musicworks

Issue 100 spring 2008Musicworks Issue 99 - WINTER 2007

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 FEATURE ARTICLES

Spatial Music
By Jordan Nobles

Article Summary:
The Redshift Music Society has been presenting spatial-acoustic concerts in Vancouver, BC since 2004. One of its most successful events is the annual Vertical Orchestra concert, which fills the atrium of the coliseum-like Vancouver Public Library with sounds emanating from the many levels of balconies. Building on a tradition that has its roots in the Italian Renaissance, Redshift continually seeks out venues whose architectural and acoustical properties will inspire composers to create something out of the ordinary. Redshift’s public events are designed to reach a public that might not normally be exposed to new music. Unlike a traditional ticketed audience in a concert hall, an impromptu audience is formed by chance passersby, who experience the music from within and are free to move into, through and out of the space at any time. Having composed dozens of spatial works and co-presented a number of Redshift seasons, society founder and co-artistic director Jordan Nobles shares his ideas and experiences on the rewards and challenges facing producers, composers, and performers of spatial-acoustic music.

Jem Finer
By Matt Rogalsky

Article Summary:
Jem Finer is a multidisciplinary artist based in London, England. His work extends from songwriting and banjo playing with The Pogues, to conceptual sound installations. In this article, based on an interview by Matt Rogalsky in 2006, Finer discusses the broad range of his interests and the evolution of several major projects, including The Centre of the Universe, created as artist in residence in the department of astrophysics at the University of Oxford, Longplayer, a thousand-year-long composition which began playing at the turn of the millenium, and Score for a Hole in the Ground, a “post-digital” sound installation which responds to environmental conditions. The article, in Jem Finers’s words, drawn from discussions with Matt Rogalsky, demonstrates the breadth of Finer’s interests and abilities and his inspiring embrace of the experimental.

Diane Labrosse
By Richard Simas

Article Summary:
Over the last twenty-five years, Montreal musician, composer, improviser, and multi-faceted artistic collaborator, Diane Labrosse has explored a broad range of new-music projects via concerts, recordings, and installations. She is one of the artistic directors of the dynamic concert series Productions SuperMusique. From her beginnings with the highly political feminist bands Wondeur Brass, Les Poules, and Justine, through her ongoing creations with Michel F. Côté and Martin Tétreault, Labrosse continues to open doors on sound meaning and aesthetics through a variety of approaches. She is much sought after as a sound designer for stage and installation creations. For those projects as well as her own concerts and recordings her instrument is a Roland Sampler SP808. Both witty and poetic, Labrosse’s projects are often organized around a tightly structured concept that she then diverts, deconstructs, and expands, until discovering the musical and evocative world that she desires. Whether on tour with an improvisation duo, composing for a new-music chamber ensemble or a symphony of ship horns in the Old Port of Montreal, communication is foremost among her intentions. She leads her listener to unknown places, revealing unique music experiences.

Dynasty of Dissonance
By Donald Brackett

Article Summary:
When it comes to contemporary art, music, and culture, where are we and how did we get here? Whatever happened to all those lofty classical ideals about beauty and proportion, absolute truth, and the sublime? Oh yes: the twentieth century happened. In that century, a new kind of aesthetic, the aesthetic of noise, entered the picture and altered the playing field forever. With its intertwined and radically altered art forms, its hyper-subjective stance and near solipsistic gloom, the modern age introduced us all to a new definition of art. The word modern itself, at least in terms of the average cultural consumer, has come to be synonymous with a heroic scale of audacity and sheer creative bravado for which those consumers are still only barely prepared. This article recounts an historic encounter between two great exponents of aesthetic dissonance, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, and also explores the practitioners of the kinds of conceptual art that these two precursors made possible. Three Canadian artists engaged in the drastically mixed-media work that Duchamp and Cage inspired are also introduced: Vessna Perunovich, Mimi Gellman, and Paula Braswell, each of whom use installation formats which include sound and music as a major component of their environments.

COMMENTARY

The Untold Stories of So-Called World Music
By Nick Storring

In this first installment of “The Untold Stories of So-Called World Music,” cellist-composer Nick Storring discusses the impact of the marketing term World Music on the authenticity of recorded performances of non-Western music styles. He recounts his uncovering of a cryptic collection of old-fashioned Thai pop, and his subsequent discovery, while searching for more such music, of the identity of the singer. Along with that discovery, however, came a sense that a whole body of work had managed to fly under the Western music industry’s radar—that in our current the-world-is-getting-smaller-every-day era, we have been fooled about how easy it is to hear the actual music of the world.

Mitchell Akiyama – the Navigator of Ambiences
By Max Ritts

Montreal-based electronic musician Mitchell Akiyama is a navigator of ambiences. His music makes use of appropriation and quotation in the course of explicit explorations of space, both real and imaginary, literal and referential. His work is heavily influenced by his curiosity and he explores possibilities on a whim, almost as if solving problems. In this article, Max Ritts explores Akiyama’s career, his pursuit of meaningful live electronic performances, his record label intr_version, and his involvement in the Montreal post-rave electronic music scene.

CD CONTENTS

Diane Labrosse
1 | Best Of 8:02
2 | Earth 7:01
3 | Unisson duet 3:28

Download MP3:

Diane Labrosse - Unisson Duet (excerpt)

Jem Finer
4 | Banjo Raga 3:56
5 | Cosmic Surf 3:48
6 | Longplayer 11:35
7 | from Score for a Hole in the Ground 1:51
8 | from Score for a Hole in the Ground 0:55
9 | from Score for a Hole in the Ground 1:08

Jordan Nobles
10 | Watermap 13:48

Download MP3:

Jordan Nobles - Watermap (excerpt)

Mitchell Akiyama
11 | The Uses of Fiction 13:31
Download MP3:

Mitchell Akiyama - The Uses of Fiction

Tasman Richardson
12 | Fantasycore 3:38
Download MP3:

Tasman Richardson - Fantasycore

REVIEWS

Events

Kyle Brenders on the X-Avant Festival in Toronto, Ontario
Sarah Weaver on the Guelph Jazz Festival in Guelph, Ontario
Richard Moule on the Electric Ecclectics Festival in Meadford, Ontario
Jerry Ozipko on the Winspiration Festival in Edmonton, Alberta
Stuart Broomer on Jazz em Agosto in Lisbon, Portugual
Kevin Filipski on Buffalo in June in Buffalo, New York
Gregory Preston on The Deep Wireless Festival in Toronto, Ontario
Emily Hall on The Montreal New Music International Festival in Montreal, Quebec

Recordings

The All Ear Trio on Ninth Word Music
Alog on Rune-Grammofon
Amado, Zingaro, Ulrich, and Filiano on European Echos
Barbara Benary on New Word Records
Nagel, Bernstein, Akchote, and Jones on hatOLOGY
The Bruce Eisenbeil Sextet on Nemu
John Butcher and Paul Nilsssen-Love on Clean Feed
Sten Sandell Trio & John Butcher on Clean Feed
Warren Burt on XI Recordings
Eugene Chadbourne & Andrea Centazzo on Ictus
The Andrea Centazzo Mitteleuropa Orchestra on Ictus
Guido Mazzon & Andrea Centazzo on Ictus
The Guido Mazzon Sextet on Ictus
Aldo Clementi on Content SAK
Philip Corner on New World
Michael Fahres on Cold Blue Music
Ganelin Trio Priority on NotTwo Records
Fabian Gisler on hatOLOGOY
Malcolm Goldstein & Barre Phillips on Bab-Ili
Les Klebs on Ouïe/Dire Productions
Steve Lacy & The Roswell Rudd Quartet on Cuneiform
The Lori Freedman 3 on Actuelle
Urs Leimgruber on Leo
Mersault on Formed Records
Kaffe Matheews, Martin Tétreault, & Leon Lo on Oral
John Raskin on Rastascan
Matt Rogalsky on XI Records
Satoko Fujii-Yoh Ensemble on Victo
Philip Thomas on Bruce’s Fingers


Words

Andy Hamilton. Music and Aesthetics. (Continuum)
Leigh Landy. Understanding the Art of Sound Organization. (MIT Press)


VISIONS OF SOUND
Tasman Richardson and Jawa Video Music by Duncan Rodger