EDITOR'S NOTES, FALL 2020
This issue of Musicworks comes preloaded with guitars. Hollow, heavy, bowed, cracked, pedalled, flung. Trusty companions. Feedback demons. Easy to pick up, hard to put down. While I do not [...]
Sound notes
Aidan Baker’s Ambient Autonomy
Over the past twenty years, Berlin-based Canadian guitarist and composer Aidan Baker has developed a creative rhythm, using his guitar as a gateway to seemingly disparate sounds and marrying [...]
Eliza Kavtion’s Call and Response
BEAUTY IN CONFUSION
In her spellbinding live show, Montreal-based multi-instrumentalist Eliza Kavtion twists threads from documentary films, punk-rock distortion, and hip-hop innovation together with her wailing, [...]
C. Diab’s Cascadian Guitar Music
NOTES FROM THE HAPPY PLACE
Vancouver-based bowed guitarist Caton Diab (who composes as C. Diab) makes sonorous music that you feel deeply. Primarily crafted on an acoustic guitar with a pickup, effects pedals, a loop [...]
A message from the Musicworks Board of Directors
Originally published in the Fall 2020 issue
The Board of Directors of Musicworks acknowledges that the new and experimental music scenes covered in the magazine are built on a foundation of systemic racism, and that through our content we [...]
Features
AN INEXHAUSTIBLE SOURCE OF WILD MUSIC
The Fall 2020 issue comes preloaded with guitars. Hollow, heavy, bowed, cracked, pedalled, flung. Trusty companions. Feedback demons. Easy to pick up, hard to put down . . . just like[...]
Casey Koyczan Resonates the Future
SPACE EXPLORATION
In early July 2020 it was my pleasure to interview Tlicho Dene interdisciplinary artist Casey Koyczan. He is extremely generous and open. I have done my best to represent our[...]
An Inexhaustible Source of Wild Music
In the 1970s, electronic music studios at the University of Toronto and McGill University sparked exciting ideas in guitar composition. With a focus on the evolution of Canadian works for guitar[...]
GESSO MUSIC
How do you think and write about sound outside of metaphor? Is music necessarily tethered to other aspects of our sensuous and interior lives? Or can we appreciate its meaning[...]
Susan Alcorn’s Vibrant Deviations
PEDAL STEEL GOES AVANT-GARDE
Susan Alcorn moves through life in methodical motion, a few beats slower than the usual rapid flow. At the 2020 edition of Toronto’s Women From Space festival, held in mid March,[...]
Visions of sound
REMOTE POSSIBILITIES
Arkora, a Toronto-based electric, vocal, chamber consort, includes an eight-voice choir and an accompanying ensemble, with irresistible composer bait—the Lumiphone. A giant, three-octave, [...]
Reviews
Mark Miller. Of Stars and Strings: A Biography of Sonny Greenwich.
Tellwell Talent.