Musicworks turns 40 this year. It’s been quite a journey from the DIY newsprint tabloid published in 1978 to Musicworks 130—our first-ever full-colour issue! Buy the print issue (or print+CD combo) from our shop, or start your subscription today. On the Cover Montreal guitarist, oud player, and composer Sam Shalabi has been active across a diversityContinue reading “What’s Inside Musicworks 130?”
Genre Archives
Sam Shalabi’s Land of Kush. Sand Enigma.
Sam Shalabi’s musical worlds are a collision of the Montreal Mile End art–noise–rock–improv scene and the bona fide craziness of Cairo—a city where societal and political instability weaves a shifting sand of death and beauty. It’s easy to see how the effect of these two influences have thoroughly permeated Shalabi’s take on the world, withContinue reading “Sam Shalabi’s Land of Kush. Sand Enigma.”
Kamancello explores a new duo dimension
“Kamanche means little bow in Kurdish and Farsi,” says Shahriyar Jamshidi, the kamanche player in Kamancello, his Toronto-based duo with cellist Raphael Weinroth-Browne. The pair marry rich lyricism and microtonal ornamentation, influenced by Iranian, classical, and metal musics, in fully improvised performances that feel their way forward from quiet drones to chugging, propulsive rhythms, andContinue reading “Kamancello explores a new duo dimension”
Paul Dolden. Histoires d’histoires.
Paul Dolden is a maximalist’s maximalist, combining literally hundreds of simultaneous acoustic tracks of standard orchestral instruments, augmented with rock drums and guitars and spiced with exotic instruments. So great is the attention paid to the minutest detail of each track that, in fractal-like fashion, there seems to be equal complexity no matter how deeplyContinue reading “Paul Dolden. Histoires d’histoires.”
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”
Dálava explores the landscape of song
On a summer evening, outside this art gallery-cum-coffeehouse somewhere on the Gulf Islands, silver-green alders, not yet dry and summer-drab, sway, as deer graze in a meadow beyond, and small birds sing. Inside, a young couple performs. Julia Ulehla has spurned the venue’s microphone and is keening deep into the timber-framed space with a voiceContinue reading “Dálava explores the landscape of song”
Gong Punks and Culture Bombs
Gentle and intense, soothing and exhilarating, traditional Filipino kulintang music provides the kind of richly immersive experience that makes an hour go by in what seems like a minute. The intertwining, hypnotic rhythms of its gongs and drums rise and fall as the players change tempos and improvise together over repeating patterns to create aContinue reading “Gong Punks and Culture Bombs”
GONGS ARE US
My childhood memories of gongs in action are mostly associated with entertainment spectacles: snooze-interrupting crashes at symphony matinees, the bare-chested Gongman swinging a mallet in the Rank Organisation’s film logo, a minor celebrity banishing a contestant on The Gong Show. But during those years—thanks to my globetrotting grandparents, and the photos they took and LPsContinue reading “GONGS ARE US”
Summer 2017
The Piano and Erhu Project Expands the Repertoire
“Let’s begin with a short history of this instrument,” says Nicole Ge Li, in a video shot at the Vancouver offices of the Canadian Music Centre. She’s speaking to a roomful of composers, gathered there to learn more about writing for PEP (Piano and Erhu Project), her joint undertaking with the man who’s just introducedContinue reading “The Piano and Erhu Project Expands the Repertoire”