St. John’s, Newfoundland It’s July 2001 in St. John’s, Newfoundland—the one-hundredth anniversary of Marconi’s successful reception of transatlantic wireless transmissions on Signal Hill. In town on a visit, I decide to pay homage to the event by hiking up the Harbour Trail to Signal Hill.[...] Read more

Sonic Geography Micheline Roi Issue 106

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

Featured Article Darcy Spidle Issue 132

Amanda Dawn Christie’s Requiem for Radio In 2012 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) began to tear down its Radio-Canada International towers in Sackville, New Brunswick (home to some 6,000 people and best known as the locale of the beloved SappyFest). The dismantling of the towers wasn’t just another chapter in the[...] Read more

Visions of sound Kiva Reardon Issue 127

The Passion and Curiosity of Barbara Hannigan “An absolute stroke of luck for opera” is just one of the countless accolades Canadian-born, Amsterdam-based soprano Barbara Hannigan has received for her performances of both classical and contemporary music. Composers and musicians she has worked with are unanimous in their[...] Read more

Profile René van Peer Issue 121

The Idiosyncratic Musicality of Marc Sabat The emergence of Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique in the early 1920s not only presented an altogether new conception of pitch in music, it also prompted a dramatic and widespread shift in the fundamental thinking surrounding Western concert music. Its latent quasiscientific[...] Read more

Featured Article Nick Storring Issue 125

Myriam Bleau spins Soft Revolvers In a darkened room, an artist is manipulating four translucent circular objects on a tabletop, moving from one to another. Audience members gather around. The objects emit light. Their spinning motion activates deep tones and beats that crackle and whir, and snippets of voice that drop in[...] Read more

Visions of sound Deanna Radford Issue 120

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

Sound Bite Jesse Locke Issue 144

Luca Kasper's "Atelier Métal" Swiss sound and visual artist Luca Kasper’s Atelier Métal was awarded third place in the 2023 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest. Hit the PLAY button above to listen.   Currently based in France, in the countryside near Lyon, Kasper found the first[...] Read more

Featured Article STAFF

The Material Soundscapes of Roarke Menzies On a Sunday afternoon this past June I visited Outlet Fine Art, one of many independent galleries and performance spaces that have popped up in and around the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Bushwick in recent years. I was there to attend a performance by sound artist Roarke Menzies, the second in[...] Read more

Sound Notes Dan Joseph Issue 126

Wow & Flutter make breathing room The phrase “wow and flutter” typically refers to flawed analog recordings—ones with imperfections that cause the pitch to oscillate, either slowly or quickly. When Toronto-based wind players Bea Labikova, Kayla Milmine, and Sarah Peebles decided to form an improvising trio[...] Read more

Sound Bite Sara Constant Issue 131

John Wynne FULL TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY   A chill-blue image of ocean waves projects across the join of two white walls. At first the image appears still, but then you notice the waves undulating gently. On a table in front of the image, and housed in a small casket with[...] Read more

Featured Article Julian Cowley Issue 116