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

Buffy Sainte-Marie reflects on Illuminations “God is alive / Magic is afoot / Alive is afoot / Magic never died.”   Those words, written by Leonard Cohen and sung by Buffy Sainte-Marie, open a doorway into the mystical world of Illuminations—one of the most musically beguiling, technologically[...] Read more

Featured Article Jesse Locke Issue 135

Public Recordings' what we are saying “Is being together possible?” The first words spoken in what we are saying, a sound­–dance piece by the Toronto-based experimental performance company Public Recordings, have a disruptive effect—an abrupt imposition of language into an initially wordless and[...] Read more

Sound Notes Christopher Willes Issue 125

loK8Tr FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY     They weren’t going to speak with me. Maybe it was just a he or a she, rather than a they. I didn’t know. An e-mail exchange was possible, but I wanted to meet face to face. I tried cajoling the members of the online[...] Read more

Featured Article Matthew Pioro Issue 106

Knoxville, Tennessee FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY   As with any American city, the dominant feature of the Knoxville soundscape is the almighty car. With an extension of the interstate zooming only a few blocks from downtown, and a multi-lane surface road separating the University of[...] Read more

Sonic Geography Issue 107

Victoria Composers Cultivate a Place to Listen Why has a vibrant community of emerging composers chosen British Columbia’s cozy, scenic capital over more bustling contemporary-music hubs? THERE'S A DEEP HUSH in the church where I am sitting and nervously listening to an especially slow and fragile performance of[...] Read more

Featured Article Nick Storring Issue 129

FET.NAT’s Post-Punk Palimpsests Around twenty years ago, a post-punk revival was supposedly upon us. Reissue compilations proliferated alongside a crop of new artists who audibly drew from the genre’s heyday. Where punk-rock wedded a rock ethos with rebellious politics (or sometimes just rebellious posturing), post-punk[...] Read more

Profile Nick Storring Issue 136

Cold Wave A sad-looking polar bear drifts on a shrinking ice sheet in a vast, deep-blue sea under a bright, blue sky. Scenes like this have long been used to illustrate climate change, and they are more than symbolic. Polar regions are warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the world. The[...] Read more

Featured Article Jonathan Bunce Issue 139

Wow & Flutter make breathing room The phrase “wow and flutter” typically refers to flawed analog recordings—ones with imperfections that cause the pitch to oscillate, either slowly or quickly. When Toronto-based wind players Bea Labikova, Kayla Milmine, and Sarah Peebles decided to form an improvising trio[...] Read more

Sound Bite Sara Constant Issue 131

SlowPitchSound and the Universe Between the Grooves When it comes to picking the defining factors of a musical practice, some artists view their work as a single, continuous process, homing in on a specific vision and returning to it repeatedly. Others are the opposite—traversing a multitude of styles and sounds as they launch[...] Read more

Featured Article Sara Constant Issue 144