Featured Articles
Casey Koyczan Resonates the Future In early July 2020 it was my pleasure to interview Tlicho Dene interdisciplinary artist Casey Koyczan. He is extremely generous and open. I have done my best to represent our conversation in order for readers to discover and understand his creative practices. Focusing on the Northwest[...] Read more
New Age Music—The Second Wave I’m lying on the living-room floor. I’ve been like this for two hours, on my back, in the dark, headphones on. The record on the turntable is literally locked in its groove and producing a low-note drone that at times sounds like a whale’s moan or some sort of detuned,[...] Read more
Matt Rogalsky It’s supposed to be beautiful, but I can’t shake the feeling of there being something ominous about this. Imagine you’re approaching an installation by Matt Rogalsky, and down the hall you hear whispers of . . . what? something you recognize—or do you?[...] Read more
Tenzier: History Outside the Margins “There’s a group of students who used a term I really liked: countermemory,” Tenzier founder Eric Fillion tells me over Skype from Montreal. “I almost like that better than counterculture.” He’s talking about Tenzier, the avant-garde label which has put[...] Read more
Aaron Oppenheim’s October 12, 2014 (excerpt) October 12, 2014 (excerpt) is a recording of a live performance held in New York City on October 12, 2014 as part of ABC No Rio’s COMA Series, which presents experimental and improvised music. “This piece uses samples of voice for all of its material, manipulated in real time[...] Read more
Linda Bouchard's Murderous Little World FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY Couple Linda Bouchard’s vision and sound with poet Anne Carson’s texts, engage the talents of a host of collaborators, including extraordinary musicians Guy Few, Joseph Petric, and Eric Vaillancourt, give it all several[...] Read more
Havana, Cuba What does a city sound like whose history spans periods of colonial opulence, Mafia casino decadence, and a dying communist revolution? The habanera, the salsa, and reggaeton. Havana’s storied past has produced a musical culture as varied and deep as the sociopolitical eras that it has[...] Read more
The Audacious Artistry of Ig Henneman The year is 1979, and Ig Henneman is ready to rock. In pink zebra-print pants and a black tank top, she strikes a power pose on the stage of Amsterdam’s Paradiso. Her gold-painted Barcus-Berry electric viola glows in the spotlight. She is playing a Rock Against Racism show, flanked by[...] Read more
Saxophonist Karen Ng Sets The Scene THINK OF ANY STYLE OF MODERN saxophone playing, and chances are Toronto’s Karen Ng has done it, and done it beautifully. Her tone can be eerily high and pure, rich and fluid, deep and mellow, alluringly tender or startlingly abrasive. Her fingers fly in a dazzling, exuberant run, then[...] Read more
A message from the Musicworks Board of Directors The Board of Directors of Musicworks acknowledges that the new and experimental music scenes covered in the magazine are built on a foundation of systemic racism, and that through our content we have facilitated and upheld that system. Musicworks is a long-standing publication dedicated to[...] Read more
Rachael Wadham: Installing A Quiet Sound-World FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY The work of Vancouver-based sound artist, improviser, and composer Rachael Wadham often hinges upon a certain pack-rat sensibility, with sounds scavenged from mundane, remote, or even derelict sources, squirrelled away with humble[...] Read more
The Musical Colours of Dominique Fils-Aimé On the 2004 live-concert recording Tour de Force, the renowned American poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron introduces his 1981 song “Is That Jazz?”: “Go to your record store . . . look at the bottom shelf, you will find a box called miscellaneous. We are miscellaneous. We[...] Read more
