Featured Articles
Three Literary Field Recordings I. White Fang, Chapter I[1] A vast silence reigned over the land on every side was the silence, pressing upon them with a tangible presence a faint far cry arose on the still air. It soared upward with a swift rush, till it reached its topmost[...] Read more
The Spatial Sonic Designs of Juro Kim Feliz Genres can be compared to landscapes: they are places where people gawk like tourists, set up camp on Spotify playlists, and explore musical structures. Juro Kim Feliz sat down with me in November 2021 to talk about the challenges of creating in both the Filipino and the Canadian[...] Read more
Kyle Brenders It’s 1999. The millennium is approaching, and Kyle Brenders, teenage saxophonist, is living the small-town Ontario version of the jazz life. He’s a member of the Bill Sherry Big Band, playing vintage swing tunes for dancers in the St. Thomas municipal arena, decades-old tunes[...] Read more
Nate Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain 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: trumpet amplified to distortion levels; prerecorded tape of unidentifiable noises; dense, rapid drumming of[...] Read more
Markus Floats' Motion Emotion 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 more essentially—as energy and dynamics, waves and reverberation? These questions come up around the work of[...] Read more
Scenocosme's Kymapetra FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY The title Kymapetra is a combination of two ancient Greek words, kyma meaning a wave or vibration, and petra, which means stone. Every stone is forged by time—broken, polished, composite, or fossilized—and each has a[...] Read more
David Psutka Augments Creative Spaces In 2019, David Psutka was approached by Karen Vanderborght to compose the soundtrack for her augmented reality documentary Grey Matter AR, which she had started developing a few years earlier. Vanderborght, who describes herself as an extended reality (XR) creative, had begun by filming[...] Read more
Colin Stetson's Sound Story Stories in which the protagonist blossoms, finds themselves, or rediscovers their roots appear everywhere. Their ubiquity makes it awfully tempting to replicate this narrative when telling the story of a solo artist who has arrived at a uniquely focused sound world. Yet sometimes it’s more[...] Read more
Camino De Santiago De Compostela FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY In the spring of 2010 we undertook a walk to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, a pilgrimage site since the Middle Ages. It’s the traditional burial site of Santiago, or St. James, one of Christ’s apostles who[...] Read more
What's Inside Musicworks 150 ON THE COVER Maylee Todd Maylee Todd has made a practice of embracing everything, especially when it comes to crafting a uniquely weird aesthetic—such as her busy digital avatar Maloo—out of[...] Read more
What's Inside Musicworks 151? ON THE COVER Rémy Bélanger de Beauport Rémy Bélanger de Beauport’s roots run deep in Quebec City, where he grew up and is now an activator in the city’s improvised music scene. An artist, cellist, and improviser, he creates communities of[...] Read more
Nicole Lizée I asked Nicole Lizée, newly commissioned to compose a work to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of John Cage’s birth, if she has ever before composed with that iconic artist in mind. How could she not? She is, after all, known for her nonstandard use of instruments, prepared[...] Read more
