Featured Articles
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
Carmen Vanderveken is full of surprises Quebec-born composer Carmen Vanderveken was commissioned by the Dutch annual festival Gaudeamus Muziekweek to write a piece for a quartet featuring Dutch bass clarinetist Fie Schouten. An earlier piece sheds light on the shape and sound of the music Carmen Vanderveken is[...] Read more
Pheeroan akLaff Pheeroan akLaff believes in drums first, rather than last. He can drive an ensemble forward with the machine-gun attack of his snare and the rolling thunder of his bass and toms, compounding and enriching the music with dense polyrhythms, or using the metallic shimmer of his cymbals to surmount[...] Read more
Reclaiming Chinatown In many respects, the year 2020 was a time of reckoning for Asian Americans. Hot on the heels of the landmark Asian ensemble-cast blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians, South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho made history with Parasite, which took home the first Academy Award for Best Picture ever to be[...] Read more
João Pedro Oliveira's N'vi'ah João Pedro Oliveira won second place in the 2022 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest. Listen to and read about his award-winning composition! "N'vi'ah is an Old Testament word meaning prophetess. A[...] Read more
Roxanne Nesbitt’s Sonic Investigations People often describe sound as something that reverberates outward into space, but the music of interdisciplinary artist Roxanne Nesbitt seems to move inward; it has an audiovisual geometry that focuses the eye and the ear, pulling you closer to the source. To perform her 2010 composition[...] Read more
Mark Molnar’s alternative trajectories Harrowingly unbridled and unpredictable, yet blatantly meticulous in their construction, Mark Molnar’s compositions frequently emerge as rugged tangles of bowed-string sonorities. Even though their gestural expressivity might suggest that they could’ve been conceived in myriad[...] Read more
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
Luke Nickel Transmits a Living Score Luke Nickel has written me a piece. No, wait. That’s not quite right. Luke Nickel has left me a series of sometimes vague, sometimes specific instructions via audio recordings of his voice, which I am only allowed to listen to[...] Read more
Jessie Lausé's Movements Jessie Lausé wins second place in the 2021 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest for Movements, a three-movement work for eight-channel mixed media. “[Movements] explores the melodic and registral capabilities of modified human and spatial[...] Read more
Avatar Orchestra Metaverse FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY Avatar Orchestra Metaverse is a global collective making new music within the virtual-reality platform Second Life, an online three-dimensional program that allows users to interact through in-world avatars (users’ digital[...] Read more
Analia Llugdar FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY In her music, Montreal composer Analia Llugdar delves deeply into the primal interior of sound, as evidenced by a sampling of her work from 2003 to 2009. There are compositions for solo cello, small (trio) and large ensembles, often[...] Read more
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