Featured Articles
Resonant Frequencies I first encountered Alanna Stuart on a mid-November evening in 2018. After an exhilarating trudge through the snow-muted streets of Toronto’s Stanley Park neighbourhood, I made what felt like a heroic landing at Array Space, where a few dozen or so hearty souls were gathering for a[...] Read more
Tanya Tagaq Grabs The World By The Throat Watching Tanya Tagaq perform is more than just an auditory and visual experience: it’s physical. As the Nunavut-born, Manitoba-based throat singer moves around a stage, she unleashes something fierce and powerful that comes from deep within her body, yet seems positively unearthly. She[...] Read more
Myriam Bleau spins Soft Revolvers In a darkened room, an artist is manipulating four translucent circular objects on a tabletop, moving from one to another. Audience members gather around. The objects emit light. Their spinning motion activates deep tones and beats that crackle and whir, and snippets of voice that drop in[...] Read more
Julia Mermelstein's "wonted II-III" Toronto-based composer Julia Mermelstein creates music focused on detailed tone, colour, textures, and gestural movement that reveal evocative, immersive, and subtly changing soundscapes. Her work aims to blend acoustic and electronic sound worlds in seamless interactions.[...] Read more
Louis Andriessen brings the noise Louis Andriessen arrived on the international scene with a bang. In 1976 he unleashed De Staat (The Republic) on unsuspecting audiences. The political charge of the composition came from texts of Plato sung by four soprano voices hovering like ethereal apparitions over pounding, iron-fisted[...] Read more
Lina Allemano is Splitting Time If Toronto’s avant-jazz and free-improv community has a living room, it’s the Southern Cross Lounge, the front room of the Tranzac Club—a cluttered bandstand with an ancient upright, a friendly bar in the back corner, a familiar audience—where drummer Nick Fraser[...] Read more
The Many Trajectories of Erin Rogers Erin Rogers and Dennis Sullivan are facing each other on the stage of Manhattan’s Le Poisson Rouge in late February of 2020, a small table of gear between them. They take turns triggering samples of sportscasters by pounding large, illuminated buttons as if playing bare-knuckle Whac-a-[...] Read more
Los Arroyos in Stereo A springtime hike through the hills of the Sierra Nevada, Andalucía, Spain. I follow my guide, Neftali, scrabbling up switchbacks, sweat from the raw sun cooling in the alpine breeze swishing my neck. The hike has been filled with talk. Neftali pointing out species[...] Read more
Zosha Di Castri is looking for action An eighty-four-foot, mixed-media triptych spans a wall at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. With three huge scrolls, each three feet high, arranged on the wall in three rows, it’s an elaborate montage on a stark, white backdrop. Photographs, texts, drawings, and lithographs make up[...] Read more
Darsha Hewitt Following the work of Darsha Hewitt is like feeling your way through the inside of an electronic circuit. It is tactile, visceral. Her trial-and-error approach comes from a truly experimental place, and during my conversation with her, I suggest that I have imagined her jotting down[...] Read more
Jean-Sebastien Audet’s Songs of Ephemera Jean-Sebastien Audet and I drink coffee in a café on Toronto’s Queen Street West, as we try to pin down his elusive music. The man who has kindly given us his larger table is now squeezed into a corner with his laptop and is feigning interest in nondescript wall art. He perks up[...] Read more
Panayiotis Kokoras’ Viper Snake Electronic music composers and pit viper snakes both create dramatic sounds that remind the listener of something that is not actually there. The Western Diamondback, the most common rattlesnake in Texas, can sound like a swarm of insects—or car radio static or steam escaping from a[...] Read more
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