Reviews
Colin Stetson. The Love It Took to Leave You. Virtuoso saxophone player Colin Stetson learned the art of circular breathing at fifteen and has been redefining the creative possibilities of instrument plus breath, body, and microphone ever since—recording solo albums and movie and game soundtracks and performing with cohorts like[...] Read more
Juliet Palmer. Four Rooms. Field recordings are generally made outside, in the (more or less) great wide open, and only rarely inside a building, such as a house. On Four Rooms, Toronto-based composer Juliet Palmer brings the two modes together, moving back and forth between them, sometimes blending them into[...] Read more
Peggy Lee & Cole Schmidt. Forever Stories of: Moving Parties. Vancouver-based cellist Peggy Lee and guitarist Cole Schmidt are two of the city’s most respected and prolific creative music artists. Their considerable talents easily span a dozen projects, including three they share, Sick Boss, Echo Painting, and their self-titled trio (which uses a[...] Read more
Emilie Cecilia LeBel. Landscapes Of Memory. In his “Anecdote of the Jar,” poet Wallace Stevens wrote of an object which, when placed on a hill in Tennessee, became an active focal point, imposing perceptual order upon the surrounding countryside. Imagine such an effective centre for attention being projected through time,[...] Read more
Andile Khumalo. Tracing Hollow Traces. Composer Andile Khumalo stretches a wide canvas of pan-culturalism in ways not immediately apparent in his music. Born in Durban, South Africa, in 1978, Khumalo moved to New York City to study spectral composition at Columbia University. That heady approach to writing music works with[...] Read more
Godspeed You! Black Emperor. NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD. I’ve never understood the connection between GY!BE’s politics and their music; their latest album leaves me more ambivalent than ever. The title, rendered in all caps with minimal punctuation, is surely meant to come off as confrontational and urgent, conveying essential[...] Read more
Sarah Davachi, Dicky Bahto. Music for a Bellowing Room. | Sarah Davachi. The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir. Sarah Davachi’s drones are unearthed from the deep. The Los Angeles-based Canadian composer’s pieces draw equally from the tenets of early music and La Monte Young-esque minimalism, blending ancient and modern into solemn meditations. Her latest two releases, Music for a[...] Read more
Yves Charuest. Out Into. Coleman Hawkins’ solo saxophone improvisation Picasso in 1948 was a unique event; it has since become a genre, expanded in turn by such creative voices as Eric Dolphy, Anthony Braxton, and Evan Parker, and emerging innovators like Sakina Abdou and Don Malfon. Québécois[...] Read more
Manuella Blackburn. Interruptions. John K. Samson of Winnipeg’s The Weakerthans once sang a plea (in the voice of a cat named Virtute) to “ask the things you shouldn’t miss / tape hiss and the modern man / cold war and card catalogs / to come join us if they can.” Those lines came to mind while I[...] Read more
X Avant XIX: TeXture. The glass walls of the Allan Gardens Children’s Conservatory did little to obscure a truth that had become evident to everyone packed in on a chilly Tuesday night in October: Fall had arrived, and with it total darkness by eight o’clock—that is, darkness subdued by the[...] Read more
The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century. Billed as the AGO’s “first hip-hop exhibit" in its 124th year of existence, The Culture can be viewed either as a cause for celebration—given hip-hop culture’s reign as the leading art form du jour—or as a source of embarrassment, given that this is hip-hop[...] Read more
Measha Brueggergosman-Lee. Zombie Blizzard. “There you have it: zombie.” Zombie Blizzard is the latest release from soprano Measha Brueggergosman-Lee, so I was surprised to hear novelist and poet Margaret Atwood’s deadpan croak upon pressing “play.” Each of these seven new settings composed by pianist[...] Read more