What's Inside Musicworks 142? The authentic enthusiasm and curiosity of artists writing about artists for whom they feel an affinity propelled Musicworks in its early days. This dynamic is in the magazine’s DNA and continues to inform the storytelling in our pages, as you’ll discover in the Summer 2022 issue[...] Read more

Featured Article STAFF Issue 142

Sound It Out! Musicworks' annual guide to festivals and events is a snapshot of the sonic adventures that will play out in Canadian intersections, fields, and venues this spring and summer. Many of our featured artists, contributors, and staff will be on the scene. We're especially eager to tell[...] Read more

Featured Article

The Astral Excursions of John Mills-Cockell The imagination of electronic composer John Mills-Cockell exists in a liminal space. His music, with its neon-pastoral glow, feels neither jarringly futuristic nor soothingly nostalgic. Nevertheless, as the very first Canadian owner of a Moog synthesizer (purchased the same day Wendy Carlos[...] Read more

Featured Article Jesse Locke Issue 127

Spool: Music in the Margins CERTAIN LABELS are very much the product of a particular vision and exude cohesion of an almost iconic order—one that even seems to magically weather shifts in taste and approach. ECM’s elegant black and white photography, sans serif typeset, and crisp, reverberant sonic profile[...] Read more

Sound Notes Nick Storring Issue 129

Christine Duncan Unleashes the Elements IT ALL CAME BACK SO FAST: the Whip, the Punch, the Elements. All those gestures unlocked my voice and made it respond exactly as it was supposed to—even after a five-year absence.   Late last year, I embedded myself with the Element Choir, the world’s leading[...] Read more

Featured Article Jonathan Bunce Issue 124

What's Inside Musicworks 130 - Spring 2018 Musicworks turns 40 this year. It’s been quite a journey from the DIY newsprint tabloid published in 1978 to Musicworks 130—our first-ever full-colour issue! Buy the print issue (or print+CD combo) from our shop, or start your subscription today. On the Cover[...] Read more

Featured Article Issue 130

Vicky Chow Is Just Warming Up Against a deep blue, backlit stage, Vicky Chow sat at the baby grand in the Scheuer Auditorium at the Jewish Museum on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in April 2017, flanked by forty speakers hanging from stands. For an uninterrupted hour, she played dizzying sequences of interlocking[...] Read more

Profile Kurt Gottschalk Issue 128

Cold Wave A sad-looking polar bear drifts on a shrinking ice sheet in a vast, deep-blue sea under a bright, blue sky. Scenes like this have long been used to illustrate climate change, and they are more than symbolic. Polar regions are warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the world. The[...] Read more

Featured Article Jonathan Bunce Issue 139

The Apperceptive Musical Adventures of Taylor Brook Canadian composer Taylor Brook—whose music can strike an unusual balance between challenge and charm, sometimes with an astonishing delicacy—had been based since 2011 in New York City, where he was first a doctoral student and then a lecturer at Columbia University, all the while[...] Read more

Profile Kurt Gottschalk Issue 140

Alex Buck’s Screaming Trees Convergence is often the magical force in the creative process that leads to an ear-catching work. Two or more seemingly disparate elements meet in the imagination of an artist who unites them into something new that resonates with both universal and personal meaning. This is the story[...] Read more

Sound Notes Jennie Punter Issue 136

Gong Punks and Culture Bombs Gentle and intense, soothing and exhilarating, traditional Filipino kulintang music provides the kind of richly immersive experience that makes an hour go by in what seems like a minute. The intertwining, hypnotic rhythms of its gongs and drums rise and fall as the players change tempos and[...] Read more

Featured Article Mary Dickie Issue 128