Featured Articles
Video Game Music: New Directions in Play The first time I played PaRappa the Rapper was a struggle. I was with my parents at a novelty deli where each table was outfitted with a television and a PlayStation video-game console. I didn’t have one at home, but a paper-thin, hip-hop cartoon[...] Read more
The Musical Lightness of Éric Normand The world of improvised music has spawned a core of musician–organizers who have built scenes and networks and record labels to support and extend the music. Few, however, have achieved what Éric Normand has, creating a hotbed of free improvisation in the relatively isolated[...] Read more
Extermination Music Night It’s quarter past midnight in late May 2008. Storm clouds loom but hold, on this surprisingly humid night. I open the garage, grab my bike and check my backpack: flashlight, five cans of beer, five-dollar donation, notepad and pen. I recheck the instructions I printed from an online[...] Read more
Joan Tan Jing Wen’s Study of Fragile Objects #1 Singaporean composer Joan Tan Jing Wen’s Study of Fragile Objects #1 was awarded third place in the 2024 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest. Hit the PLAY button above to listen. Tan Jing Wen shared notes with Musicworks about how[...] Read more
Aidan Baker’s Ambient Autonomy Over the past twenty years, Berlin-based Canadian guitarist and composer Aidan Baker has developed a creative rhythm, using his guitar as a gateway to seemingly disparate sounds and marrying noise, krautrock, metal, drone, and free jazz in thrilling and unexpected ways. Through his[...] Read more
What's Inside Musicworks 136? The Spring 2020 issue is a one-stop, one-of-a-kind sonic journey. Most of the stories were assigned, written, and edited before the lockdown, due to the global COVID-19 health crisis, took hold. Events referred to or advertised in this issue were not yet cancelled at press time but likely[...] Read more
Anthony Pateras: Sonic Phenomena in Real Time The music of Anthony Pateras covers vast expanses of composition and improvisation, of acoustic and electronic instrumentation, and combinations of these. He is also a virtuosic pianist. Between 2012 and 2019 he created Immediata, an ambitious series of fifteen albums, self-released[...] Read more
Psiw-te npomawsuwinuwok kiluwaw yut The first time I heard Jeremy Dutcher on the radio, I was driving my son and some of his non-Native teammates to soccer practice in Peterborough. I had tuned in to the CBC a few bars into Dutcher’s single “Honour Song,” and the fifteen-year-old boys in the car fell[...] Read more
Alanna Stuart Embraces the Bombast Multidimensional artist and music producer Alanna Stuart is constantly evolving. She regards categories not as borders but as things to be transcended. In her acclaimed duo Bonjay, with Ian “Pho” Swain, as well as her collaborative projects and her solo songwriting, she is[...] Read more
New Frequencies This issue of Musicworks comes preloaded with guitars. Hollow, heavy, bowed, cracked, pedalled, flung. Trusty companions. Feedback demons. Easy to pick up, hard to put down. While I do not declare this as The Guitar Issue, I do aver that the guitar informed my aleatoric curatorial process[...] Read more
The Unsung Songbooks of Dave Burrell TO SAY THAT PIANIST, COMPOSER, AND—AT THIS POINT—JAZZ ELDER DAVE BURRELL WAS NOT made for these times is a bit of a shortsighted claim. Burrell is a jazz classicist preceded by a reputation for free improvisation. He was present for the fabled Parisian Summer of 1969, when[...] Read more
music, interrupted A barrage of media releases announcing the cancellation or postponement of concerts and festivals—in my hometown of Toronto, in music hubs across Canada and beyond—began hitting my inbox with increasing intensity the second week of March. Like many who actively follow, attend,[...] Read more
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