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Issue 102 winter 2008Musicworks Issue 102 - Winter 2008

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 FEATURE ARTICLES

YVAT
By Sabine Bürger and Tim Beeb

Article Summary:
In this interview by the visual artists Tim Beeby and Sabine Bürger, Romanian electronic musician Yvat discusses the cultural changes in Romania since the fall of Communism, with particular reference to the experimental music scene, Yvat’s personal development through his early years and in his working methods, and the influence classical music has had on his work. Yvat has worked both with other musicians and with various visual artists, and the interview continues with a discussion of some of the many collaborations in which he has participated.

Jody Redhage
By Christian Carey

Article Summary
Jody Redhage is a new music dynamo, active as a chamber musician, bandleader, composer, teacher, and solo performer. But it is her work as a singing cellist that has distinguished Redhage in the New York new music community, which is becoming increasingly geographically diffuse and stylistically catholic. With her groups Fire in July and Y Trio, her recording All Summer in a Day, and a continuing commissioning project, Redhage is cultivating a growing repertoire of indie art song that breaches genre boundaries and makes for stirring listening.

Robin Minard
By Micheline Roi

Article Summary:
Robin Minard is a Canadian composer and installation artist living, working, and teaching in Weimar, Germany. His work over the last twenty years focuses on how to recontextualize listeners' perception of the environment, how to work with sound in space, and how to work with musical form in public spaces. In dealing with these questions he forms elegant and original answers somewhere between sound art and acoustic design. His work is also imbued with a visual sensibility, with technology used to mimic the natural world: piezo loudspeakers appearing as plant forms and blue plexiglass evoking water. The visual aspect of his work earned him the 1996 Brandenburg Prize for Visual Arts. In this article, Minard discusses the influences and processes that inform the creation of his distinctive installations.

Linda Catlin Smith
By Christopher Butterfield

Article Summary:
In this interview with Christopher Butterfield, composer Linda C. Smith explains her approach to creation through her relationships with melody, harmony, and rhythm; time and form; and the history of Western music. She touches on her early life, the difficulties of notation, and the importance of music in the home. She mentions certain visual artists she feels a close affinity with, and draws analogies between their work in the visual sphere, and her own in music. Appended to the interview is an e-note she wrote as an afterthought to the interview, in which she speculates on the idea of failure as a viable aesthetic stratagem.

PROFILE

I Have Eaten the City
By Glen Hall

Categorizing the music of I Have Eaten the City is pleasantly problematic. While the group’s performances are entirely improvised, the widely diverse influences that inform their playing and recordings result in an ever-changing and self-described “shape-shiftery” group identity. It is the process of convolving these varied influences—free jazz, ambient, noise, dance, contemporary chamber, Asian, African, free improv—that is their ever-evolving identity, not any one or two particular genres. The members of the Toronto improvising trio—saxophonist and guitarist Colin Fisher, cellist and laptoppist Nick Storring, and percussionist Brandon Valdivia—first met at the Kitchener-Waterloo Racket Festival in 2005. All three musicians are fully aware of how their music is differently perceived—sometimes positively, sometimes not—by audiences from different musical demographics (indie, noise, free jazz, etc.). IHETC defy categorization and thwart expectations, not out of contrariness but because their creativity simply, delightfully, doesn’t let them get into any one musical rut.

COMMENTARY

So-Called World Music: I hear a new world
By Nick Storring
This second instalment of “The Untold Stories of So-Called World Music” (the first appeared in Musicworks 100) focuses on a handful of labels and Web outlets from the Western world that have opted for a different path in the curation of non-Western musics. Among them are the Sublime Frequencies label, Terp Records, Yaala Yaala, and Crammed Discs, each of which has, in their own way, put the aesthetic of the music first and pushed anthropological authenticity into the background. They also serve as a showcase for forms of music that have been neglected in various ways.

SONIC GEOGRAPHY

Ken Waxman in Bologna

CD CONTENTS

YVAT
1 | Abeam 3:39
Download MP3:
YVAT - Abeam excerpt (2.2MB)
2 | Ablution 3:00
3 | Frozen Grass (live version) 5:25


ED OSBORN
4 | Flying Machines 4:20


JODY REDHAGE
5 | Paint Box 7:04
6 | Of Minutiae and Memory 6:39

Download MP3
Jody Redhage - Of Minutiae and Memory (2.2MB) excerpt

LINDA CATLIN SMITH
7 | Dirt Road #6 2:59
8 | Dirt Road #11 1:58
9 | Dirt Road #13 1:50
10 | Dirt Road #12 4:07


ROBIN MINARD
11 | Music for Quiet Spaces 15:50

Download MP3:
Robin Minard - Music for Quiet Spaces (2.0MB) excerpt

I HAVE EATEN THE CITY
12 | Feral Geography I & II (excerpt/extraits) 15:02

Download MP3:
I have eaten the city - 12 | Feral Geography I & II (excerpt/extraits) (2.0MB)


REVIEWS


Events

Richard Moule on Electric Eclectics in Meaford, ON
Ken Waxman on The Vision Festival in NYC
Kevin Filipski on June in Buffalo
Brian Kurt Seeger on Suoni Per Il Popolo in Montreal
Max Ritts on SoundaXis in Toronto
Ken Waxman on the Schaffhauser Jazzfestival in Schaffhausen, Switzerland
Stuart Broomer on FIMAV in Victoriaville, QC
Christopher Reiche on Voice ++ in Victoria, BC


Recordings

Ryan Driver on Rat-Drifting
Blondy/Lehn on Another Timbre
Brochard/Guionnet/Perraud on In situ
Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath on Cuneiform
Daniel Levin Quartet on HatHut
Lisle Ellis on Henceforth
Evangelista on Constellation
The ESP label
Feuermusik on Standard Form
Freedman/Thomson on Barnyard
Jörgensmann/Oleś on HatHut
Veronika Krausas on Vera Ikon Productions
Licht/Onda on Family Vineyard
Francisco López on GD Stereo
Miller/Coxhill on Cuneiform
The Necks on ReR Megacorp
Larry Ochs and Rova and Metalanguage
Penderecki String Quartet on Centrediscs
Prism Quartet on Innova
The Stone Quartet on Downtown Music Gallery



Words

Dave Clark, How to Conduct…Yourself! (The Improviser’s Woodshed).
Steve Dalachinsky, et al, Logos and Language: A Post-Jazz Metaphorical Dialogue (RogueArt).
Elisabeth V. Stubley, ed, Compositional Crossroads: Music, McGill, Montreal. (McGill-Queen’s University Press).
Jeremy Yudkin, Miles Davis, Miles Smiles, and the Invention of Post-Bop (Indiana University Press).


VISIONS OF SOUND
Flying Machines by Ed Osborn