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

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 The piece of outdated farm[...]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

Joëlle Léandre For Joëlle Léandre it all begins and ends with the double bass. After playing the often unwieldy bull fiddle from the age of nine and carefully studying its intricacies, she creates with it sounds so personal that defining them as free music, new music. or anything else, is[...] Read more

Profile Ken Waxman Issue 105

Bekah Simms’ Skinscape and Elliott Lupp’s Hinge Bekah Simms’ Skinscape received an honourable mention from the jury of Musicworks’ 2018 Electronic Music Composition Contest.   Skinscape is a work for flute and fixed media inspired by the transformation of something intimately familiar into something processed[...] Read more

Featured Article STAFF

Ningxin Zhang’s Kagemusha: for Pipa and Electronics At age five, Ningxin Zhang started her classical training on the pipa—a lute-like plucked Chinese instrument in use for more than 2,000 years—and followed the traditional route of practising repertoire (classical and folk songs) and performing in competitions. While studying[...] Read more

Sound Bite Jennie Punter Issue 148

Jay Crocker Navigates the Music of Obstacles "THEY WERE EXPECTING TO HAVE A swinging kind of jazz party, but we were doing nothing of the sort that night.” Percussionist Chris Dadge is recalling a particularly memorable gig at the Beat Niq Jazz & Social Club—a trad jazz club in downtown Calgary—during[...] Read more

Featured Article Andrew Patterson Issue 122

Jennifer Walshe Spins a Fine Tale The centenary of Dadaism is only three short years away, but there’s still time for curators and arts organizations across the world to program fitting tributes to the full multiplicity of artists involved in the movement. Irish radio, for example, will be honouring Dublin[...] Read more

Profile Louise Gray Issue 116

Kaie Kellough Sounds It Out IT’S 2016, YET I FIND MYSELF SPENDING an inordinate amount of time talking about artistic output from the ’70s and ’80s. It was in the latter decade that esteemed Montreal-based sound poet Kaie Kellough’s favourite band, Bad Brains, emerged on the scene with a[...] Read more

Featured Article Dalton Higgins Issue 124

Vanese "VJ" Smith is Right on Time Vanese (pronounced va-NIECE) “VJ” Smith and I are on the Spadina streetcar, chatting like old friends. Just minutes earlier we met for the first time. I arrived from up North (aka Thornhill) in a state of winter-blues petulance, but when I saw her bright smile and waving arm from[...] Read more

Profile Chaka V. Grier Issue 130

Markus Floats' Motion Emotion How do you think and write about sound outside of metaphor? Is music necessarily tethered to other aspects of our sensuous and interior lives? Or can we appreciate its meaning more essentially—as energy and dynamics, waves and reverberation? These questions come up around the work of[...] Read more

Featured Article Brennan McCracken Issue 137

The Blessed Riders of Streetcars in Vienna Streetcars in Vienna are blessedly quiet. The machines—brand new, high-tech plastic platforms—announce themselves on approach with only a slight electric hum. I now react to their high pitch with the same short sprints I used to make to catch the lumbering College streetcar in[...] Read more

Sonic Geography Caitlin Smith Issue 118