowd of sixty or so people, spread unevenly around the pews of Halifax’s Fort Massey United Church, is waiting. OBEY Convention creative director Andrew Patterson has just introduced Indonesian “doom folk” duo Senyawa, but after the applause has faded they have still not appeared. Finally, two diminutiveContinue reading “Senyawa plays the music of the universe”
Burden Unpacks the Piano’s Inner Life
At the 2016 Winnipeg New Music Festival, the members of Burden and their synecdochical piano are set up in the midst of a noisy, beer-swilling crowd at Union Sound Hall. Without so much as a word of introduction to attract attention, they assume positions on three sides of the piano and begin. The only noiseContinue reading “Burden Unpacks the Piano’s Inner Life”
Di Mainstone Fashions a New Sonic Future
Di Mainstone, inventor of the Human Harp, describes herself as a “bridge botherer.” But to be accurate, her bridge-bothering activities are fairly recent. Before bridges (the Human Harp has, to date, played bridges in Brooklyn, Omaha, and Bristol) came mood-sensitive kinetic outfits and prosthetic sound devices. In Mainstone’s tiny studio, perched atop a disused VictorianContinue reading “Di Mainstone Fashions a New Sonic Future”
Caduc
The word caduc translates from French as both obsolete and deciduous. Appropriately, the roster of Mathieu Ruhlmann’s humble Vancouver imprint, Caduc, plays right at the intersection of the organic world and senescent technology. Since late 2011, Caduc has built a catalogue of improvised and intuitively constructed music whose sonic fibre is audible, and often quite delicate.Continue reading “Caduc”
Hecker. Articulação.
Much of Florian Hecker’s downright preposterous music could easily be regarded as the absurdist vanishing point of technological vanguardism in computer music. Both boisterously noisy and eerily austere, with its hyperactive bursts of sound, his music often feels as though it’s untouched by human agency or intuition. Devoid of elegant contours—or the mere hint ofContinue reading “Hecker. Articulação.”
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”
The New Sounds of Lebanon
The experimental music scene in Beirut, Lebanon, may exist in relative geographic isolation from other global movements of a similar ilk, but over the past fifteen years it has become a dynamic hub for a dense concentration of fiercely independent musical voices. From humble beginnings and tiny numbers, the close-knit community has grown and thrived,Continue reading “The New Sounds of Lebanon”