Performances Presented in 2016

I. Assimilation by Judith Schuyler (Oneida)
Indigenous concepts of sovereignty and urban identity are explored in this short work that gives a response to the concept of freedom from the perspective of a young urban Indigenous female.

II. freek¡Üwhency by Janet Rogers (Mohawk/Tuscarora), 2011
Exploring themes of identity, politics, cultural reshaping and forgiveness, artist Janet Rogers crafts an audio experience utilizing sound compositions, interviews and sound poetry to evoke the “spirit of radio.” Rogers creates an audio time capsule of contemporary Indigeneity in Canada.

III. Score for the Bottom of a Lake by Suzanne Morrissette (Cree/Métis)
A moving, meditative aural landscape of a lake bottom; the mixture of sounds form an audio tribute to a physical place that few humans can experience.

IV. Kikinaw by Cheryl L’Hirondelle (Cree/Métis/European)
In this “soundmark”, the artist evokes and represents the identity, spirit and form of a tepee, with a refrain that that says “our home, all of us, together, all beings.”

V. Nikamowin (Song) by Kevin Lee Burton (Swampy Cree), 2007
Creating a linguistic soundscape through aural elements of Cree, Kevin Lee Burton weaves sound and image with a political and rhythmic resonance. Exploring diverse landscapes by remixing their formal textures, the construction of this work – originally an experimental video – underscores questions of how languages emerge, exist, transform and dissolve.

VI. Playing Radio Sound (performance) by Janet Rogers (Mohawk/Tuscarora)
Using average clock radios, Janet Rogers will present a sound performance using digital tuning, static, sound, song, voice, alarms and body. Radio waves exist within time and frequency. The medium of radio requires expressive signals and receivers. One little clock radio offers so much information and uses. Rogers will play (with) four clock radios in a performance to exemplify how we receive this information and signals.

I. I Can Hear for 100 Miles by David Jensenius
A new composition using sounds recorded from the Found Sounds archive. David Jensenius is the developer of Found Sound, an iOS app for mobile soundscape recording and listening.

II. Station Breaks by Victoria Fenner
It's December of 1982. It's a long bus ride between Toronto and Vancouver with only a radio for company. Between the Static is a collection of radio stations which punctuated long distances of airwaves between settlements in the sparsely populated land mass called Canada thirty years ago. In between stations, life outside the bus.

III. Dish Song by Andrew Zukerman / Fleshtone Aura
Dish Song consists of two discernable elements - field recordings of birds & insects from the Radio Aporee archive and fragments of music sourced from various elementary to middle school choir records. Using electronic and concrete methods the source material is processed and re-recorded to the brink of total abstraction. Reconstituted into a tonal mulch, the material is played back live using tape players, samplers and modular synthesizer through NAISA's Spatialization System.

I. Below the Walls of Jericho (1988-89 - remastered 2012) by Paul Dolden
The title is only a loose reference to the story in the bible. What interests me about the story is the idea of a large mass of people knocking down a wall through the use of sound. The story gives credence to the notion of music as a catalyst for social change. Beyond the sheer physical impact that a large number of sounds contain, music is a form of language which is capable of stimulating thought. The power of music lies in the simultaneous physical and intellectual seduction of the listener.

In the composition, four hundred tracks of sound are often assembled to create the sense of a large mass. Three hundred and thirty-three tracks are created by dividing each of the seven octaves into forty-eight notes. Brass, string and wind instruments from the Western musical tradition and from other cultures are combined to create these textures. The remaining tracks are made from unpitched percussion instruments. This working method allows each track to have its own identity in terms of frequency and tempo. The relationship between each individual layer and the mass effect can act as a metaphor for the relationship between the individual and society. Beyond the music, the metaphor suggests questions of the nature of the walls we have to tear down in order for our culture to move forward.

Below the Walls of Jericho was realized in 1988-89 at the composer’s studio and premiered on November 12th, 1989 during the CEC Electroacoustic Days, >convergence< at the Margaret Greenham Theatre of The Banff Centre for the Arts (Alberta, Canada) — as the Berlin wall began to tumble down. The version of this work for percussion and tape, Luminous Hysteresis, was commissioned by percussionist Trevor Tureski with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts (CCA). Below the Walls of Jericho won 1st prize in the Electroacoustic category of the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition (Bourges, France, 1990). For a list of recorded musicians, visit: http://www.electrocd.com/en/oeuvres/select/?id=13940

II. Who Has the Biggest Sound? (2005-08) by Paul Dolden
Our composer pursues the important questions of the day: Who has the biggest sound?, Who has the nicest melodies?, Who can play the fastest?, and Who has the most complex music? During this quest for the musical Holy Grail the composer is impeded by the sounds of nature, or in this excerpt, by the sound of crickets. The text for the speaker :

“Ay! Carbon! That is enough of these misbehaving bugs. Crazy. Enough of these grasshoppers, these cicadas, what do you think this is? We are listening to music? These bugs drive me crazy, crazy, crazy. Let’s get onto the through composed thoroughfare and hear the Tonic Tango. And hear: Tonic Tango. Let’s get onto the through composed thoroughfare and hear the Tonic Tango.”

The sonic behavior of crickets and cicadas, is everywhere in this excerpt, from the dense percussion to the busy sections of brass and winds. All this music is modeled on the microtonal and polyrhythmic patterns found in the insects. I found the rhythmic behavior of these insects’ often resembled Spanish or South American rhythmic patterns such as Flamenco, Tango, Cha Cha etc. It is no coincidence that Latin music evolved in environments native to cricket sounds. In other words, I am considering the relationship between geography and culture. In other parts of “Who Has….” I visit other musical and geographical areas of the world.

III. L’ivresse de la vitesse (1992-93 - Remastered 2012) by Paul Dolden
The title L’ivresse de la vitesse (Intoxication by Speed) is an allusion towards my current artistic intentions which involve the speeding up of an excess of musical ideas so that the composition and its materials exhaust themselves in the shortest time possible. The intoxicating aspect of speed is evoked by using primarily fast tempo markings and rapid changes in orchestration, density and dynamics. These elements can be particularly sped up to the point of exhaustion and intoxication in the digital audio studio which is limitless or ‘virtual’ in its colour and density possibilities.

To increase the sensation of exhaustion and intoxication, hundreds of musical parts occur simultaneously that are organized by numerous musical systems which unfold concurrently. A few of these musical systems originate in different styles of popular music. These musical styles are organized by an overall compositional language and style in order to diffuse their direct effect or reference point, and to create an internally coherent music. This overall compositional language is intended to make the different musical styles and compositional systems implode inwards, creating new identities beyond their worn-out historical reference points, and to produce what I hope is like seduction: undeniably attractive and yet simultaneously unexplainable. Indeed any work that is totally complicit in its own absorption, so that it no longer makes apparent sense on the surface, will exercise a remarkable fascination. In short, an art work fascinates by its esotericism which preserves it from external logic.

L’ivresse de la vitesse was produced in the composer’s studio with assistamce from the Canada Council for the Arts (CCA) and in particular from a Media Arts Audio Production Grant. It premiered on May 28th, 1994 at the 3rd Annual Festival of Experimental Music organized by the London Musicians’ Collective (UK). L’ivresse de la vitesse was awarded the 2nd Prize at the 3rd Prix international Noroit-Léonce Petitot (Arras, France, 1994); 1st Prize in the Musica Nova 1994 International Competition of Electroacoustic Music (Prague, Czech Republic); 1st Mention in the Stockholm Electronic Arts Award (Sweden, 1994); and the Jean A Chalmers Award for Musical Composition (Toronto, Canada, 1995).

IV. Air of the Rainbow Robe and Feathered Skirt (2016) by Paul Dolden
Commissioned by the NAISA with financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Air of the Rainbow Robe and Feathered Skirt is the third movement of a larger 44’ work called Music of Another Present Era. Each movement plays freely with our ability to imagine another time and culture. At the same time, it recognizes that this historical imagining is necessarily conditioned by our own time and place.
Air of the Rainbow Robe and Feathered Skirt , is a musical re-imagining of an ancient Chinese myth:

Today the Chinese call it the Moon Festival. In Tang dynasty, it was a time of national holidays for moon gazing, drinking and merrymaking. Not everyone agreed on what the craters and plains of the lunar surface depicted. For some the moon was the site of an ice palace for the moon goddess and her court. In the folklore of the Tang, a magician escorted Emperor Illustrious August to that palace across a silver bridge that he had conjured up by tossing his staff into the air. During his sojourn there the emperor witnessed a performance of the “Air of the Rainbow Robe and Feathered Skirt” by immortal maids. He memorized the music, and on his return to earth taught it to performers at his palace. The music and dance of this work remains the most famous artifact of the Tang dynasty today.

I have attempted to create a modern version of this work, in which maidens often sing, and dance rhythms abound.

V. Vertical Time (1973, restoration and revision 2012) by John Oswald
These were the ideas i set out to experience in the concocting of Vertical Time in 1973. ??- An idea of black noise. ??- A mediation from the pure simplicity of a single sine tone to the pure complexity of white noise. ??- An aural tapestry intended to compliment visual fields generated from television snow. ??- A mass or cloud of sound that one could move around or through, thus hearing different perspectives of a continuous presence. ??The final sonic environment is achieved through many things, including thick and busy white noise with thousands of sine tones, changing the playback speed of an accumulation of these tones, a swarm of sweeping pitches, a mass of very short blips of pitches, and coloured variations of the sounds. ??In the end i never finalized a composite mix of Vertical Time back then, preferring to have it sound different each playback with the staggering starts of unsynchronized tapes and synth. Almost 40 years later now i've reassembled these parts, recreating some portions which weren't recorded at the time. ??The structure of Vertical Time is based on the banana split sundaes that were (and still are) available at Dairy Queen ice cream stands: three varied peaks and a unifying throughline (the split stereo banana). ??*With the help of Chris Muir and John Abram, and the encouragement of Barry Truax.

VI. Skindling Shadés (1989) by John Oswald
Co-incidentally the composer was gathering recordings of incendiary sounds at the same time choreographers Paula Ravitz and Denise Fujiwara were working on a solo of combustible images, while using, as rehearsal music, a recording of Igor Stravinsky's The Firebird. The co-choreographers asked John Oswald to make a replacement to The Firebird and he had no intention to imitate Stravinsky. ??In addition to actual fire recordings, there are similar sounds (the moving of air, the escaping of gases, the fracture of timber), tromp l'orielle and heat noise swarms. The composer refers to a swarm as a massive overdubbing of a single sound source.

VII. DAB (1989) by John Oswald
From “BAD RELATIONS: plunderography, pop and weird in DAB.”?The source for DAB is entirely the Jackson/Jones/Swedien pop song 'Bad' (Epic EK 40600 DIDP 70643). The transformations come from a limited pallet, which excludes timbral signal processing (filtering, modulation, supplementary synthesis, etc.) pitch shifting, delay reverberation and add-on musicianship. What is left is location in time. Fractional portions of the original music, varying in duration from about 25 milliseconds to phonemes and sonemes, to phrase fragments, have been superimposed and re-juxtaposed in 3 specified sections without pause: Revised, a bridge, and Homogenized. ??DAB varies between a general similarity to its source material and abstraction. It also mediates between pop/rock predictability, the rhythmic idiosyncrasy available to improvisers, and the timbral meditations found in the electroacoustic genre. Totally mechanical routines have been applied to the realizations of musicians who have the studio time to seek perfection. Perfection has been messed with by improvisation. Very popular music meets its extremities.

I. Around the Roost by James Bailey
The sounds in this piece were recorded in the environment around Warbler's Roost, near South River, Ontario. It comprises eight separate tracks which, at the beginning, are present in all speakers. These gradually decay at varying rates in each speaker until each has its own individual voice.

II. Yellowknife Soundscape by Carmen Braden
What is your ‘hometown’? Is it the town you grew up in? The town you live in now? The town you would call home for whatever reason? My hometown is Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, and it is the answer to all three of those questions. Thanks to the Northwest Territories Arts Council, I was able to produce this soundscape of Yellowknife. It is an audio portrait that reaches through the seasons and finds common sounds (soundmarks) like ravens or crunching snow, as well as more unusual sonic moments like goat or buffalo grunts, or ants chewing wood. Photo credits go to three amazing local photographers: Bill Braden, Dave Brosha and Rae Braden. Sounds I love from the town I love – enjoy! To view go to: http://blackicesound.com/portfolio/compositions/yellowknife-soundscape/

III. Unseen Songlines by Nimalan Yoganathan
Unseen Songlines immerses the listener within the soundscapes of Mamori Lake, a remote village inside the Brazilian Amazon. This piece explores the ambiguous perception of sounds emanating from the jungle and deep beneath the Amazon River, where we hear the sounds but often cannot see their sources: a blindfolded acousmatic concert performed by the rainforest itself. Field recordings subtly weave through electroacoustic textures and gestures so as to accentuate the grey area between natural and synthetic sounds. The listener is invited to hone in on the musical subtleties of the rainforest without being distracted by its visual beauty.
Instrumentation: Yamaha PSS-380 synthesizer, bells, mbira, field recordings gathered within the Amazon rainforest around Mamori Lake, hydrophone underwater recordings of dolphins and fish in Amazon River tributaries.

IV. Fuzhou by Nicolás Arnáez
Jazzinto is an Argentinean jazz band, eclectic enough to incorporate many other languages into their modern approach to jazz music. Funk, rock, tango, chacarera and electroacoustic music can be heard all over Poxirunning, their second release (easy to find on the internet). Fuzhou is the last track of this album; this Chinese city, its sharp and permanent noises, and a monument of the local Perón inspired a wine-seller drummer to think into a musical piece able to collapse different (but not always coherent) sonic textures. This idea was brought to the ex-bassist and actual muffin maker and composer, who was invited to participate on this album. The result is Fuzhou, a piece that presents a variety of Edmontonian soundscapes, extremely compressed versions of the tunes presented earlier on the album, a Mexican tortilla seller, amongst other. All this presented today, on its most rhizomatic spatial texture.

V. Immersion: Dynjandi by Michelle Macklem
“Immersion: Dynjandi” is a piece created from field recordings from the Dynjandi waterfalls in Iceland. In Icelandic, “dynjandi” means “thunder” and accordingly, this piece displays the sonic intensity and spectrum of the waterfalls. Under and above water recordings make-up the immersive experience of approaching Dynjandi and becoming entranced with its soundstate, as portions of the waterfall are brought into a sample-based soundscape.

VI. Black Sands by Dan Tapper
How does imagination alter how we perceive an environment before, during and after experiencing it? Black Sands is a series of three audio-visual works exploring the before, during and after of a journey to Iceland. Sounds move from crisp collages to hyper-real realities and nostalgia tinted memory.

VII. while working and walking by Darren Copeland
In this piece I have combined recordings made while working outdoors or walking around at different times between early spring and late summer of 2015. Some key moments include the cat trying to pounce on a squirrel, burning brush, wind, water dripping in spring, the neighbour’s pigs chowing down on household veggie scraps, and ice sounds from the lake. It has been my experience that many sounds pass by without being noticed while I am in the process of completing different tasks. This piece is an attempt to capture and savior those fleeting moments. The everyday soundscape is richer then I often realize. “while working and walking” was made in 2015-16 and commissioned by New Music Edmonton with funding from the Canada Council for the Arts.

I. Pathways by Shawn Pinchbeck
Pathways is an improvised sound performance that will explore a theme of pathways, travel, to and from, choices and the journey. Using a his self-recorded library of sounds and a gestural controller, Shawn will sound surf a piece that crosses genres of sound art going from electroacoustics, noise, ambient music and scounscapes.

II. Three improvisations with "Trio a la Distancia" [Distant Trio] by Nico Arnáez
Trio alla distancia is a non-real time trio based in Argentina and Canada. While gathering together for a session of open improvisation in late August 2016 in Mendoza, Jorge Hernaez (double bass), David Bajda (guitar), and Nicolás Arnáez (live electronics) decided to keep performing altogether, since the cities were they reside are separated by more than 13,000 Kilometers they choose to involve themselves into a timeless improvisatory music connection, where the double bass and guitar duo recorded improvised sonic interactions in Argentina, and the live electronics are added later on a concert situation elsewhere in the world… or vice versa.

The pieces being performed are entitled Cuarenta Días Diferido I [Forty days delayed I], Cuarenta Días Diferido II [Forty days delayed II], and 226 Horas de Latencia [226 hours latency].

III. Requiem for Radio: Pulse Decay by Amanda Dawn Christie
Requiem for Radio: Pulse Decay, is the first in a suite of works mourning the loss of the RCI shortwave site that stood in Sackville, NB from 1944-2014. Audio triggered by a Theremin is sourced from contact microphone recordings that were made of each tower when they were still standing. The Theremin is used to play the ghosts of the radio towers.

I. FIELD by Martin Messier
With this project FIELD, Martin Messier assumes that it is possible to create sounds using electromagnetic fields of our environment. These residual and imperceptible electric signals are picked with electromagnetic transducer microphones, and become generators of the performance. On stage, he plays with two connections patches that offer many possibilities to connect many outputs to many inputs. By a continuous movement of plugging and unplugging, Messier interacts with them, thus noise and light composition emerges. With FIELD, Messier makes material this flow of power otherwise inaudible and invisible.

CREDITS
Martin Messier concept, audiovisual composition, programming and performance • Interface Thomas Payette • Nathanaël Lécaudé Electronics • Technical design Thomas Payette, Maxime Bouchard, Frédérique Folly • Production 14 lieux • Support Canada Council for the Art for their support.

II. Soft Revolvers by Myriam Bleau
Soft Revolvers is an audiovisual performance for 4 spinning tops built with clear acrylic by the artist. Each top is associated with an ‘instrument’ in an electronic music composition and the motion data collected by sensors – placed inside the tops – informs musical algorithms. With their large circular spinning bodies and their role as music playing devices, the interfaces strongly evoke turntables and DJ culture, hip hop and dance music. LEDs placed inside the tops illuminate the body of the objects in a precise counterpoint to the music, creating stunning spinning halos. Soft Revolvers received a Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica in 2015.

I. Myo Improv by Dispersion Lab
Doug Van Nort, the Canada Research Chair at York University and distinguished electroacoustic sound artist, as started the Dispersion Lab, which is a studio and a live ensemble comprised of graduate and undergraduate students as well as artists from the local community. They explore telematic performance, improvisation, laptop performance and gestural conducting in among their prolific artistic activities. Include in this performance are Ian Jarvis and Michael Palumbo.

II. EngineBaroque by Luis Hernandez
EngineBaroque is a live electro-acoustic performance. Luis controls a custom-made 3d environment --a digital extrapolation of Kurt Schwitter's Merzbau, imbued with locative sounds. As he navigates this artificial architecture, he samples sounds in the environment, manipulating them in real-time with tape machines and samplers, creating a live electro-acoustic space located somewhere between the physical and digital world.

III. Hypergame by Andrew Shenkman
Prepare your body for the game-story-musical event of a lifetime! Inspired by tabletop RPGs, improv comedy and rock & roll, Hypergame Storytime: The Musical invites the audience to take their rightful place as the star of an intergalactic, time travelling, life afirming odyssey about the power of the human spirit and butts probably, whatever, just trust us. What is it? What isn’t it! It’s all your favourite activities and interests smushed together with healthy dose of awkwardness, imagination and friendship.