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 of residential schools on families and the ripples of consequence across succeeding generations, and the music carries all the emotional weight that that implies. The EP is divided into five intense, atmospheric tracks on which McKiver bows and plucks the viola, sometimes looping it and adding electronic effects, drawing a vast range of sounds and emotions out of the instrument. Sometimes employing thick, solid tones, sometimes eerie interwoven layers, and sometimes flighty, wispy or rapid-fire passages, McKiver creates a world of anxiety, fear, anger, and determination, with repetitive, hypnotic cycles and cresting waves of music that is as heart-wrenching as it is beautiful.
Mary Dickie is a Toronto music and arts journalist whose work has been published in a variety of different publications over the past couple of decades, including Impact, Eye Weekly, Maclean’s, ELLE Canada, The Toronto Sun, FASHION magazine and IN Toronto. She is also a member of the Polaris Music Prize jury.