Daniel Glassman

London Contemporary Music Festival Walking away from the Thames on the final night of the London Contemporary Music Festival (LCMF), I was reminded of the classic scene from The Simpsons in which Bart’s friend Nelson emerges from a screening of David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch and says, “I can think of at[...] Read more

Concerts and Events Daniel Glassman Issue 143

Godspeed You! Black Emperor. G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! Epic multi-part compositions, long crescendos, drones and field recordings, gloomy moods giving way to cathartic orchestral climaxes—yes, it’s another Godspeed You! Black Emperor album. There are now more post-reunion albums than pre-hiatus ones, and the recent output has taken[...] Read more

Recordings Daniel Glassman Issue 139

Tomeka Reid Quartet. Old New Having played with a who’s who of the Chicago jazz scene young and old—Nicole Mitchell, Joshua Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, Jaimie Branch—for well over a decade, cellist Tomeka Reid isn’t lacking in avant-garde bona fides. Yet her work under her own name, in an updated[...] Read more

Recordings Daniel Glassman Issue 135

Strangewaves V: Mother Nature. On the last day of Strangewaves V, we drove onto the festival’s site at the fairgrounds in Paris, Ontario, a little after 2 p.m, when Myriam Gendron—a singer and guitarist best known for her 2014 release Not So Deep As A Well, which sets Dorothy Parker poems to fragile folk[...] Read more

Concerts and Events Daniel Glassman

New Hermitage. Obey Convention XI. Chamber jazz is an intriguing subgenre; programmatic chamber jazz even more so. Halifax-based quartet New Hermitage weaves gently undulating textures out of a unique instrumentation consisting of woodwinds (Andrew MacKelvie), harp (Ellen Gibling), guitar (Ross Burns), and cello (India Gailey[...] Read more

Recordings Daniel Glassman Issue 133

Amirtha Kidambi & the Elder Ones. From Untruth. “Eat the rich or die starving.” Repeated mantra-like at the end of the first song on Amirtha Kidambi’s impressive new record with her band the Elder Ones, From Untruth, that sentiment somehow lands less as provocation than as simple statement of fact, a moment of clarity[...] Read more

Recordings Daniel Glassman Issue 133

2018 Guelph Jazz Festival. “I’d rather be a human being / than to be avant-garde,” intones William Parker towards the conclusion of his solo bass performance at the 2018 Guelph Jazz Festival. Fittingly, the performance of his piece—which is excerpted and adapted from Flower In A Stained-Glass[...] Read more

Concerts and Events Daniel Glassman Issue 132

Colin Fisher. V Le Pape. V Le Pape, the debut solo album by Toronto guitar-and-electronics whiz Colin Fisher (Not the Wind, Not the Flag; Fake Humans; much else besides), invites comparisons as much to the works of New-Age experimentalist Laraaji as it does to classics of the loopy, psych-ambient solo-guitar[...] Read more

Recordings Daniel Glassman

Listening To Art, Seeing Music. Listening To Art, Seeing Music, described in the media materials as a “multi-sensory journey of discovery,” and launched in early 2018 at Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum, encompasses about a dozen installations dotted around the museum within its permanent collection, in its[...] Read more

Concerts and Events Daniel Glassman Issue 130

Giant Claw. Soft Channel. Giant Claw is the vapourwave–plunderphonics sound-collage pseudonym of musician, visual artist, and Orange Milk label-boss Keith Rankin, of Columbus, Ohio. Soft Channel, his new album, is a paradoxical object, at once one of the most fragmented and one of the most listenable variants[...] Read more

Recordings Daniel Glassman Issue 129

Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Luciferian Towers.     At this point, the GY!BE formula probably needs no introduction. Godspeed You! Black Emperor has been making long-form, crescendo-driven, enigmatically titled, outspokenly political, communally produced, instrumental post-rock for over twenty years, with no major[...] Read more

Recordings Daniel Glassman

Joni Void. Selfless. It’s hard to be lo-fi in the twenty-first century. Even the most rudimentary contemporary sound recorders—on a smartphone or laptop, say—lack the auditory artifacts so fetishized by connoisseurs of tape and vinyl and emulated by much contemporary sampling and plunderphonics[...] Read more

Recordings Daniel Glassman Issue 128