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 Expanding Universe of Yamantaka // Sonic Titan I HAD BEEN GRIPING TO ALASKA B, cofounder of the creative ensemble YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN, that Bloordale didn’t have any decent pizza. I’d recently transplanted myself to the Toronto neighbourhood, one of her stomping grounds, and found it discomfiting to not know where to[...] Read more

Featured Article Zack Kotzer Issue 123

Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi is just scratching the surface “My relationship to sound is [an] obsession with texture and how sounds affect each other, and also [with] playing with the human psyche.” Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi then bursts out laughing, saying, “That’s a lot in one sentence.”     [...] Read more

Sound Bite Andrea Warner Issue 135

Arkora’s Cloud Chamber Arkora, a Toronto-based electric, vocal, chamber consort, includes an eight-voice choir and an accompanying ensemble, with irresistible composer bait—the Lumiphone. A giant, three-octave, thirty-one-tone, equal-tempered (31-TET) glass marimba, the Lumiphone was designed and constructed[...] Read more

Visions of sound Tova Kardonne Issue 137

Burden Unpacks the Piano's Inner Life At the 2016 Winnipeg New Music Festival, the members of Burden and their synecdochical piano are set up in the midst of a noisy, beer-swilling crowd at Union Sound Hall. Without so much as a word of introduction to attract attention, they assume positions on three sides of the piano and[...] Read more

Featured Article Daniel Emberg Issue 125

Bekah Simms’ Skinscape and Elliott Lupp’s Hinge Bekah Simms’ Skinscape received an honourable mention from the jury of Musicworks’ 2018 Electronic Music Composition Contest.   Skinscape is a work for flute and fixed media inspired by the transformation of something intimately familiar into something processed[...] Read more

Featured Article STAFF

The Retro Aesthetic of Le Révélateur THE OCEAN RECEDES INTO THE DISTANCE, awash in thick bands of golden-purple sunset hues. Its surface ripples in loose synchronization with a burbling synthesizer score. Suddenly, a shimmering plane materializes and obliquely bisects the scene; the plane spins and the textures of the two[...] Read more

Visions of sound Greg J. Smith Issue 123

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

Samuel Andreyev’s Sonic Organisms There’s a strange duality about the music of Strasbourg-based Canadian composer Samuel Andreyev.             His official bio states that his compositional process is “marked by a rigorous perfectionism,”[...] Read more

Featured Article Nick Storring Issue 133

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