Featured Articles

Tosca Terán Has a Brand New Spawn Bag The lobby is cavernous and cool compared to the heat under the blazing mid-afternoon sun outside. It’s mid July, and I’m visiting Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) on a decidedly peculiar mission: to listen to music made by fungus. As part of the seventh edition[...] Read more

Featured Article Greg J. Smith Issue 135

What's Inside Musicworks 149? ON THE COVER Brendan Grey and the Evolving Ethos of Super Duty Tough Work  As Winnipeg hip-hop ensemble Super Duty Tough Work (SDTW) hits the ten-year mark, founder and MC Brendan Grey, sits down with writer Abiola Regan to talk about tapping in to his family’s[...] Read more

Featured Article STAFF Issue 149

Casa Da Música Builds A Home For Experimental Music FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY   1497. Lisbon, Portugal. Navigator Vasco da Gama commands the first ship to sail from Europe to India. During the fifteenth century Portugal’s navigators are at the cutting edge of innovation and world discovery, their travel[...] Read more

Profile Richard Simas Issue 110

Myk Freedman Makes Room for an Ensemble of One (This article was originally published in Spring 2015.)   Myk Freedman is best known as the lap-steel-wielding leader of the nonet St. Dirt Elementary School, whose idiosyncratically tuneful music (released on Rat Drifting and on Barnyard Records) is nestled in the crevice[...] Read more

In the Works Nick Storring Issue 121

The Radical Transcriptions of sfSound PERHAPS NO OTHER AMERICAN METROPOLIS is more associated with important countercultural movements than the San Francisco Bay Area. From the Beats of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s to the radical punks of the ’70s and ’80s, the “city by the Bay” has long[...] Read more

Featured Article Dan Joseph Issue 122

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

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

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

Terri Hron joins the flock The slight, bright-eyed woman comfortably seated in her sunny Montreal studio is known as a musical beast. Hard to imagine. But the epithet is just one of several that contemporary recorder player and composer Terri Hron has earned—not on the expected grounds of virtuosity, but rather[...] Read more

Sound Bite Jason van Eyk Issue 110

The Spatial Sonic Designs of Juro Kim Feliz Genres can be compared to landscapes: they are places where people gawk like tourists, set up camp on Spotify playlists, and explore musical structures. Juro Kim Feliz sat down with me in November 2021 to talk about the challenges of creating in both the Filipino and the Canadian[...] Read more

Sound Bite Rachel Evangeline Chiong Issue 141

The Sound Future of Virtual Reality I HEAR A PERCUSSIVE THUD. SOMETHING IS HITTING THE FLOOR IN FRONT OF ME REPEATEDLY. It’s reverberating (I’m in a large room, I guess) and the rhythm is punctuated by frenzied bursts of high-pitched squeaks nearby. In the distance, I hear shuffling and the murmur of voices[...] Read more

Featured Article Greg J. Smith Issue 126

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