The Cluster Festival has been a captivating presence on the Winnipeg experimental music scene since 2009. Directed by Ashley Au—a musician, composer, and arts worker active across multiple mediums and genres—the thoughtfully curated festival emphasizes collective creation and the integration of art and technology. The 2025 program brought together local and visiting talent to nurture communities and modes of expression that are curious, courageous, and at times gloriously absurd.
Toronto sound artist SlowPitchSound, a pioneer of sci-fi-turntablism and a generous mentor, opened with a tour of his set-up, which included a turntable, drum machine, mixer, and effects unit. The overhead camera that provided a close view of his nimble hands also provided a creative means of introducing each movement of the largely improvised work. Textured materials and scraps of paper inscribed with titles like “Pollination” and “Tree Knowledge” were placed on the turntable in the camera’s zoomed-in view to divide the performance and underscore the environmental motifs introduced by way of recorded birdsong and facts about trees. That evening’s program also included the soft launch of bingenTV, an installation by Sophie Seita and Naomi Woo centred on a wonderfully queer and kooky fictitious gardening show.
The next day, Vancouver-based interdisciplinary artist Jami Reimer performed her bio-acoustic composition Soft Tongues, which interwove ethereal singing with the recorded voices of both frogs and humans, guiding listeners through an operatic swampscape alive with amphibious noise and beguiling lyrical content (“a tiny coin / a little token / I’d rather be devoured than broken”). This was followed by Dirge, a dance work co-created by Chilean musician and producer Los Dias Floreados and beloved local artists Rayannah—a prolific beat-maker and looping artist—and Carol-Ann Bohrn, a contemporary dancer and choreographer. Accompanied by a hypnotic undulating drone from two keyboardists, Bohrn alternated between painfully slow movements and madly whirling frenzies in a tortured dance with a thin mattress. The ensemble’s vision of a work that, as the program note states, “confronts the paradox of stagnation and spiralling” was well expressed in Bohrn’s motions, as she gripped the flimsy prop with fond desperation or flung it away in torment. The dance could also be interpreted as evoking the stops and false starts of chronic illness or, at its most relatable level, conveying a deeply conflicted relationship with rest.
A couple of days later was the premiere of The River Between, a composition by Olivier Macharia for himself and Eamon Sheil on baritone and alto sax, respectively, which combines beats, looping, and synth. The players developed a compelling soundscape that primed the audience for the mesmerizing second act, a super-duo comprising beloved Canadian indie musician Zoon—coiner of the genre term “moccasin-gaze”—and American multi-instrumentalist Laraaji, a creative mystic and past Brian Eno collaborator. The night featured an array of rare instruments—harmonium, Omnichord, tape machine, wood flute (Zoon), and zither (Laraaji)— played with drum brushes, dulcimer mallets, EBow, and fingers. Laraaji’s transcendent musicianship elevated Zoon’s already uplifting dreampop vibes into sacred sonic spaces.
By far the most whimsical offering of the festival was the Quigital Corporate Retreat, created by Montreal’s Architek Percussion and the Quigital artist collective. The event centred on a “voluntary” (mandatory) employee compliance training program—a bizarre and engaging hodgepodge of corporate ideology delivered by singer Sarah Albu with theatrical zeal. Rife with motivational clichés—“If you’re on time, you’re late!”—the show quickly descended, hilarious and cultlike, into a series of prayers and appeals to an omnipotent entity guiding the unseen hand of commerce—“Protect our family: our consumers!” Albu beseeched, and “Give thanks for the synergy of our vision!”
The competent crew of percussionists were sometimes cast as typists—beat-making via the clicky ends of pens, writing utensils tapped against mugs, and typewriter-like sample pads—and at other times acted as Albu’s backing band, equipped with mallet instruments, drums, bass, and keyboard to craft songs that remained rebelliously interesting even while cleverly referencing the inane sinewave stock music favoured by large corporations for being utterly benign.
A true exercise in mixed media, the immersive experience allowed the employees (audience) to participate via a website, accruing points by meeting co-workers, purchasing promotions, and sending each other absurdist messages generated by artificial intelligence (“Ava, your email is frankly perplexing and hardly constructive. It’s astonishing to see you misinterpret the situation”). The retreat expertly and energetically parodied both the manic emptiness of corporate culture and the banal inhumanity of AI.
While our tasks were exercises in futility, the event itself highlighted, even in its satire, the sense of community underlying the facetious networking that occurred throughout the venue. Faces that had become vaguely familiar over the course of the fest were now scanned into our phones, and longtime friends found much within the goofy activity checklist to delight in together.
Cluster is, at its heart, a community—one which values playfulness, experimentation, and collaboration. As Winnipeg’s avant-garde scene continues to shift and evolve, incorporating new technologies and engaging with new ideas and issues, Cluster will exist to bring artists and audiences together to share in moments of wonder, intrigue, and beauty, and even to be called in for a collective performance review and exuberantly pronounced “FIRED.”
AVA GLENDINNING is a Winnipeg-based musician, writer, and editor. She reviews music for Cups N Cakes, has contributed to Reductress, and published her first novel, Bukowski’s Broken Family Band, in 2024. She plays guitar with her indie trio Bicycle Face and other groups and works as the managing editor for CV2 Magazine.