Featured Articles
Lea Bertucci composes time and space As I sit here listening to Metal Aether, the most recent full-length release from New York composer and performer Lea Bertucci, the difficulty of locating this music’s boundaries becomes increasingly clear. Bertucci’s compositions balance minimalist saxophone patterns with field[...] Read more
crys cole amplifies personal space I first saw crys cole perform in a tiny gallery in Winnipeg’s Chinatown. Seated with a contact mike, a pane of glass, and little else, cole reflected the minimalism of her setup in quiet soundscapes and restrained gestures. Immediately, she had the room under her command. There was a[...] Read more
The Quiet Waves of Silla and Rise In early 2016 Ottawa-based DJ, producer, and dancer Eric Vani, aka Rise, was hired to create music to be played at the Canadian Museum of Nature’s Nature Nocturne—a themed-evening series that Vani describes as a “rave in the middle of dinosaur skeletons.”[...] Read more
Backward Music What function do record labels fulfill in an era of streaming and algorithmic music discovery? What do labels offer artists and listeners when the means of music access and distribution are changing at a rapid clip? Kyle Cunjak, who is a musician and the owner-operator of[...] Read more
Jenny Moore Tears Things Up The first intimation that Jenny Moore has arrived at the music room at The Victoria, a historic pub in East London, is when the crowd slowly starts to part. The six members of her ensemble Mystic Business are doing a slow stomp, each hitting a pair of Boomwhacker tubes against each other to[...] Read more
Field Notes From Fort McMurray in the damp morning air: rain pitter-patters on whispering leaves. inherited onomatopoeic vocabulary; true but tried tropes carrying with them vague echoes of that singular safety known to the time when board books taught us to affix words to sounds, predictably, repeatably. a wind sighs,[...] 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
Yves Charuest and The Existential Act of Improvisation In the fall of 2016, I attended Montreal rehearsals and concerts and Toronto recording sessions of Roscoe Mitchell and the Toronto-Montreal Art Orchestra for a feature article that was published in Musicworks 127. This complex, largely through-composed music—Mitchell’s[...] Read more
Neither Here Nor There: Musical Identity in the Global Flow It is impossible to stand still nowadays in the face of worldwide security concerns. With climate change, wars, oppressive political climates, and alarming epidemics, the ability to move around physically has become a humanitarian necessity for many. The commodification and hyperrealism of[...] Read more
Chloe Alexandra Thompson’s Meaningful Exchanges Chloe Alexandra Thompson has always thought of sound as something visceral. “I think, if I trace it back, my first sound installation happened when I discovered that the fabric in front of loudspeakers could move from the sound vibrations,” she tells me. “I just freaked out[...] Read more
Dálava explores the landscape of song On a summer evening, outside this art gallery-cum-coffeehouse somewhere on the Gulf Islands, silver-green alders, not yet dry and summer-drab, sway, as deer graze in a meadow beyond, and small birds sing. Inside, a young couple performs. Julia Ulehla has spurned the venue’s microphone[...] Read more
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