Featured Articles

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

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

Featured Article

C. Diab’s Cascadian Guitar Music Vancouver-based bowed guitarist Caton Diab (who composes as C. Diab) makes sonorous music that you feel deeply. Primarily crafted on an acoustic guitar with a pickup, effects pedals, a loop station, and bow, Diab’s textured and mournful tones rattle your bones and settle into your heart,[...] Read more

Sound Bite Laura Stanley Issue 137

James Goddard Makes Brave New Spaces “Recorded music these days is like an inversion of the old-time medicine show—you know, those people who would go from town to town and put on this big carnival performance to sell their medicine. Now that ticket sales have become the main income generator for musicians,[...] Read more

Sound Notes Peggy Hogan Issue 139

music, interrupted A barrage of media releases announcing the cancellation or postponement of concerts and festivals—in my hometown of Toronto, in music hubs across Canada and beyond—began hitting my inbox with increasing intensity the second week of March. Like many who actively follow, attend,[...] Read more

Editorial Jennie Punter Issue 136

What's Inside Musicworks 145 ON THE COVER: SIMONE SCHMIDT Simone Schmidt is a visionary artist who consistently finds new possibilities for the country song form. In the Toronto psychedelic country bands One Hundred Dollars and The Highest Order and as Fiver, Schmidt has created some of the most original[...] Read more

Featured Article Issue 145

Between Folklore and the Future: The Music of Heidi Chan Heidi Chan began combining her passions for arranging, technology, and traditional instruments when her father gave her a demo version of the music software program Cakewalk. “Because it was a demo version, I couldn’t save anything,” she recalls. “So I had to leave[...] Read more

Sound Bite Francesca D’Amico Issue 126

Buffalo New Music FULL TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY    Buffalo has long held an aura of adventure for me. The first time I visited the city, I was intrigued by the impressive collection of modernist work at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, where I returned often in the 1970s, driving[...] Read more

Featured Article Gayle Young Issue 116

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

Eighty-five scores celebrate Pauline Oliveros Still Listening: New Works in Honour of Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) is a project initially conceived to mark Oliveros’ eighty-fifth birthday on May 30, 2017. Eighty-five artists were invited to create eighty-five new compositions, each with a duration of eighty-five seconds. Organized by[...] Read more

In the Works Lawrence Joseph Issue 127

Thierry Gauthier FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY   “My artistic evolution,” Thierry Gauthier writes, “has been characterized by the intensity of impulse, immediacy, and the urgency to create; the quest for a paroxysm and the absolute; the same sense of urgency as[...] Read more

Sound Bite Richard Simas Issue 106

Ian William Craig’s Sonic Alchemy To many listeners, Ian William Craig’s debut LP, A Turn of Breath (Recital, 2014), seemed to materialize out of thin air—and not just because it was his first commercial release: one can hear almost spectral voices attempting to penetrate layers of electromagnetic detritus, like[...] Read more

Sound Notes Nick Storring Issue 124