Performances Presented in 2012

Craving a Sunday afternoon with lots of cake and fun things to do in Toronto? New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) proudly presents Art’s Birthday at the NAISA Space. Sunday, January 15th is the perfect day to make and enjoy Art upstairs in the Artscape Wychwood Barns. From Noon to 5pm, there will be hands on art-making, interactive activities, and lots of fun things to hear and see. And of course there will be cake!

Art’s Birthday is a celebration of ART of all kinds and NAISA has organized a chance for the entire family to experience and create it. Events include: performances by MiMo, a Toronto-based duo featuring multi-instrumentalists Matt Miller (laptop, electronics) and Samuel Morgenstein (percussionist) using re-purposed toys and found objects; a performance by Rob Cruickshank using his Carrot slide whistle; Make your own Art’s Birthday cards; Build your own music instruments with Tilly Kooyman; Try our scary voice machine and make your own scary sounds with Darren Copeland.

Works by Aynsley Moorhouse, Peter Courtemanche, and Dominique Ferraton commissioned by CBC Radio One's Living Out Loud with producer Steve Wadhams explore the theme of Freedom in varying ways including: surviving dementia, developing new models of free energy from rain water, and the winter-time survival of water-bound creatures.
All three works will also be broadcast on Living Out Loud, CBC radio 1 99.1-FM on May 25 @ 1pm

NAISA presents Radio Naked at New Music 101, a showcase of contemporary music produced by members of the Toronto New Music Alliance and the Toronto Reference Library with Robert Everett-Green as audio guide. Christof Migone will give a lecture and perform a new version of his work Radio Naked.

NAISA and The Ambient Ping presents Radio in Ambience featuring Hector Centeno joined by a performance video from Tetsuo Kogawa to create a no input transmission duet of mysterious ambient beauty.

Performances by Jennifer Cherniack and Kristen Roos interspersed with audio insertions by Christof Migone examine how meaning is conveyed through different broadcast media. Cherniack's performances deconstructs an episode from the 90's sitcom Friends for a performance that combines live foley sound effects and textual analysis. Kristen Roos' Thrum sculpts a multi-dimensional radio listening experience using multiple transmissions spread out through the space. Christof Migone's Radio Naked will be interspersed through the performance to provoke and question the nature of transmission and the assumptions we make about what constitutes a broadcast

The notion of space is conceived simultaneaously in the realm of the virtual and the physical in James Partaik's performance Transects, while in the dual performance of Tetsuo Kogawa (video performance of Induction 03) and Hector Centeno the notion of space is twinned with the interaction of physical movement with radio waves.

This year's Deep Wireless Ensemble includes writer and radio artist Gregory Whitehead, performance artist Shannon Cochrane, turntable artist Erik Laar (of insideamind), and actor and interdisciplinary artist Rebecca Singh who will present two different sets of performances (one each on the 28th and 29th) that each explore radio art as a live performance medium in the 21st century. May 28th also features a performance of The Pencil Project by Martin Messier and Jacques Poulin-Denis (imagine school desks becoming sound instruments!) and Freedom Highway by Emmanuel Madan. Also included are works commissioned by CBC radio’s Living Out Loud by Andrea Dancer, Charlotte Scott, Steven Naylor and Andreas Kahre as well as snapshots of the H.P. Dinner Show and Karinne Keithley's Basement Tapes of the Mole Cabal.

The Pencil Project is a performance piece created by sound artists Martin Messier and Jacques Poulin-Denis. Their intention was to craft a live electronic music piece inspired by the physicality of writing and the imagery it articulates. Using computer technology, the performers translate scribbling, scratching, dotting and drawing with a pencil into music. Although a lot of programming, signal processing and design provide the backbone of this project, one of its main objectives is to keep the technology invisible. The most important aspect of The Pencil Project is the music itself. Using the proximity of contact microphones, an extensive range of sonorities and “sound gestures” is created.

Freedom Highway, performed by Emmanuel Madan, is an exploration of mass media and American public discourse in the post-9/11 context based on recordings of talk radio shows while the artist journeyed across the eastern US in September 2002.

Writer (poetry, fiction, essays) and musician (free improvisational singing and oral sound art) Paul Dutton creates across the range of what he likes to refer to as the speech-music continuum. His usual Toronto appearances are in brief sets or segments, but in the afternoon of Saturday, July 28 he will perform a rare full-length, full-spectrum solo concert and reading, presenting oral sound improvisations, new and previous verbal works, and sound poetry repertoire. Come out and experience two sets of border-busting, still innovative (after more than forty years), entertainingly challenging works offered by a true original, recognized internationally as a venturesome master of literature and music.

Paul Dutton is the author of six books, five solo recordings, and numerous recordings in ensembles (The Four Horsemen, CCMC, Five Men Singing). He has been touring nationally and internationally since 1970, performing at literary and music festivals, in concert halls, clubs, schools, and universities.


Soundsinger Paul Dutton (CCMC member and former Four Horseman member) merges the world of sound poetry and sound art in this solo performance in the intimate listening environs of the NAISA Space. Also included will be an exhibit of Paul Dutton's collection of poetry and other works.

Live outdoor Sound Art Performance by Octopus (Germaine Liu and Mark Zurawinski)

Performance of work created by artists participating in the week-long Sound Travels Intensive. Hear and see experimental sound art performances at the explorative “bread-board” stage.

NAISA and the Canadian Electroacoustic Community host two concerts with works chosen by an international jury of electroacoustic practitioners, which provide a snapshot of the latest research and exploration in sound art happening around the world.

NAISA welcomes recorder player and composer Terri Hron who will present a work of her own plus perform works composed by Emilie Cecilia Lebel, Robert Normandeau, and Paula Matthusen which will also be featured on her upcoming CD release Flocking Patterns. Following Hron's performance is a “back by popular demand” performance of Tomás Henriques' work Duality from last year's Symposium with Henriques' performing on his unique instrument the Double-slide Controller and integrating it with the NAISA spatialization system. The evening of live performances will conclude with a duet sound singing improvisation by Toronto's original sound singing legend Paul Dutton and Sound Travels guest artist Trevor Wishart.

After you have explored the fabulous Farmer's Market at the barns come up to the NAISA Space and join Terri Hron in a special free performance and artist talk. She will talk about her live works for recorder and electronics and for the Canadian repertoire she is developing for this unusual combination. She will perform a number of works from this repertoire and she will also be joined by violinist Andréa Tyniec in a new work created for her called A Love Song for M.A.D.

Encounters in the Republic of Heaven is an 8-channel sound-surround piece completed on January 1st 2011 and is based on speaking voices recorded in the North East of England where Trevor Wishart was A.C.E. Composer-in-Residence from October 1st, 2006 to September 2009, based at the University of Durham.

The piece is constructed in 4 Acts of approximately 20 minutes each, combining portraits of individual speakers (accompanied by sounds and imaginary instruments derived from the voices themselves) with computer animation of the entire community of voices - speech that waltzes, speech that locks in harmony, clouds of speech that circle the audience, culminating with speech that transforms into song.

The opening of Adam Basanta's dynamic and performative light and sound installation Room Dynamics will feature a special concert performance version. Featured with Adam Basanta will be guest performers Julian and Max Stein.

NAISA is proud to join forces once again with the Factory media centre in Hamilton to present a special “Artist Crawl” performance by Laurel MacDonald.

Videovoce’s Laurel MacDonald (vocals and video) and Phil Strong (sound design) have a nearly two-decade long history of musical collaboration. Their most recent is in the Videovoce performance project, integrating MacDonald’s live vocals with electronics and video. Videovoce features Strong’s distinctive sonic signature and MacDonald’s otherworldly vocals as together they create lilting, pulsing, multi-layered sight and sound environments.

Two very different performances will be included in this evening concert by two phenomenal vocalists - Laurel MacDonald (Videovoce) and Nobuo Kubota – presenting vocal styles ranging from guttural vocal phonemes to Renaissance music. Also expect to see images as well as Laurel MacDonald's performance will integrate video as well. Videovoce will feature Phil Strong’s distinctive sonic signature and Laurel MacDonald’s otherworldly vocals as together they create lilting, pulsing, multi-layered sight and sound environments.

Dynamic audiovisual interplays exploring transformation and density form the thread for this pairing of a videomusic performance by Nick Storring with a videomusic screening of Ryo Ikeshiro's Construction in Zhuangzi. The latter is a screening version of the live work presente at last summer's Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium. Construction in Zhuangzi has been presented extensively throughout the UK. Nick Storring's acousmatic works have been presented on a number of occasions by NAISA and this marks his first live performance at a NAISA event.

On December 1st NAISA will celebrate the John Cage Centennary with performances of two distinguished works from Cage's oeuvre for variable instrumentation. Cage's Variations I from 1958 began a series of works with open instrumentation and trans-disciplinary thinking that eventually led to the large multi-media spectacle of Variations VII. Variations 1 will be performed by the Toronto-based electroacoustic quartet Quartetto Graphica. Variations I is one of the first graphic score works performed by them and can easily be seen as the inspiration for the direction of the group. Also included on the concert will be an electroacoustic performance by Darren Copeland of Four6, which is a significant component of Cage's numbered pieces from his later years.