Featured Articles
Sarah Peeble`s Audio Bee Booth FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY Pollination Wunder Station is a wunderkammer—cabinet of curiosities—full of fascinating living things. The piece is part habitat interpretation, part bio art, part sound installation, and part sculpture. It is one in a[...] Read more
What's Inside Musicworks 149? ON THE COVER Brendan Grey and the Evolving Ethos of Super Duty Tough Work As Winnipeg hip-hop ensemble Super Duty Tough Work (SDTW) hits the ten-year mark, founder and MC Brendan Grey, sits down with writer Abiola Regan to talk about tapping in to his family’s[...] Read more
Backward Music What function do record labels fulfill in an era of streaming and algorithmic music discovery? What do labels offer artists and listeners when the means of music access and distribution are changing at a rapid clip? Kyle Cunjak, who is a musician and the owner-operator of[...] Read more
Meet the Winners of the 2023 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest TORONTO, CANADA, April 22, 2024: San Francisco-based composer Ningxin Zhang has won first prize for her composition Kagemusha: for Pipa and Electronics. “I am deeply honoured to have received the first prize in the 2023 Musicworks Electronic Music[...] Read more
The Musical Lightness of Éric Normand The world of improvised music has spawned a core of musician–organizers who have built scenes and networks and record labels to support and extend the music. Few, however, have achieved what Éric Normand has, creating a hotbed of free improvisation in the relatively isolated[...] Read more
Giulia Regini's NeOnSound Italian composer Giulia Regini’s NeOnSound is the winner of the 2021 Marcelle Deschênes Prize in Electronic Music, as selected by the jury of Musicworks’ 2021 Electronic Music Composition Contest. “NeOnSound is an audiovisual composition inspired by Dan Flavin's[...] Read more
Jairus Sharif and the Expression of Truth Jairus Sharif believes in the transformative power of music. On his debut album, Water & Tools, the thirty-three-year-old multi-instrumentalist constructs dense, impassioned improvisations that fuse the murky beatscapes of underground hip-hop with the scorching intensity of free jazz.[...] Read more
Buffy Sainte-Marie reflects on Illuminations “God is alive / Magic is afoot / Alive is afoot / Magic never died.” Those words, written by Leonard Cohen and sung by Buffy Sainte-Marie, open a doorway into the mystical world of Illuminations—one of the most musically beguiling, technologically[...] Read more
Cris Derksen enhances her sonic adventure Some musicians fall in love with an instrument at a very young age and never look back; others experiment with many different ones before they find the ideal match for their talents. Cris Derksen is one of the latter. As a child, she first wanted to play flute, then saxophone, then double[...] Read more
Trauma of My Mouth In the spring of 2018, Chinese archeologists announced that they’d unearthed a four-thousand-year-old collection of jaw harps (kouxian in Chinese) at the Shimao ruins, a prehistoric site in Shenmu City in northwest China’s Shaanxi Province. These artifacts,[...] Read more
Roscoe Mitchell and the Montreal-Toronto Art Orchestra The year 2017 is being widely celebrated as the centenary of jazz, marked by the hundredth anniversary of the music’s first recordings, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s “Livery Stable Blues” and “Dixie Jass Band One Step.” Jazz began as a spontaneous,[...] Read more
Artificiel’s "Three Pieces With Titles" “I had never seen such new things before. I didn’t even know what a new object could be,” the poet and art critic André Salmon wrote, after visiting the studio of Pablo Picasso in the spring of 1914. Of particular interest to Salmon was Guitar, a wall-mounted 3-D[...] Read more
