Meet the Winners of the 2023 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest TORONTO, CANADA, April 22, 2024:   San Francisco-based composer Ningxin Zhang has won first prize for her composition Kagemusha: for Pipa and Electronics.   “I am deeply honoured to have received the first prize in the 2023 Musicworks Electronic Music[...] Read more

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Erin Gee Sings the Body Electronic     SHOULD YOU EVER FIND YOURSELF IN A CONFINED SPACE WITH ERIN GEE, PREPARE TO BE ENTERTAINED, AND PERHAPS ALSO PUZZLED—AT LEAST BRIEFLY.   “If someone meets me in an elevator,” she tells Musicworks in a telephone interview[...] Read more

Visions of sound Alexander Varty Issue 126

Chiyoko Szlavnics draws the ear towards infinity “I keep coming back to light on water,” says Chiyoko Szlavnics, explaining her interest in beating, that intriguing fluttering effect that arises when sound waves of slightly differing frequencies coincide. “It’s a very similar kind of synaptic experience—for me[...] Read more

Featured Article Julian Cowley Issue 119

A message from the Musicworks Board of Directors The Board of Directors of Musicworks acknowledges that the new and experimental music scenes covered in the magazine are built on a foundation of systemic racism, and that through our content we have facilitated and upheld that system. Musicworks is a long-standing publication dedicated to[...] Read more

Sound Notes The Musicworks Board of Directors Issue 137

Sami Blanco’s Experimental Atmospheres Yellowknife-based experimental electronic-music artist Sami Blanco plays me a snippet of a soundbank he made for late-night broadcast on Yellowknife’s francophone radio station, CIVR-FM, familiarly known as Radio Taïga. Emerging from a Korg MS2000—the virtual analog[...] Read more

Sound Bite Laura Stanley Issue 134

The Many Trajectories of Erin Rogers Erin Rogers and Dennis Sullivan are facing each other on the stage of Manhattan’s Le Poisson Rouge in late February of 2020, a small table of gear between them. They take turns triggering samples of sportscasters by pounding large, illuminated buttons as if playing bare-knuckle Whac-a-[...] Read more

Profile Kurt Gottschalk Issue 136

John Preus' Slow Sound On a brisk fall afternoon in October, about two dozen people hunkered down in the intimate main room of Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio. They watched some of the city’s more open-minded musicians—including guitarist Leroy Bach and drummer Mikel Avery—improvise on[...] Read more

Sound Notes Peter Margasak Issue 118

Nate Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain Jump into an early version of Nate Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain, and you land in dark and turbulent, almost infernal terrain. Sounds are dense and blur into one another: trumpet amplified to distortion levels; prerecorded tape of unidentifiable noises; dense, rapid drumming of[...] Read more

Featured Article Stuart Broomer Issue 118

Shannon McKee's "The Copy Room" As I step into the undersized side room of the middle-school office, I want to remove my high heels. I want to kneel on the thin, brown carpet and touch my forehead to the ugly floor. I want to offer up a soft song. Because when I—a teacher’s assistant for twenty-five twelve-year[...] Read more

Sonic Geography Shannon McKee Issue 121

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

Featured Article Chris Paul Harman Issue 105