Micheline Roi
In Praise Of Spectacle It’s October, and that means that Torontonians have just survived another annual, all-night, bacchanalian, contemporary-art binge called Nuit Blanche. Once a year, on the last Saturday in September, contemporary art in all its forms is brought free of charge to the Toronto public, from...
Change Is Coming, You Can Hear It In The Streets On a recent trip to Montreal I encountered one of the most exciting pieces of new music I had heard in a long time. The sound came quietly at first, a distant pointillistic, tinny gesture. Granular synthesis? The mixing was superb, from niente to loud surround-sound and back again. At its...
From Totalitarianism To Democracy: Wonderful Bad Taste Comes To Experimental Music Good taste is totalitarian. The art critics, curators, and editors that create taste’s laws also enact those laws; their opinions influence what gets seen and read by the audience. Experimental music operates under it’s own totalitarian regime. Educators, artistic directors, and...
Writer's Block, Coming To An Artist Near You Writer’s block. Google it: 14,100,000 results; it’s popular. Not a problem solely for writers, it could aptly be named creator’s block. Anyone trying to render an idea out of nothingness knows writer’s block’s terrifying implications—missed deadlines, lost...
Alt-Experimental, New Music's Fragmented Future “There’s nothing wrong with pretty music.” Jonathan Bunce—author of this issue’s feature on Canada’s new pop adventurists—is talking with me about the twenty-one-year-old singer–songwriter known as Grimes. Her song “Crystal Ball,”...
Craft, Fearlessness, And Imagination Meet Technology We are sitting in a darkened theatre watching a global collective of musicians making new music. But there’s no one on stage. Instead, we are looking at and listening to an audiovisual projection of the performers playing telematically through an online three-dimensional virtual-...
Creating Truth To Power Sound is territory. Birds know it, young men in boom cars know it, and the U.S. military’s Psychological Operations Company knows it. So when it was announced that the integrated security unit charged with enforcing the law during the G20 meetings in Toronto last June could chose to...
Turn On, Tune In, But Don’t Turn Down Imagine you are walking down a crowded street, or say, sitting on public transit, or maybe even waiting in a public place for an appointment. Now close your eyes. What do you hear? Chances are, you will hear, bleeding through the ambient background noise in this imagined scenario, a...
Radio Is Dead! Long Live Radio! I received my first radio at the age of ten. Battery-powered and small enough to be handheld, it had an antenna long enough to pick up signals in my southern Ontario bedroom from exotic downtown Detroit. It arrived in my life on Christmas Day as a present from my Uncle Ted. I still remember...