Luke Nickel Transmits a Living Score Luke Nickel has written me a piece.   No, wait.   That’s not quite right.   Luke Nickel has left me a series of sometimes vague, sometimes specific instructions via audio recordings of his voice, which I am only allowed to listen to[...] Read more

Featured Article Heather Roche Issue 132

The Swedish Sound-Art Scene Nadine Byrne Monochrome images of two young women—evidently sisters—stare out impassively from oval apertures that resemble Victorian cameo brooches. A gauzy ectoplasmic fabric oozes from their mouths while, in an aperture between them, their faces merge in a dreamlike blur[...] Read more

Featured Article Julian Cowley Issue 108

Resequencing Resonances PHOTOGRAPHS BY GREEN YANG   Resonances are ghosts. They accentuate unseen presences of sounding bodies as they amplify frequencies inherent in them. Noted Italian composer Luciano Berio explored the transfer of energy from one body to another in his Sequenza X (1984), which[...] Read more

Featured Article Juro Kim Feliz Issue 143

Bug Incision: Calgary’s Cross-Pollination Buzz The world of free improvisation is like a parallel universe, a global underground community of nonidiomatic soundmakers, recording with each other in every imaginable permutation, connected via a proliferation of text- and link-heavy Web 1.0 sites, DIY venues, and CD-R labels, with a[...] Read more

Sound Bite Daniel Glassman Issue 131

Ashley Au Is Stretching Out Most music fans in Winnipeg have seen plenty of Ashley Au playing bass in recent years in a wide range of idioms—Americana, hip-hop, jazz, and sludge metal. Pausing to tally current projects, Au counts in blinks before saying, “I’m in an open relationship with maybe seven[...] Read more

Profile Daniel Emberg Issue 139

Cold Wave A sad-looking polar bear drifts on a shrinking ice sheet in a vast, deep-blue sea under a bright, blue sky. Scenes like this have long been used to illustrate climate change, and they are more than symbolic. Polar regions are warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the world. The[...] Read more

Featured Article Jonathan Bunce Issue 139

Rocío Cano Valiño’s Okno wins first place in Musicworks' 2020 Electronic Music Composition Contest After following the enigmatic whooshes, dangling creaks, and scene-stealing clunks around the evocative sonic space of Okno, I was not surprised to learn that its composer, Rocío Cano Valiño, has a background in interior design—a talent she employs in the various[...] Read more

Sound Bite Jennie Punter Issue 140

Michael Pounds' "Breathing 2: Re/Inspiration" Michael Pounds began his career as a mechanical engineer, receiving a B.S. from Ohio University. After working at the NASA Lewis Research Center, he returned to the academic world to study music composition with a focus on computer music and music technology. After undergraduate music[...] Read more

Sound Notes

Eve Egoyan and David Rokeby's Surface Tension Surface Tension is a thirty-five-minute collaborative interarts work that the two of us (pianist Eve Egoyan and installation artist David Rokeby) created for Disklavier piano and interactive video. The piece explores the relationship between what we do separately in our respective[...] Read more

Visions of sound Eve Egoyan and David Rokeby Issue 105

Amy Brandon is Capturing Intimate Chaos The first time I met guitarist-composer Amy Brandon, we talked about the lineage of a particular sound.             Her 2019 composition Mimic—written while she participated in the Canadian League of Composers’[...] Read more

Featured Article Sara Constant Issue 134