Tenzier: History Outside the Margins “There’s a group of students who used a term I really liked: countermemory,” Tenzier founder Eric Fillion tells me over Skype from Montreal. “I almost like that better than counterculture.” He’s talking about Tenzier, the avant-garde label which has put[...] Read more

Sound Bite Kristel Jax Issue 124

Ohama’s Alternative Dimensions Tona Walt Ohama has lived many lives. Born on a potato farm in Southern Alberta, he has spent the past forty years making passionate, deeply personal music while forging friendly connections with anyone who enters his orbit. Since his debut album, the 1982 cassette release Midnite News,[...] Read more

Profile Jesse Locke Issue 143

The Combine Project The Combine Project (2004-09) is a series of kinetic sound sculptures constructed from an abandoned 1964 Allis-Chalmers All-Crop combine harvester. I discovered it ten years ago on a property my wife and I purchased when we moved from Toronto to rural Ontario. The piece of outdated farm[...] Read more

Visions of sound Steven White Issue 107

Quatuor Bozzini Quatuor Bozzini is poetry, sweat, talent, idealism, determination, love, survival, fate, and a wonderful wild dance with the spirits. For fifteen years, the Montreal ensemble has steadfastly explored the notion of what contemporary music means today. The players are irrepressible creators[...] Read more

Profile Richard Simas Issue 118

Milan FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY   A sonic spectre is haunting Milan’s music scene. That ghostly presence is Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), Italy’s best-known composer of romantic operas, who moved to the city when young, shot to fame with Nabucco in 1842[...] Read more

Sonic Geography Ken Waxman Issue 105

Trase Pa: Choreographing the Soundworld of David Bontemps’s Traces In most cultures there has always been a synergetic interplay between music and dance—one informing and amplifying the other. Music exemplifies the physicality and rhythmicity that exists in a dancing body. The synergy of dance and music is a repertoire of invitations to the spaces in[...] Read more

Sound Notes Kevin A. Ormsby Issue 138

Composer Wolf Edwards loads the chamber Wolf Edwards’ various stories are so interesting and so curiously entwined that it’s hard to know where to start. Working in the fish-packing plants of Ucluelet, B.C., the ugly-duckling sibling of Tofino’s trendy swan? Playing guitar on the stage of some black-hole dive[...] Read more

Profile Alexander Varty Issue 120

New Stages For New Music Intense purple LED light washes over the Thin Edge New Music Collective (ABOVE PHOTO) as they scramble to soundcheck, seeming to heighten the chaotic mood at Long Winter, Toronto’s monthly interarts festival series during the coldest season. Two different sources of electric guitar[...] Read more

Featured Article David Dacks and Peter Burton Issue 125

Roscoe Mitchell and the Montreal-Toronto Art Orchestra The year 2017 is being widely celebrated as the centenary of jazz, marked by the hundredth anniversary of the music’s first recordings, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s “Livery Stable Blues” and “Dixie Jass Band One Step.” Jazz began as a spontaneous,[...] Read more

Featured Article Stuart Broomer Issue 127

Musicworks #128: From the Ancient to the Avant-Garde GONG PUNKS AND CULTURE BOMBS Traditional Filipino kulintang, a style of orchestral music played on a set of brass gongs, is a mesmerizing and exhilarating mixture of the ancient and the avant-garde. This authentic indigenous music has been played in the southern Philippines for centuries[...] Read more

Featured Article STAFF

The Creative Constructions of George Lewis “THIS PIECE HAS A NEW NAME,” ANNOUNCED GEORGE LEWIS, composer, trombonist, writer, and professor, speaking from the stage of the Community Church of New York. “I realized as I got into it that the old name—the name you have in your programs—doesn’t[...] Read more

Featured Article Kurt Gottschalk Issue 124