Ballads from a Bedpost
On a brisk fall afternoon in October, about two dozen people hunkered down in the intimate main room of Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio. They watched some of the city’s more [...]
Sound notes
inspires recipes for radical art
Quatuor Bozzini is poetry, sweat, talent, idealism, determination, love, survival, fate, and a wonderful wild dance with the spirits. For fifteen years, the Montreal ensemble has steadfastly [...]
Margaret Noble's Safer Is Better
First-place winner of the Musicworks 2013 Electronic Music Composition Contest
With an underground club DJ’s flair for performance and a conceptual artist’s commitment to the rigorous investigation of ideas, San Diego interdisciplinary artist [...]
The Blessed Riders of Streetcars in Vienna
First-place winner of Musicworks’ 2013 Sonic Geography Writing Contest
Streetcars in Vienna are blessedly quiet. The machines—brand new, high-tech plastic platforms—announce themselves on approach with only a slight electric hum. I now react to their [...]
Songs in the key of geography
What can sound tell us about a place? Listen to British Columbia, and it might sound something like Music from the New Wilderness, a multimedia performance work that conjures B.C.’s past [...]
Healing Power Records Hits Toronto With a Sonic Balm
The last place you’d expect to hear a comprehensive showcase of a modern experimental music community is on a dance mix. But with Heart of Toronto, a 2013 CD and download compilation, [...]
Features
Tanya Tagaq Grabs The World By The Throat
Watching Tanya Tagaq perform is more than just an auditory and visual experience: it’s physical. As the Nunavut-born, Manitoba-based throat singer moves around a stage, she[...]
Victor Gama builds a brave new soundworld
Wherever Victor Gama plays, you can be sure clusters of people will be jostling to percuss the upturned metal bowls of his tipaw (so called because the surface of the instrument[...]
Nate Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain
AMPLIFIES THE HUMAN CONDITION
Jump into an early version of Nate Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain, and you land in dark and turbulent, almost infernal terrain. Sounds are dense and blur into one another[...]
Mark Molnar’s alternative trajectories
(excerpt from "Outside the Chamber: Sean McCann, Mark Molnar and Jonathan Pfeffer Play by their Own Rules"
Harrowingly unbridled and unpredictable, yet blatantly meticulous in their construction, Mark Molnar’s compositions frequently emerge as rugged tangles of bowed-string sonorities. Even though[...]
Reviews
Harry Partch’s Delusion of the Fury.
Performed by Ensemble musikFabrik at The Ruhrtriennale: International Festival of the Arts, Bochum, Germany. August 23, 2013.