Featured Articles

Scrap Arts Music: Dr. Seuss meets steampunk Scrap Arts Music is a joyous collision of creativity, experimental sound, and energetic movement, with percussion pieces performed on reborn hunks of junk. It’s challenging to describe and impossible to ignore.   Since 1998, when he founded Scrap Arts Music in[...] Read more

Sound Bite Linda Barnard Issue 139

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

Featured Article Jesse Locke Issue 135

The Genre of Morgan-Paige Morgan-Paige Melbourne was a child prodigy who started playing piano at three and singing and composing shortly afterwards. Soon she was winning piano competitions, and at sixteen she had her first composition published with SOCAN. It looked like she was heading for a glittering career as a[...] Read more

Sound Bite Mary Dickie Issue 138

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

Visions of sound Sarah Peebles Issue 111

Mariana Vieira’s The Unexpected Encounter with Diversity Electronic music has the potential to free composers and sounds from physical and cultural constraints while also bringing those elements closer together. Composer Mariana Vieira has been exploring ideas in this creative space since her undergraduate studies in composition at Escola Superior[...] Read more

Sound Bite Jennie Punter Issue 143

Erin Sexton Erin Sexton is in awe of the universe. By situating her creative practice in relation to the stars and the planets, the Montreal sound artist seeks to engage in conversations with the cosmos. Her work is grounded in the hard materials we know as nature, electricity, and the elements. She[...] Read more

Featured Article Deanna Radford Issue 119

Manuella Blackburn’s Home Truths U.K. composer Manuella Blackburn’s composition Home Truths won the Marcelle Deschênes Prize in Electronic Music in the 2023 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition (EMC) Contest. This donor-supported annual prize awards $300 to a self-identified female or non-binary composer with[...] Read more

Featured Article

Laraaji, Forever Expanding in Experimental Directions New Age legend Laraaji has soared through a five-decade artistic voyage, propelled by the fiery spirit of positivity that’s represented by his trademark orange clothes. The seventy-six-year-old African-American visionary, who continues to joyfully record, perform, and present laughter-[...] Read more

Featured Article Jesse Locke Issue 134

Nicolas Bernier and Martin Messier “La chambre des machines is a project where two electronic musicians are driven by the desire to be involved, as physically as they can be, in a performance context,” explains Nicolas Bernier, discussing his ongoing collaborative work with Martin Messier. “It’s not a[...] Read more

Featured Article Julian Cowley Issue 115

Label Profile: Redshift Records We won’t go into the details—because, frankly, we don’t understand them—but in astronomy a redshift is a way to measure an object’s placement in space, and its movement vis-à-vis the earth.   “It’s like the Doppler effect, but[...] Read more

Sound Notes Alexander Varty Issue 130

Eighty-five scores celebrate Pauline Oliveros Still Listening: New Works in Honour of Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) is a project initially conceived to mark Oliveros’ eighty-fifth birthday on May 30, 2017. Eighty-five artists were invited to create eighty-five new compositions, each with a duration of eighty-five seconds. Organized by[...] Read more

In the Works Lawrence Joseph Issue 127

First-place Winner, Musicworks 2017 Sonic Geography Writing Contest Childhood has no single place,  no secret garden, no single carousel to ride on, nor tree branch to fall from: just hours, that slip away, so similar to music,  which has no place either, just passing time it tries to keep up with[...] Read more

Sonic Geography Ina Čiumakova Issue 130