Featured Articles
Zosha Di Castri is looking for action An eighty-four-foot, mixed-media triptych spans a wall at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. With three huge scrolls, each three feet high, arranged on the wall in three rows, it’s an elaborate montage on a stark, white backdrop. Photographs, texts, drawings, and lithographs make up[...] Read more
What's Inside Musicworks 139? ON THE COVER: Evensong (2018) by Lou Sheppard, who recently made the 2021 long list for the prestigious Sobey Art Award. Congratulations Lou! This issue contains a special 30-page section that explores climate emergency through the stories of nine sound and music[...] Read more
Jean-François Laporte A maze of thin, transparent hose bundled by lock ties runs along the walls and floors of a spacious studio painted white from floor to ceiling. At the back of the studio near a tool and supply room, an air compressor kicks into action with a thump. Hissing air begins filling the lengthy[...] Read more
The Warp and Weft of Kelly Ruth In the history of musical instruments, the questions asked are pretty standard: Who played it? What did they play? How did it evolve? Kelly Ruth’s instrument, the weaving loom, carries an entirely different kind of history. It brings to mind mythology, solitary artisans, beautiful[...] Read more
Anna Höstman Tunes In To Her Roots There’s no place like home. For Anna Höstman, winner of the 2013 Toronto Emerging Composer Award, home is the Bella Coola Valley, a remote wilderness wonderland on British Columbia’s central coast. Its rich cultural history dates back 10,000 years to the Nuxalkmc people (now[...] Read more
Matthew Cardinal’s Asterisms Asterisms, Matthew Cardinal’s debut solo album, creates audial desire paths, not necessarily conjuring anything concrete in my mind’s eye but moving like a current—or a river—that I’m compelled to be swept up in. Asterisms is a pleasure to listen to, and I’ve[...] Read more
Bret Parenteau widens the loop When Bret Parenteau’s name is attached to a release or performance, those familiar with his music find themselves wondering what kind of intensity the Winnipeg artist is unleashing this time. His work ranges through harsh noise, urban field recordings, and looping synth sounds, but the[...] Read more
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
James Rolfe FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY. I first met James Rolfe nearly twenty years ago, when we were finalists in the 1990 edition of the CBC National Radio Competition for Young Composers. As a frequent visitor to Rolfe’s Toronto apartment at that time, I was afforded an insider[...] Read more
Inside The National Music Centre The Original New Timbral Orchestra, known simply as TONTO, has been called “a synthesizer the size of Nebraska.” The appearance of this electronic monolith makes an immediate impression. Housed in a twenty-foot semicircle of six-foot-tall wooden cabinets with knobs, keyboards,[...] Read more
Kitchen Chorus over breakfast, writing in my head, i can’t hear the words land—they’re swallowed back down the chute they come from—thud of molars as they chew buttered toast which slides, with a slick suck, into the whirlpool of digestive juices—outside, rain is rivetting[...] Read more
Olivia Block FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY The sound of a clarinet passage emerges from a quiet section and is punctuated by a series of minute electronic tones. Accompanying the clarinet is a recording of the wind, but the sound is more than just that of a rush of wind; it is[...] Read more
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