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Tanya Tagaq Grabs The World By The Throat Watching Tanya Tagaq perform is more than just an auditory and visual experience: it’s physical. As the Nunavut-born, Manitoba-based throat singer moves around a stage, she unleashes something fierce and powerful that comes from deep within her body, yet seems positively unearthly. She[...] Read more
Tomoko Sauvage's Waterbowls Delicate clusters of tones sound and resonate. An orchestration of chimes and drips, they mix to form a potent brew of sullen melodies and serene reverberation. Adrift, immersed, submerged—there are many metaphors one might use to describe a close listening of Clepsydra, the opening[...] Read more
Rings of Beijing I sit staring at the laptop screen in my Beijing hotel room. Writers’ block. Silently trying to formulate words. No sounds enter my consciousness. Only the insistent hum of the laptop. Until my listening body is dropped into a pool of sound. Concentric sonic circles ripple out from the[...] Read more
The Avian is the Message Songbirds have a secret language. This is something I did not fully appreciate until recently, when I became immersed in their world. What may be music to our ears is bird-speak—a mating call, an aural fence, or simple prattle to stay in touch. There are people who can understand bird[...] Read more
Derek Charke Derek Charke is irresistibly attracted to the North. In 2006 he found himself in the Yukon, dogsledding with the Kronos Quartet. For a composer with a love of the Arctic it doesn’t get better, or more surreal, than this. A few days earlier he had been in a Whitehorse hotel room where[...] Read more
Between Folklore and the Future: The Music of Heidi Chan Heidi Chan began combining her passions for arranging, technology, and traditional instruments when her father gave her a demo version of the music software program Cakewalk. “Because it was a demo version, I couldn’t save anything,” she recalls. “So I had to leave[...] Read more
Chroma Mixed Media's Water Water, the second-place winner of Musicworks' 2018 Electronic Music Composition Contest, is a multimedia performance piece structured around changing states of water. It was composed collaboratively by three members of Chroma Mixed Media for a performance with the Co.Crea.Tive[...] Read more
The Friendly Exchanges of Germaine Liu When percussionist Germaine Liu performs, there’s more to her approach than simply striking a snare drum with a wooden stick. Liu seeks a deeper intimacy with her instruments, exploring all the sounds they might produce by closely examining each part. This is the key[...] Read more
Kaïa Kater and the Creative Power of Letting Go Kaïa Kater is a gifted storyteller. Drawn to history, the Montreal-based musician and composer strings together tales that marry the elusive past with an ever-shifting present. From a young age, Kater, who studied cello and piano as a child, found refuge in songwriting. “I didn[...] Read more
Ian Battenfield Headley “Working with John Chowning at MusicAcoustica in Beijing was like touching history,” confesses a reverent Ian Battenfield Headley during our Skype call. “I had this image of him being this serious composer who doesn't take time to speak to underlings, but he’s[...] Read more
Sarah Davachi flies into psychoacoustic space One could say that Sarah Davachi’s drone-based music is all about meditative states, or texture, or duration. But more than anything else, it’s about balance—between the theoretical and the practical, the material and the cerebral, the antique and the avant-garde, the[...] Read more
Thomas, Farah, and D’Eon I’m sitting with Thom Gill and we’re talking about his most recent EP Such Is Your Triumph, arguably his most intimate and personal set of recordings to date. In addition to his beautifully hushed and harmonically inventive takes on two gospel songs made famous by the Clark[...] Read more
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