Reviews
Danielle Shlomit Sofer. Sex Sounds: Vectors of Difference in Electronic Music. Danielle Shlomit Sofer’s Sex Sounds sets the reader on the hunt for things missing in most discussions of electronic music: sex, sexuality, libidinal drive. Guided by Sofer, once we start looking for the missing element of sex in electronic music, we begin to see it everywhere.[...] Read more
Adriana Barton. Wired for Music: A Search for Health and Joy Through the Science of Sound. What happens to a person who spent their entire childhood and youth practising to be a professional musician and can no longer play? Adriana Barton, who took up the cello when she was five years old and had dreams of being a concert soloist, was forced to give it up when she developed soft[...] Read more
Paul Steinbeck. Sound Experiments: The Music of the AACM. The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) has been a guiding force in creative music since its inception in Chicago in 1965. Its membership has included a veritable who’s who of the jazz avant-garde scene, such as Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Roscoe[...] Read more
TAK Ensemble. Love, Crystal and Stone The terms vanity label or vanity press can carry a connotation of indulgence, even aggrandizement. Were all indulgences as grand as TAK Ensemble’s packaging of Ashkan Behzadi’s music, Mehrdad Jafari’s paintings, and the poetry of Federico García Lorca, however, we[...] Read more
Monica Pearce. Textile Fantasies Fabrics and music have an obviously sensuous connection: Think of weaving, texture, soft and strong qualities. Prince Edward Island-raised composer Monica Pearce, who is now based in the U.S., explores these links in her excellent debut album, Textile Fantasies, which features a cycle of[...] Read more
John Oswald. Classics from the Rascali Klepitoire I first met John Oswald as a fellow musician in Toronto’s new music, improv, and modern dance scenes of the 1970s; we co-launched Musicworks in 1978. By his own account, he began mashing up appropriated music on a home tape recorder as a teen. Since then, he’s explored and[...] Read more
Pauline Oliveros & James Ilgenfritz. Altamirage Pauline Oliveros is best known for her invention and development of Deep Listening, which in essence encouraged intense attention to all possible details of sound. While that can conjure relaxing tones and quiet drones, this highly entertaining recording bursts with wit and energy, exposing[...] Read more
No Hay Banda. I Had a Dream About This Place No Hay Banda, a commissioning group, presenter, and record label founded in Montreal in 2016, codifies their work in the Canadian experimental music scene on their adventurous debut album, I Had a Dream About This Place. The four-track record presents winding, texturally explorative pieces[...] Read more
Alice Ping Yee Ho. A Woman’s Voice Alice Ping Yee Ho is renowned in the Canadian music community for her elegant compositions that play inventively among dissonances, pleasing harmonies, and colours inspired by Chinese opera and folk music. Her new CD, A Woman’s Voice, draws together a number of her vocal works and[...] Read more
Marina Hasselberg. Red Ricercar Primo, by composer Domenico Gabrielli, opens Vancouver cellist Marina Hasselberg’s Red by dropping us into a hollow, windy atmosphere that feels a little like a haunted house. Her cello gradually enters with a Bach-like solo, resonant and a little forlorn, surrounded by[...] Read more
Robert Diack. Small Bridges With energized minimalism, Toronto drummer and synthesizer player Robert Diack reconstitutes fragments of other genres into this fourteen-track CD, using repetitive textures driven by his solid drum beats to create resourceful if somewhat claustrophobic pieces. With[...] Read more
Matt Choboter’s Hypnopompia. Sleep Inertia Aiming to portray hypnopompia—hallucinations that occur while waking up—Vancouver pianist Matt Choboter has created an eight-part auditory suite that turns subconscious dreamscapes into musical exploration. Featuring clarinetist François Houle, guitarist Jacob Wiens,[...] Read more