Featured Articles
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
Aidan Baker’s Ambient Autonomy Over the past twenty years, Berlin-based Canadian guitarist and composer Aidan Baker has developed a creative rhythm, using his guitar as a gateway to seemingly disparate sounds and marrying noise, krautrock, metal, drone, and free jazz in thrilling and unexpected ways. Through his[...] Read more
Gordan Monahan Gordon Monahan’s voice floats to me across the Internet from his farm, the Funny Farm, his home base in Meaford, Ontario. Monahan was recently awarded a 2013 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, and is already planning a series of installations for 2013,[...] 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
Avatar Orchestra Metaverse FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY Avatar Orchestra Metaverse is a global collective making new music within the virtual-reality platform Second Life, an online three-dimensional program that allows users to interact through in-world avatars (users’ digital[...] Read more
The Piano and Erhu Project Expands the Repertoire “Let’s begin with a short history of this instrument,” says Nicole Ge Li, in a video shot at the Vancouver offices of the Canadian Music Centre. She’s speaking to a roomful of composers, gathered there to learn more about writing for PEP (Piano and Erhu Project), her[...] 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
Petra Glynt experiments in celebration Ancient rock carvings at Petroglyphs Provincial Park in eastern Ontario inspired Alexandra Mackenzie to call her latest solo musical project Petra Glynt. Evoking rock, ancient cultures, flashes of reflected light, and the enduring power of art, the name seems perfectly apt. Petra Glynt may[...] Read more
Adam Basanta “I’ve always been interested in perception and apperception,” writes Montreal-based composer Adam Basanta in a recent e-mail correspondence. “This has led me, as a musician and composer, to centre my work on listening as a perceptual and psychological experience.[...] Read more
Bennett Jenisch In addition to having recently won the Musicworks Electronic Music Contest with his first ever acousmatic piece, Buried Gesture, Bennett Jenisch also writes and performs with his live electronic band Moth Vegas. “I would say that probably about half of what I produce is stuff like the[...] Read more
Shifting the Narrative The time for postponing discussions of environmental issues is over. This is the main thrust of two music-and-sound-powered documentary projects, both of which aim to encourage honest conversations about climate change and to explore the many ways our lives intertwine with—and impact[...] Read more
Hyposurface FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY On a 2004 visit to the MIT Media Lab, I encountered a small, flat wall with a skin of silver luminescent triangles covering a background of cables and metal frame. My host, the creator of Hyposurface, Mark Goulthorpe (dECOi Architects[...] Read more
