James Goddard Makes Brave New Spaces
JOINING FORCES
“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 [...]
Sound notes
SOUND ENGINEERING
Most music fans in Winnipeg have seen plenty of Ashley Au playing bass in recent years in a wide range of idioms—Americana, hip-hop, jazz, and sludge metal. Pausing to tally current [...]
Scrap Arts Music: Dr. Seuss meets steampunk
ENTER THE XYLOBE
Scrap Arts Music is a joyous collision of creativity, experimental sound, and energetic movement, with percussion pieces performed on reborn hunks of junk. It’s challenging to describe [...]
Sounds of an Unfolding Emergency
MUSICWORKS 139: EDITOR'S NOTE
“we have no power or wifi/internet” [...]
Silent Season: Intrinsically Connected to Nature
While living in Union Bay in 2007, Jamie McCue spent his downtime hiking, camping, and fishing in Vancouver Island’s abundant forests and rivers. Deeply moved by the symphonic rhythms of [...]
David Psutka Augments Creative Spaces
MINISCORES FOR MICRODOCS
In 2019, David Psutka was approached by Karen Vanderborght to compose the soundtrack for her augmented reality documentary Grey Matter AR, which she had started developing a few years earlier [...]
Features
DEEP READING, URGENT LISTENING
ON THE COVER: Evensong (2018) by Lou Sheppard, who recently made the 2021 long list for the prestigious Sobey Art Award. Congratulations Lou!
This issue contains a[...]
Circumpolar artists Matthew Burtner, Paul Walde, Jana Winderen, and Terje Isungset bear sonic witness to Arctic warming.
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[...]
Tanya Kalmanovitch's Tar Sands Songbook and the podcast Future Ecologies use music and storytelling to create safe spaces for urgent environmental discourse.
The time for postponing discussions of environmental issues is over. This is the main thrust of two music-and-sound-powered documentary projects, both of which aim to encourage[...]
In separate interviews, Raven Chacon and Lou Sheppard talk about their unique artistic practices and what it means to listen during urgent times.
We tend to think of an emergency as something sudden—the kind of jarring, life-and-death situation that leaps out at us with abrupt urgency. And when we think about what an[...]
Reviews
Godspeed You! Black Emperor. G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!
Constellation (CST156)
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Theory of Ice.
You’ve Changed Records, YC-048.
Taylor Brook / TAK Ensemble. Star Maker Fragments.
TAK Editions, TAKe003.
Colin Fisher. Reflections of the Invisible World.
Halocline Trance, HTRA017.