IF Archive 2022

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

17, Institute of Critical Studies (Mexico City, Mexico)

17, Institute of Critical Studies is a space situated at the nexus or crossroads between the academic field, non-academic culture and psychoanalysis.

Conceived as a laboratory of the word, 17 Radio is a space for creation and reflection on communication technologies and policies, concerned with the development of social ties. The entire audio version of the IF 2022 festival will be broadcast through 17 radio, which can be streamed on their website: https://17radio.org/

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

Arboretum

The Arboretum at the University of Guelph is a 400 acre natural heritage greenspace and ‘living laboratory’ adjacent to main campus. Established in 1970, The Arboretum is a favourite spot for trail running, dog walking, hiking, and exploring nature on our grounds, which feature plant collections, gardens, walking trails, natural woodlands, wetlands, and meadows. The Arboretum connects people with nature and supports teaching, research, and outreach at the University.

We have a strong focus on biodiversity and conservation of woody plants native to Ontario. We lead long-running initiatives such as the Rare Woody Plants of Ontario program, through which we archive, in living gene banks, representative individuals of rare and at-risk trees and shrubs of the province. Our Elm Recovery Project is aimed at breeding a genetically diverse, Ontario-sourced American Elm population that is tolerant of Dutch Elm Disease. The Arboretum is integral to many undergraduate courses, providing support, expertise, and a wide variety of plants species and environments for researchers at all levels. We also offer dozens of workshops and other public programs.

The Arboretum is free to the public and open daily, dawn until dusk.

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

Art Gallery of Guelph

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

ArtsEverywhere Festival

The ArtsEverywhere Festival is the place where conversations, ideas, and artistic experiments presented on ArtsEverywhere.ca come alive in our home community of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Over four days, the festival offers lectures, conversations, music, artistic performances, circle gatherings, literary readings, exhibitions, and much more. By bringing to the gathering a diverse, informative, creative, and sometimes unlikely combination of people, the festival offers a program that connects to the ongoing work and needs of many organizations and individuals who wish to make the world a better place.

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

CFRU 93.3 FM

CFRU aims to provide a complete service to the community. We provide access to the media to groups and individuals who would otherwise have little access through mainstream media outlets. By doing so, we reflect the diversity of the community. We engage, inform and entertain our listeners, we empower and teach our volunteers, and we support all of the great people doing cool things around Guelph. We raise awareness of community activities, events, and concerns. We introduce new ideas and perspectives. CFRU will not broadcast materials intending to subject any group or individual to hatred or contempt on the basis of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, gender and gender representation, age, real or perceived socio-economic status, mental or physical ability, sexual orientation, citizenship status, or source of income, unless necessary to provide context within a larger issue.

www.cfru.ca

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

CJLO 1690AM

CJLO 1690AM is a community radio station, broadcasting out of the Loyola Campus of Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke, historically known as Montreal, on the unceded and unsurrendered land of the Kanien’kehá:ka nation. The station was formed in 1998 and was recently voted the #1 Best Radio Station in the CULT MTL’s Best of Montreal 2022 Readers’ Poll. Tune in 24/7 on the radio or online at cjlo.com to hear a selection of rock, indie, hip-hop, metal, punk, country, electronic, world beat, sports talk, film commentary and audio storytelling.

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

CJRU 1280 AM

CJRU 1280 AM is Toronto Metropolitan University’s volunteer-driven campus and community radio and multi-media hub, broadcasting on the AM dial since March of 2016. Our station airs a variety of programming from the university, TMU students, the community at large, and syndicated programming from community stations across Canada. Our website, CJRU.ca, also hosts written content authored by our volunteers, including news pieces, music and film reviews, and other features.

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

CKMS 102.7 FM

CKMS 102.7 FM (Radio Waterloo) is a community radio station broadcasting independent and alternative music and culture to Waterloo Region.

Incorporated in 1977, Radio Waterloo Inc. is a nonprofit cooperative that is heavily involved in the local community. Our primary purpose is to maintain and operate a CRTC licensed FM radio station.

CKMS is a community-based radio station and is committed to training community members in the techniques of broadcasting. We are maintained by our programmer cooperative and managed by our volunteer staff and Board of Directors and are committed to serving the needs of community groups.

Our content is generally different than what you would hear from commercial airwaves in that we attempt to introduce our listeners to new ideas and perspectives in a way that will benefit the local community. We emphasize exposure of issues and activities that are important to the local community while also supporting and driving local talent.

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

Coastal Jazz and Blues

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

Concordia University

Raah is a research lab on Media and Migration housed at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University. Raah is Urdu/Farsi for path/passage/route—a word that is often used when thinking or talking about practices of migration. These paths, passages, routes can also refer to how academics, artists, and community activists work in order to address migration. Raah brings together scholars, artists and community organizers to conceptually and artistically theorize the emerging field of media and migration studies.

Raah is proud to sponsor award-winning inter-disciplinary artist Amitesh Grover’s work for the IF Festival entitled ‘How I Got Here’. In the work, Grover commemorates 75 years of India’s Partition, and the resulting Independence.  In the project, he reproduces a series of digital photographs from his family archive.  Each photograph depicts a member of his family who experienced the 1947 Partition of India and was compelled to migrate to the ‘other side.’ The photographs chosen for this series contain personal stories of the Partition, each an inheritance handed down to the artist through tellings and re-telling. 

In this piece, Grover, breaks the code that visualises the digital elaborations. The pixels of an image, when translated into the alphanumeric ASCII code, are a non-intelligible sequence of characters that contain all the information required to hold the image together. He writes into this ASCII code the stories of his family members, and in doing so, introduces memories into the impersonality of image data. This conscious act of ‘interference’ corrupts the image data to produce glitches and cracks in the resulting image. Using techniques of data bending to shape the transformative process, the original photograph disappears to produce, in its place, images that are broken, damaged, wrecked. In forcing data to coexist with personal (and collective) memories, he makes the injuries (re)appear in digital form. In the end, what emerges is not a photograph but an image that is itself wounded, carrying the bodies and stories of those partitioned from their land. 

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

DownBeat Magazine

DownBeat magazine is the granddaddy of American music magazines. DownBeat covers the world of Jazz, Blues & Beyond to bring back the best in jazz and blues as well as its offshoots. Folks can subscribe to DownBeat magazine at downbeat.com!

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

Ed Video

Ed Video is Guelph’s Artist-Run Centre

OUR MISSION/MANDATE: As a charitable artist-run centre, our mission is to foster the creation, exhibition, and appreciation of media arts.

OUR VISION: Ed Video is a leader in the creation, promotion, and appreciation of independent media art in Canada. Ed Video is an inclusive and innovative educational centre that supports artists and diverse communities in all aspects of media arts. Ed Video exists to instigate and enable the creation and exhibition of independent media arts. Anyone can become a member, take part in workshops and events, or rent equipment.

OUR HISTORY:

Since 1976, we have helped members create video-based projects that represent the diversity, spirit and viewpoints of the people in our region. We achieve this by offering skill-enriching workshops at a variety of experience levels and renting video production equipment at rates that are affordable for users at all levels.

Ed Video creates lasting links between artists, audiences, and organizations in our role as an established cultural centre in a city renowned for being vibrant with creativity. Above all, Ed Video is committed to the Educational potential that video has for creators and viewers, young and old, and promoting the control and comprehension of contemporary video-based art.

Contrary to what our name suggests, Ed Video does not serve only video artists. Our membership explores the creative potentials of many forms of art, including: film, sound art, installation, and new media.

There has never been a better time to get involved with Ed Video.

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

Electric Eclectics

Electric Eclectics takes place on a farm overlooking the scenic Big Head Valley, just outside of Meaford, Ontario. The farm features some of the best sunsets you will ever see.

Each year, we assemble an eclectic program of avant-garde and crossover musicians, as well as art installations, DJs, and films.

Past highlights have included Suzanne Ciani, Dreamcrusher, Mykki Blanco, Silver Apples, Lido Pimienta, Iskwé, Lee Ranaldo & Leah Singer, Lydia Lunch & Weasel Walter, US Girls, Jennifer Walsche, Julianna Barwick, Damo Suzuki, Tony Conrad, Laura Ortman, Tim Hecker, HEALTH, The Gories, Carla Bozulich, Mary Margaret O’Hara, Katie Stelmanis (Austra), Chelsea Wolfe, Let’s Paint TV, Petra Glynt, Alexander Hacke, Danielle de Picciotto, Edwin van der Heide, Shelley Hirsch, and Dorit Chrysler.

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

Elysium Gallery

Elysium is an artist led, not-for-profit social enterprise comprising 84 artist work-spaces, a contemporary art gallery, venue, and bar over 4 locations in Swansea City Centre, Wales, United Kingdom. Elysium gallery promotes the work of contemporary visual artists by providing a solid platform from which they can anchor themselves and provide a comprehensive national and international network to increase their exposure and develop their practice whilst showcasing and making accessible contemporary art within the City and County of Swansea.

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

Hillside Festival

The Hillside Summer Festival and Hillside Inside are three-day, multi-stage events with a broad artistic vision that emphasizes diversity: of culture, of musical heritage and style, of age, geography and influence.

Set in a beautiful, accessible conservation area with campgrounds on Guelph Lake, our summer festival is world-renowned as one of Canada’s most progressive, environmentally conscious, completely non-commercial community celebrations. We create a village on Guelph Lake Island that we fill with music, dance, drumming, food, crafts, and more.

For IF 2023, Hillside Festival is co-presenting Now & Then: Colossal Jam IV (featuring Daniel Lanois, Elaquent, and Nels Cline Singers), a workshop performance from the 2015 edition of the Hillside Festival.

Festival Sponsor

IICSI

The International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI) is a partnered research institute, funded through a SSHRC partnership grant, that investigates how improvisation can improve life. IICSI’s mandate is to create positive social change through innovative scholarship, impactful arts events, and community-oriented activities. Our Institute works with scholars, students, creative practitioners, and community partners to practice and study improvisation as a model for social change. This research has resulted in the development of new technologies for making sound; large-scale celebratory community gatherings; numerous publications, including hundreds of articles published through our Institute’s peer-reviewed journal; workshops for youth; artist talks; and academic conferences. The University of Guelph also offers graduate programs in Critical Studies in Improvisation, which arose from years of IICSI’s award-winning, arts-based research and training. Since 2020, IICSI has put on the annual IF Festival, presenting improvisational artists of all disciplines from around the world.

The project team for the Institute includes 75+ researchers and 65+ community partners around the globe, as well as several Student Research Assistants and core staff members. The Institute has key sites at University of Guelph, McGill University, Memorial University, University of Regina, Carleton University, the University of British Columbia, Queen’s University Belfast (N. Ireland), and 17, Institute of Critical Studies (Mexico). 

The Institute was founded in 2013 and builds on funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), as well as contributions from the host institution, sites, and many partners.

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

LASALLE College of the Arts

Asia’s leading tertiary institution in contemporary arts and design education and practice. LASALLE College of the Arts offers 30 diploma, undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in fine arts, design communication, interior design, product design, film, animation, fashion, dance, music, theatre, arts management, arts pedagogy and practice, art therapy, Asian art histories and creative writing. LASALLE provides a nurturing, interdisciplinary learning environment to inspire the next generation of forward-looking, globally engaged artists, designers and leaders of creative industries. Its faculty is led by a community of award-winning artists, designers, educators and researchers, and their practice-led research sets LASALLE apart as an international centre of excellence. LASALLE is a non-profit private educational institution founded in 1984 by the late De La Salle Brother Joseph McNally, a visionary artist and educator. For IF 2023, LASALLE College of the Arts is showcasing a variety of performances from their CHOPPA Experimental Electronic Music Festival, which took place in September, 2023.

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

Mariposa Festival

Mariposa Folk Festival is an all-inclusive showcase of Canada’s heritage, cultures and talents, and fosters community engagement. Our Festival profiles over 100 artistic performances of emerging and established folk artists on 11 stages. Mariposa Folk Foundation is a proud member of Folk Music Ontario, Festivals and Events Ontario, Folk Alliance Canada, Music Canada Live and the Archives Association of Ontario.

Festival Sponsor

Musagetes

Musagetes is an international organization that makes the arts more central and meaningful in people’s lives, in our communities, and in our societies.

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

National accessArts Centre (NaAC)

Founded in 1975 as the In-Definite Arts Society, the National accessArts Centre (NaAC) is Canada’s oldest and largest disability arts organization – and in 2020, became the country’s first multidisciplinary disability arts organization. Today, the NaAC supports more than 300 artists living with developmental and/or physical disabilities through on-site studio supports and workshops, and an even broader community of Canadian artists with disabilities through immersive programs delivered online.

The NaAC Professional Dance Ensemble was formerly part of the Momo Movement organization prior to its merger with the NaAC. These artists consistently push the boundaries conceptually and physically. Creating original works, the Ensemble often works in multidisciplinary capacities including spoken word, visual art and movement into their performances. Some of our performers have been working together for more than 10 years on various projects and trainings.

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

NOW Society

We present the values of creative improvisational music through performances, workshops, concerts, tours, recordings and publications in Vancouver and abroad. We create community through respectful collaboration and partnerships. We are committed to reflecting our times and location through the presentation of varied artists, providing opportunities for diverse collective creation. The values of egalitarianism, representation, inclusiveness, parity and non-hierachical forms are vital to our practices. Our social space, 8EAST, is for gathering and the making and sharing of new culture; a safe space for voices to speak and be heard.

We gratefully acknowledge that we make music on the unceded and Indigenous lands of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and səlil̓wətaʔɬ Nations. Our social space for new culture, 8EAST, is located in historic Chinatown in the place now known as Vancouver. We collaborate with artists around the world.

The NOW Society began as a community initiative designed to support the vibrant community of Vancouver improvisers. Lisle Ellis, Paul Cram, Paul Plimley, Gregg Simpson and Ralph Eppel founded the New Orchestra Workshop (NOW) Society in 1977. Since then, leadership has also included Clyde Reed, Paul Bruce Freedman, Graham Ord, Kate Hammet Vaughan, Don Druick, Roger Baird, Ron Samworth, Nikki Carter and since the spring of 2014, Dr. Lisa Cay Miller. NOW has a history of presenting stellar new works by improvising ensembles in unique and engaging concerts, of collaborating with international artists of commissioning new compositions, of domestic and international touring, and of producing celebrated recordings and publications. NOW Society presents improvisation workshops, and has been presenting them public for over 40 years at the Western Front. Our most exciting new program is the establishment of the 8EAST social space for new culture. Workshops take place at 8EAST, as well as creative improvised music performances, community collaborative events, and informal historical and neighbourhood talks.

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

Nusica.org

Nusica.org was founded in 2011, and its main purpose is the documentation and dissemination of new trends in jazz music and research. To give voice to this mission, nusica.org uses various tools: an open content record label, various educational and dissemination activities (workshops, lectures, meetings), and album and festival reviews. The founders of Nusica.org are Nicola Fazzini and Alessandro Fedrigo.

For their IF 2023 contribution, Nusica.org is sharing a performance recorded as part of their CREI (Composizione Ricerca e Improvvisazione) artist residency program. The performance features Nicola Fazzini, Federico Pierantonio, Ferdinando Romano, and Francesca Remigi. This performance was recorded June 11th, 2023 at Sile Jazz in Quarto D’Altino, Venice, Italy.

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

Quebec Writers’ Federation (QWF)

Supporting, Connecting, and Inspiring Quebec Writers

The Quebec Writers’ Federation is a vibrant and inclusive community organization that develops, supports, and promotes those writing in English in Quebec. QWF provides English-language programs, services, opportunities, and community for aspiring, emerging, and established writers and the wider community.

QWF offers workshops, mentorship, scholarships, and much more. We also host the annual QWF Literary Gala with book awards in seven categories and special prizes.

For more information, please visit qwf.org

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

Sonic Arts Research Centre

Since its founding in 2001, the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) at Queen’s University Belfast has become a globally recognised institute for music-based practice and research, broadly conceived. SARC brings together researchers in the fields of composition, performance, musicology, sound design, broadcast, critical studies in improvisation, digital signal processing, human computer interaction and auditory perception. A purpose designed building with a state-of-the-art Sonic Laboratory and multichannel studios was opened by Karlheinz Stockhausen in 2004 during Sonorities Festival Belfast, which is hosted biennially by SARC. The Centre’s core membership combines staff who work in the SARC building with colleagues based in the nearby Music building, home to the Harty Room concert hall. SARC also includes associate members based in computer engineering, anthropology, psychology and architecture who are involved in research collaborations and co-supervision of PhD students.

At IF 2023, SARC will present five performance from their Handmade Music series, an ongoing new experimental music night in Belfast. Artists featured include:

• Son Zept (aka Liam McCartan) and Aga Olek
• Xenia Pestova Bennett and Ed Bennett
• Kevin Murphy
• Matilde Meireles
• Róis & Jamie

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

Teesri Duniya Theatre

Founded in 1981 by Rahul Varma and Rana Bose, Teesri Duniya Theatre is one of the first culturally-inclusive companies in Canada, and one of its kind in Québec—producing plays by visible minorities and First Nations, and reflecting diverse Canadian and Québecois cultures.

95% of our productions are groundbreaking premieres directed by leading directors, including India’s iconic director Lt. Habib Tanvir.

Our productions range from Counter Offence, GG winner Reading Hebron (1990s), My Name is Rachel Corrie, and GG-winning First Nations play Where the Blood Mixes (2012) to dance-theatre such as The Encounters and international hits like Bhopal and State of Denial.

We are also proud to have launched the careers of many visible minority artists and playwrights. New plays and playwrights are at the heart of Teesri Duniya Theatre’s vision. We exist to produce bold, groundbreaking and culturally diverse plays that provoke conversation.

Festival Sponsors

The Government of Ontario

Funding provided by the Government of Ontario.

The views expressed in the various performances showcased at IF 2022 are the views of the individual artists and do not necessarily reflect those of the Province.

Festival Sponsor

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) is the federal research funding agency that promotes and supports postsecondary-based research and training in the humanities and social sciences.

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

UMFM 101.5 FM

UMFM 101.5 broadcasts at 1200 watts from the University Of Manitoba located on Treaty One territory, the original lands of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and the homeland of the Métis nation. Since our revitalization in 1997, UMFM has been providing a diverse range of music, talk, and specialty programming to the Winnipeg community and beyond. We pride ourselves on our ability to offer an alternative form of media for our listeners by providing a forum for music and voices that may otherwise go without.

Festival Sponsor

University of Guelph

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

Upstream

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

Westben

Westben is a magical blend of world class music, wonderful people and a magnificent setting.

For 20 years Westben has been about bringing people together through music, experiencing it in a natural setting. Westben is where the best of music and nature spring to life! Nestled amongst the peaceful hills of Northumberland County two hours east of Toronto, near Campbellford, Westben’s primary performance venue is a custom-built, timber-frame barn. The Barn seats 400 and combines state-of-the-art acoustics with a rustic yet sophisticated atmosphere. On sunny days from June to September massive walls and doors roll away allowing music to waft over the surrounding meadow. Performances at Westben’s summer festival, Concerts at The Barn range from Bach to Broadway, opera and symphony to jazz, folk, fiddle, global music and comedy. International and New Now performers are featured throughout the year at Westben’s Centre for Connection & Creativity. Westben offers interactive experiences in Dare to Share and Dare to Pair with local chefs, sommeliers, story tellers and musicians.

Partnering Organizations and Co-Presenters

WhatIIIF?

What IIIF? (International Interdisciplinary Improvisation Festival) is an annual nomadic and online festival that attempts to answer the absurd question: Can improvisation be documented?

Improvisers from all disciplines and over 21 countries gather in WhatIIIF? to answer this absurd question through performance, practice, writing and lunch. Since 2016, we organize yearly gatherings and during the pandemic, WHAT IIIF? Nowhere & Everywhere gathers humans, trees and rocks, skies and dirt, spices and leaves, and raindrops and rooftops into a vibrant poetic analogue visual and sound aesthetic on Zoom. Championed for the space it holds, even when you cannot come, it’s been forty minutes of joy every Wednesday since April 2020.

The impetus for WHAT IIIF? came from the open improvisation knowledge base, www.improvisation.wiki, which is deadly cumbersome in its current state, but we believe can be a vibrant online universe that can be navigated with an improviser’s mindset, where work, tools and reflections can be continually added and intuitively organized, and which connects ideas, people and the public around this unique craft. Our dream is this.

Germany and Bulgaria

Abel Korinsky and Petya Stoykova

Trace

Abel Korinsky studied Music, German language and literature, social sciences and history at the University Wuppertal and completed with Master in Sound Studies at Berlin University of the Arts. www.korinsky.com

Petya Stoykova: New Bulgarian University, Sofia, BULGARIA—Bachelor in Ballet directing and Choreography; Artistic Director of Dune Dance Company

Headshot credit: Chris Schwagga

Québec, Canada

Alexis O’Hara

Alexis O’Hara is presented by Quebec Writers’ Federation (QWF)

To Be Determined

The work of Alexis O’Hara embodies the transcendent potential of the accidental, the universal magic of humour and the opportunity trapped in the stuff that people throw away.

She has co-created (with 2boys.tv) large-scale performance works with artists from marginalized communities (in Cuba, Mexico, Brazil and Nicaragua), traveled internationally with her spoken-noise performances and toured a very popular sound installation that offered a stage for spontaneous musical collaboration between strangers. She has released four albums, a book of poetry and enough helium-filled balloons to get her dress caught in a chandelier. Her work has been presented in diverse contexts in Slovenia, Serbia, Germany, Spain, The UK, Ireland, France, Belgium, and across Canada. In 2016, she was awarded the Powerhouse Prize by Canada’s longest-running feminist art gallery, La Centrale. Alexis and her drag king alter ego, Guizo La Nuit are mainstays of the Montreal cabaret scene. In collaboration with her partner Atom Cianfarani, Alexis is one half of Et tu, Machine, a collective dedicated to queer imagineering via interdisciplinary installations and actions.

Alberta, Canada

Alicia Barbieri

dragging beans | mending seams

Alicia Barbieri is an interdisciplinary artist from Southern Alberta. Her work expands into photography, textile, performance, video, and installation. She holds a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Lethbridge and an MFA from the University of Guelph. 

Alicia is interested in the blurred line between health and beauty and aims to dissect objectification in the current medical-industrial complex. Driven by her experiences with Wildervanck Syndrome, a congenital condition that has led to chronic pain, she considers the intangible wholeness of cure. She wants to share the strength in bodies being too much and not enough and give physical form to the infinite potential of the bodies discarded for failure to conform. Deeper healing requires an intimate type of care and understanding, only acquired through time. Through collaboration, performance, and craft practices, Alicia injects this time into the photographic process allowing material and interpersonal intersections to form. 

India

Amitesh Grover

Amitesh Grover is presented by Concordia University.

How I Got Here

Amitesh Grover (b. 1980, India) is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist. He moves beyond theatre into installation, video, digital and text-based art. His work delves into themes like the dyad of absence/presence, the necessity of remembering, and the performance of resistance to keep on living. He is the recipient of MASH FICA Award, Swiss Art Residency Award, Bismillah Khan National Award, Charles Wallace Award, and was nominated for Arte Laguna Prize (Italy), Prix Ars Electronica (Austria) and Forecast (HKW, Germany). His work has been shown globally at venues like Southbank Centre (London), Arts Centre (Melbourne), MT Space (Canada), HKW Berlin (Germany), Belluard Bollwerk International (Switzerland), The Hartell Gallery (U.S.), and in India at Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, The Chennai Photo Biennale, VAICA Video Art Festival, among several others. He has curated for ITFoK Festival (Kerala), Ranga Shankara (Bangalore), and Serendipity Arts Festival (Goa). He studied at University of Arts London, and teaches and writes on performance as well. He is currently based in New Delhi, India.

Québec, Canada

André Duchesne

Dessins d’hiver/ Winter drawings

André Duchesne was born in Jonquière, Quebec in 1949. As a teenager, he learned acoustic guitar. In the mid-1970s he formed an avant-garde folk-rock group called Conventum. Conventum was described by AllMusic as a mixture of “Quebec’s folk roots with absurd poetry and progressive arrangements”. They released two albums, À l’Affût d’un Complot in 1977 and Le Bureau Central des Utopies in 1979.

In 1983 Duchesne, Lussier, Derome and Lepage  formed Ambiances Magnétiques, a musical collective and a label specializing in avant-garde music. Duchesne released his first solo album, Le Temps des Bombes on the new label in 1984. Then he began writing contrapuntal compositions for a guitar quartet, and formed Les 4 Guitaristes de l’Apocalypso-Bar: a concept that Duchesne said was from post-apocalypse Canada “inspired by the ghost of Jimi Hendrix”.

 In 1992, he released Locomotive, an album that AllMusic called “the pinnacle of André Duchesne’s discography.”

He also released 1999’s Réflexions, an album of classical guitar solos, and, in 2001, Polaroïde, a free improvisation session for guitar, viola and percussion. 2004’s Cordes à danser features a string quartet and a “power trio” of guitar, bass and drums.

Since, he has never stopped, having released the following albums: Arrêter les machines (2006), Cantates électriques (2015), Travaux Publics (2021).

Canada

Anh Phung

Anh Phung is co-presented by Mariposa Folk Festival

Birds (ft samples from Birds by AlexWhorms)

“Anh Phung is a shining example of the modern musician: as a child, she earned her virtuosity while sweeping flute contests across Canada, and has since used her mastery of the flute as a compass to navigate countless styles of music, constantly learn new instruments and consistently deliver exciting performances. Not bothered by the conventions and standard limitations of the flute, her powerful musical voice steers her through everything from hip-hop to bluegrass to Bulgarian folk music, and she is the leader of prog-rock tribute band Tullstars and performance art act Hairbrain. Catch Anh Phung on the mainstage at a summer festival facing off with the lead guitarist, or slinking around the basement after-hours at a free jazz club, but blink and she’s off chasing the next new sound.” -Alan Mackie 

Ontario, Canada

Ann Westbere

Nature in Motion

Ann is a PhD candidate in the Critical Studies in Improvisation Program, a musician, a photographer, and a researcher.

Nature in Motion features up-close short videos of interactions in nature in the Spring and Summer of 2022. It features birds, insects, plants, wind, water, and the urban playground creating conversations. Some videos are without sound to focus on the interplay of movements and give a sonic pause between clips, while others focus on improvisatory sounds. All of these elements come together to create a larger soundscape. Nature in Motion aims to capture the micro-level daily interactions of nature and urban soundscapes. The listener is welcome to use their imagination while engaging with it.

For the descriptive text of Nature in Motion, please visit the following Google Document during IF 2022: Nature in Motion Descriptive Text – IF 2022

Ontario, Canada

annais linares

dream temple

raised in the dry and awfully warm Coachella Valley, annais linares is a vocalist, improviser, and collaborator with a thing for words. she seeks to co-create socio-spiritual arts projects with her communities, play collectively, and adapt to real “seasons.” email her at alinares@uoguelph.ca! 

Ontario, Canada

Anne Bourne

milk

Anne Bourne, composer/improviser and artist, documents the geopoetics of shorelines and spectral wave patterns. Seasoned in international songwriting, intermedia performance, and recording arts, Anne composes emergent streams of cello with voice, altered piano, field recordings, oral histories, and text.

A long time collaborator of composer Pauline Oliveros, Anne premiered Primordial/Lift and was one of the first to be awarded a certificate to impart Oliveros’ Deep Listening text scores and listening practice. Founder of Sounding Difference—an experience of listening, non-narrative sounding, and collective creativity produced by David Dacks at the Music Gallery in Toronto—Anne brought this practice to OCADU; York and Concordia Universities; Acts of Listening Lab; Emily Carr University of Art + Design; The Banff Centre for Art and Creativity; Killowatt Festival in Bologna, IT; and to MM_MMM in Geneva, CH with Ione. Anne composes and records independently and facilitates listening and sound-making over distance online with audiovisual works in gardens and wild park shorelines.

A Chalmers Fellow, Anne explores sound fields and microtonal voice practices where water meets land to listen, to contribute to renewal of the balance of human and more than human for sonics as a living topographical map at the intersection of nature and creative technology.

Mexico

ARMS Ana Ruiz, Mauricio Sotelo

ARMS

Group members: Ana Ruiz and Mauricio Sotelo

For this IF 2022 edition, Ana Ruiz has invited multi-instrumentalist musician Mauricio Sotelo, whose sound is based on the sonorous qualities of unique hand-made instruments like the Bicéfono and the Jarana Prisma; Chapman Stick player as well, Sotelo applies different execution techniques, electronics and live-looping resources to expand his way of imagining and creating music on live context. http://www.mauriciosotelo.com.mx

Mexican pianist and composer dedicated to improvisation and pioneer of free jazz in Mexico since 1973. Founded the group “Atrás del Cosmos”. “Atrás del Cosmos” and National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA) invited Don Cherry to play and teach the Organic Music. Published the Cassette “Hot Dreams, Cold Drinks”. Met Terry Riley and study oriental music. Played the vibraphone in Terry Riley’s “In C” at the University Cultural Center. Participated as a pianist in the improvisation group La Cocina. Composed commissioned music for the Educational Television Unit of the Sep and the ILCE. At the Manuel M. Ponce Hall of Fine Arts played harmonium in the Music of India concert with Sunanda Patnaik, voice, and Swapan Chauduri, tabla. Participated in the REA Sound Sculptures exhibition at ASU West (Arizona State University) in Phoenix, Arizona. Under the auspices of the Fonoteca Nacional, works on the recovery of the music of the group “Atrás del Cosmos”. Formed the group Free Jazz Women and released a CD, and formed Cihuatl, a group of women dedicated to improvisation. Released his first solo piano CD “And the world exploded into love” and “All & everything”. Both can be heard at anaruiz.bandcamp.com Invited to the IF festival,2020. Inaugurated the Sound Experimentation and Improvisation Center, in Tepoztlán Morelos, with Naima Karlsson and Carlos Icaza as students. In Fundacion Sebastian directs and plays with a group of 10 musicians. Director, arranger and pianist with Ensamble Kóryma Played solos and duets in Oslo, Norway with Naima Karlsson.

Headshot credit: Fernando Aceves

Ontario, Canada

Ben Finley

daybreak and sundown

Ben Finley is a performer, composer, improviser and poet specializing in acoustic and electric bass (in multiple tunings and effects). He grew up on a music festival farm, witnessing many ecosystems of music-making. The seeds of co-creative agency were sewn; Ben aims to cultivate music that celebrates its participants’ unique life experiences. This often manifests through improvisation, hybrid texts, the human voice, electro-acoustic worlds, learning from/with the biosphere, arts-based community projects, and exploring multi-stylistic compositional frameworks. Ben is the co-founder and Creative Director of the Westben Centre for Connection & Creativity’s international/multi-generational Performer-Composer Residency. He is a current PhD candidate in the Critical Studies in Improvisation program at the University of Guelph, exploring creative ensemble music and music festivals as sites of eco-cultural restoration. You can find out more about these projects and listen to the music he co-creates here: www.benfinleymusic.com. 

Ontario, Canada

Ben Finley, annais linares, Reza Yazdanpanah, and Michelle Beltran

Ben Finley, annais linares, Reza Yasdapaneh, and Michelle Beltran are presented by The Arboretum

Ephemeral Pond

annais linares (voice), Reza Yazdanpanah (tar), and Ben Finley (double bass) met through their graduate studies at the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI). Michelle Beltran is a naturalist at the University of Guelph’s Arboretum. Together, in the piece ‘ephemeral pond,’ they invite you on a virtual walk to explore multiple ways of listening to the old-growth Wild Goose Woods at the Arboretum. How do we hear the vibrant life of this pond that flourishes and erases with the seasons? How might multiple ways of knowing, playing, storytelling, and perceiving this forest deepen our engagement and sense of responsibility and belonging? This piece is an early iteration of a forthcoming project organized by Ben Finley called SoundBound! (to be held in the Arboretum on September 11, 2022), which explores coming together through place-based creative music, exchanging multiple environmental knowledges, and finding collective paths forward to restoring our relationship with ecosystems. 

Ontario, Canada

Ben Gorodetsky and Hayley Kellet

Pinch

Hayley Kellett is a co-founder of The Making-Box where she helps individuals and organizations foster adaptability and creativity through applied improvisation. She’s also taught and performed around the globe with The Second City as part of Tour Co and Second City at Sea. She is 1/5 of Guelph’s all-queer, all-women/non-binary improv powerhouse the Phlegm Fatales and has performed at Big City Improv (Toronto), Boston Improv Festival, Detroit Improv Festival, and Del Close Marathon (New York). Hayley serves as the President of the Guelph Comedy Festival and performs annually at Hillside Festival. Hayley is a recipient of Guelph’s Top 40 Under 40 award (2017), a Canadian Comedy Award Nominee (2015), a YMCA-YWCA Guelph Woman of Distinction (2018) and was nominated for a Guelph LGBT2QI+ Community Award (2019).

Ben Gorodetsky is an improviser, writer, and producer based in Kitchener, Ontario. He is co-creator of political satire comedy duo Folk Lordz (VICE) and has performed, taught, and directed improvisation at The Magnet Theatre (NYC), Out of Bounds Comedy (Austin), UCB (LA), Highwire Comedy (Atlanta), English Lovers (Vienna), IGLU (Ljubljana), and FERIIR (Reunion Island). His performance work has been presented by Movement Research at Judson Church, The Tank NYC, Mile Zero Dance, Expanse Festival of Movement Arts, and Guelph Dance Festival. He is the former Associate Artistic Director of Rapid Fire Theatre and a nominee for a Canadian Comedy Award. He has taught at UBC Okanagan, and holds a BFA from the University of Alberta and an MFA from Brooklyn College-CUNY.

Ontario, Canada

Bob Wiseman

Old is New Again

Bob Wiseman began writing and performing while still just a zygote. Later, taking on a coat of fur and several lengthy whiskers, it became clear this was not Bob, but Bob’s dog. Soon after, Bob was advised to get real about his bio. Okay: “So simple, so brilliant.” —Guy Maddin. “I know who Bob Wiseman is.” —Odetta.  “My worst piano student.” —Pearl Schneider.  

Esmé Wiseman is ten and studies violin with Soozi Schlanger of Swamperella fame. Her bike has a banana seat and she bakes muffins through improvisation. 

Ontario, Canada

Brent Rowan

Urban Farm Sound Garden

Brent Rowan is a professional community musician.  As a Guelph, Ontario, Canada-based saxophonist, Brent performs in a wide variety of musical collaborations; including 2009 and 2015 Juno Nominated Eccodek, Big Bands, smaller jazz combos, and creative music ensembles.  Brent has performed and recorded all across Canada, the UK and Germany, at music festivals in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and London England to name a few. He has released three recordings of his own compositions; “It’s About Time” in 2006, “IZ” in 2012 and “Where is Local” in 2016. 

He has been the founding director of both the Guelph Youth Jazz Ensemble and the New Horizons Band for Guelph. Brent has taught in the Community Music Program at Wilfrid Laurier University and jazz saxophone at the University of Guelph. He has adjudicated at music camps and festivals throughout southern Ontario, specializing in saxophone and improvisation concepts. 

Brent holds a Master of Arts in Critical Studies in Improvisation, from the University of Guelph, a Master of Arts in Community Music, from Wilfrid Laurier University, a Bachelor of Music from Humber College and a Bachelor of Mathematics from the University of Waterloo. Brent is currently a PHD student in Critical Studies in Improvisation University of Guelph. 

Ontario, Canada

Brian Finley

Brian Finley is an Artistic & Managing Director at The Westben Centre for Connection & Creativity

Group members: Rebecca Baptista (dancer), Lauren Lafayette-Brooks (dancer) Stephen Dagg (videographer), Brian Finley (concept, piano and director)

Forest Friends

An improvisation from Finding Your Inner Mozart by Brian Finley.  

Where does everything line up for you?  Where does it all come together?  Where, on your journey through life’s challenges, concerns and ups & downs, do you stop and say “here!”?  

In short, where is your Inner Mozart?  

Of course, it doesn’t have to be Mozart. Choose anything you want. For me, it’s Mozart! The music of Mozart can satisfy any situation: charming, funny, poignant, devastating – you name it. It can capture any human emotion and depict any setting I can imagine. Its glorious secret may be that it is uniquely able to find the simple beauty in all things. As such, it is the perfect meeting point between the human and the divine – and fully both.  

My life, therefore, is a joyful search for my Inner Mozart – that happy place where everything lines up in a beautiful simplicity – my “here!”.  

“Forest Friends” is one movement of several in this project called Finding Your Inner Mozart. With totally improvised choreography, the piece features an original piano solo called “Intimacy No. 3” by Brian Finley. Conceived as a duet of peaceful harmony, the video was shot amongst the beautifully natural surroundings of Northumberland County, right next to the Westben Centre near Campbellford Ontario.  

Enjoy! And here’s to your own Inner Mozart, whoever or whatever that may be! 

Dancers: Rebecca Baptista, Lauren Lafayette-Brooks 

Videography & Editing: Stephen Dagg // SDG 

Sound: Andy Thompson, Northumberland Music Studio 

Music: “Intimacy No. 3” by Brian Finley 

Conception & Direction: Brian Finley 

Singapore

Brian O’Reilly

Brian O’Reilly is a part of/presented by LASALLE College of the Arts

The Rapidity of Sleep

Brian O’Reilly works within the fields of electroacoustic composition, sound installations, moving images and noise music. He is also a contrabassist focusing on uncovering the inaudible textures and hidden acoustic microsounds of his instrument by integrating electronic treatments and extended playing techniques.

He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, focusing on sonic art, kinetic sculpture and analog video synthesis utilising the Sandin Image Processor. He was also at this time engaged in independent studies in music improvisation, composition and synthesis. He relocated to Paris in the late 1990s to research the composition methods of the composer and architect Iannis Xenakis. He worked extensively with Xenakis’ electronic music system utilizing graphic sonic synthesis of the UPIC. After a time of research at Les Ateliers UPIC, he received an appointment as the studio’s Musical Assistant, during which he also worked as music assistant for Luc Ferrari on his audio & video installation Cycle Des Souvenirs and Eliane Radigue on her electroacoustic work L’Ile Re-sonante amongst others.

Pursuing graduate studies in Electronic Music Composition at the University of California Santa Barbara’s Media Arts and Technology programme, where his collaborations with Curtis Roads began with the project Point Line Cloud, which won an Award of Distinction at Ars Electronica in 2002. Then relocating to San Francisco, he took a position as Operations Manager of Recombinant Media Labs, working on many projects for the Asphodel record label & recording studio. He has also received several international residencies and commissions, including invitations to work as a guest artist at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Germany, the SH Festival in Shanghai, KLEX – Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film, Video & Music Festival, LUFF – Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival, All Tomorrow Parties festival curated by Autechre and Signal Culture in New York.

O’Reilly has performed with and worked on projects with Eliane Radigue, Luc Ferrari, Curtis Roads, Zbigniew Karkowski, Garth Knox, Tomás Saraceno, Maryanne Amacher, Zeitkratzer, Dennis Wong, Otomo Yoshihide, Matmos, Christian Marclay, Toshimaru Nakamura, William Basinski, Phil Niblock, Carlos Casas, Yong Yandsen, Fe-Mail, Yasunao Tone, Siew-Wai Kok, Lillevan, Darren Moore, Tim O’Dwyer, George Chua, Andreas Schlegel, Vladimir Todorovic, Anla Courtis, SA the Collective, Bani Haykal, Francisco López, The Observatory, Steina and Woody Vasulka, amongst others.

In addition to his solo performances and works for moving images, he also plays modular analog synthesizer and generates visuals in the duos Black Zenith and Electromagnetic Objects and contributes contrabass & electronics to the noise-jazz group Game of Patience. Currently, he is a lecturer at LASALLE’s College of the Arts, School of Contemporary Music, focusing on electronic music composition, visual music and creative music-making techniques through the use of improvisation.

Ontario, Canada

Carey West and Jeff Wilson

Even a Building, Even a Stone

Carey West and Jeff Wilson have been collaborating consistently since 2000 on a range of musical projects. Carey is a vocalist, songwriter, and researcher whose work explores questions surrounding voice, agency, and improvisation. She is currently a PhD Candidate in the Critical Studies in Improvisation program at the University of Guelph. She continues to perform and record. Jeff Wilson is a percussionist, multi-instrumentalist, and producer, who has worked with Maza Meze, Jaffa Road, and Ensemble Polaris among others. He also works as a dance accompanist spending many hours improvising under the direction of choreographers such as Jon Bonham, Serge Bennathan, and Janet Johnston. 

Vocals & Arrangement – Carey West 

Drumkit, Gong, Coronet, Oud, Saw, and Temple bell – Jeff Wilson 

Philosophical musings – Frances Wilson 

Visuals – Dragonfly 

British Columbia, Canada

Carol Sawyer

Carol Sawyer is presented by NOW Society

Bewegung und Novembertag

Carol Sawyer (she/her) is a visual artist and singer working with photography, video, and improvised music. Her visual artwork investigates the connections between photography and fiction, performance, memory, and history. Her ongoing and expansive project, the Natalie Brettschneider Archive, records the exploits of a fictional avant-garde singer. Rooted in research and entangled with the stories of real events and people, the archive acts as a feminist critique of the sexist narratives of art history that have minimized or excluded the work of women. 

Bewegung und Novembertag is based on two poems by Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, an early twentieth century avant-garde poet and performance artist. Many credit her as the maker of the first “readymade”, and the true mother of DADA. 

Sawyer has an Honours diploma in photography from ECUAD, and a Masters in interdisciplinary arts from SFU. Sawyer studied classical singing, focusing on opera and art song, before training in extended voice with Richard Armstrong. She has performed extensively in improvised music contexts in Vancouver, and incorporated her singing voice into her artworks in performances and videos. She has released three CDs with her improvising ensemble ion Zoo, and collaborated and recorded with American composer and trombonist Michael Vlatkovich. A Natalie Brett Quartet LP is currently at the pressers, and will be ready for a launch date in September 2022. 

In 2017 The Canada Council awarded Sawyer the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography. In 2021, she was nominated for the prestigious Scotiabank Photography Award. 

Headshot credit: Michael O’Connell

New York, United States

Cat Toren and Xavier Del Castillo

Cat Toren & Xavier Del Castillo

Cat Toren is a Juno Award-winning Canadian pianist and composer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her style is described as “vibrant, earthy and spiritual” (UK Vibe). Joining her in this performance is Seattle-born saxophonist Xavier Del Castillo. Toren and Castillo met at a performance in Montreal and soon after started performing together in Cat Toren’s HUMAN KIND. They have released two albums together, most recently “Scintillating Beauty” on Panoramic Recordings (2020). This album received critically acclaimed reviews including five stars in UK Vibe, four stars in the All Music Guide and was included in Bandcamp Daily’s “The Best New Jazz on Bandcamp”. Both musicians are a valued part of the Brooklyn improvised music scene.

Québec, Canada

Cédric Dind-Lavoie

J’avais une tant jolie fille (with Josephine Roach, recorded in 1957)

It is on an old 4-track recorder that multi-instrumentalist and composer Cédric Dind-Lavoie, then a teenager, discovered his passion for studio recording. But what would occupy him the following years is a prolific career as a bassist/double-bassist, with a keen interest in West African Mandingo music (Balla Tounkara, Bolo Kan) and Québecois folklore (Bon Débarras, Yves Lambert). 

More recently, Cédric came back to his roots as a producer (Kyra Shaughnessy, Bon Débarras) and as a composer for theatre and contemporary dance shows (Les Archipels, Zeugma). Meanwhile, he has released two albums of original compositions: presenting Middle-Eastern-flavored jazz pieces with the Mismar ensemble in 2015, then, a first solo release in 2018 on the British label Preserved Sound and featuring nine neoclassical inspired piano compositions. 

This journey eventually led him to Archives (2021), an effort joining folklore to ambient and introspective music, which has the particularity of featuring French-Canadian archival recordings around which he deploys his arrangements. As if Cédric Dind-Lavoie had been able to slip through the cracks of time to meet these voices, hear their stories and play with them. 

Ontario, Canada

Chris Binkowski (Bucko Art Machine)

Strawberry Sendoff

Group members: Chris Binkowski (Bucko Art Machine), Eliza Niemi

Chris Binkowski, also known as Bucko, is an emerging artist working primarily in electronic music performance. Central to Bucko’s work is the idea of music as a dynamic way to express oneself and connect with people. In his own words, Bucko states “every time I perform music live it is an act of advocacy for inclusion and accessibility.” 

Technically, Bucko utilizes an iPhone mounted to his wheelchair to control a myriad of synthesizer applications, generating interwoven gestures that range from deeply serene to outright unhinged. 

In this performance, Bucko presents a special duo version of the Bucko Art Machine. He is joined by special guest Eliza Niemi (Mauno) on cello. Taking a cue from Erik Satie’s Furniture Music philosophy, Bucko and Eliza created a 45 minute improvised soundtrack for Club SAW’s courtyard. Both musicians created a non stop sound while also taking timed moments to eat food such as strawberries, chocolates and potato chips. Eliza also assisted with feeding Bucko. Their table, though slightly separated from the rest, was in solidarity with the rest of the occupied tables in the courtyard. This video captures the last 10 minutes of the performance. 

Bucko’s musical output is equally innovative and intriguing, often taking audiences on a brave sonic expedition. In concert, Bucko has opened for like minded artists, such as Jessica Moss, Organ Mood and Danielle Dahl, performing his solo music to receptive audiences at Club SAW and Arboretum Festival. 

As an artist with a disability, accessibility, visibility, and representation is very important to Bucko’s practice. He is an ambassador in the Ottawa arts community for accessibility in creative spaces, and is a recognized scene-builder and pioneer for his work in the experimental music circles. CBC awarded Chris the ‘2021 Trailblazer’ prize for his leadership in the arts. Currently, Bucko is working on his debut album alongside producer Nick Schofield. This body of work fuses his iPhone synthesis with other musicians, to form the Bucko Art Machine. 

Headshot credit: Nick Schofield

Ontario, Canada

Chris Worden

The Procrastinator’s Lament (Hum, Malfunctioning Amplifier, and Guitar – July 6)

Chris Worden is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Guelph. He is the co-founder and former artistic director of Electric Eclectics, an annual festival of experimental music and media art. He sits on the board of directors for Kazoo Fest and the Guelph Jazz Festival. His solo music project is called Natural Thirst. He used to play in Gates, Wolfcow, and somehow played in three unconnected bands with two-word names beginning with “B” (Baby Cages, Bile Sister, and Bonnie Trash). He does not know the odds of that having happened to him. Sometimes he does comedy. He is the co-host of a forthcoming podcast series called The Dot Connectors. He also wrote this bio. 

Saskatchewan, Canada

Christian Riegel

Eye Music: Eye Movement Music Creation

Group members: Christian Riegel, Katherine M. Robinson, Tait Larsen, Patrick Larsen

The Interactive Media, Poetics, Aesthetics, Cognition, and Technology (IMPACT) Lab (University of Regina) is an advanced interdisciplinary eye tracking and technology lab that focuses on developing art creation tools for people with disabilities, conducts research studies in cognitive science, digital literature, and in the user experience of technology relating to eye movements.  

The lab is co-directed by Christian Riegel, PhD, FRSA, Professor of Health Humanities and English and Katherine M. Robinson, PhD, FRSA, Professor of Psychology. Their work is funded by SSHRC, NSERC, and CFI. Tait Larsen and Patrick Larsen are research assistants in the lab working on software and hardware development as well as on various interdisciplinary eye tracker art creation projects.  

“Eye Music” is part of an ongoing research project, “‘Disrupt/ability’: Eye Tracking, Art Creation, Disability and Ableism”, that strives to harness the power of eye movements to create art and to develop art creation tools that require only eye movements. “Eye Music” can be used as an improvisational performance tool for solo performers and via networked connections with others.  

Belfast, N. Ireland

Conor McAuley, Kevin McCullagh, and Paddy McKeown

Conor McAuley, Kevin McCullagh, and Paddy McKeown are presented by SARC

Cuid a haon/Cuid a dó

‘McKeown/McAuley/McCullagh’ from Belfast, sit at the intersection of Irish traditional music, collective improvisation, free jazz, and human-computer interaction. Formed during lockdown, the trio came together considering the question of, what does it mean to be an Irish person playing improvised music today? The answer lies in their emergent sounds. 

The group uses Irish traditional tunes as a substrate, their musicking nourished, ethereal, improvised, and explosive. They ebb and flow with grace into chaos and beyond, returning to the immersive warmth of spectral electronics led by fiddle and guitar, suspended in a percussive bath of sound. 

The trio comprises of Conor McAuley on drums, Paddy McKeown on guitar and electronics, and Kevin McCullagh on fiddle and electronics.

Germany

crys cole

crys cole is presented by ArtsEverywhere Festival

crys cole – live improvisation July 21, 2022, Berlin Germany

crys cole is a Canadian sound artist now based in Berlin Germany. Working in composition, performance and sound installation she generates subtle and imperfect sounds through haptic gestures and seemingly mundane materials to create texturally nuanced works that continuously retune the ear. Cole has performed in Canada, Japan, Australia, Thailand, Singapore, the USA, UK and throughout Europe. She has ongoing collaborations with Oren Ambarchi and with James Rushford (under the name Ora Clementi). She has also worked with Francis Plagne, Leif Elggren, Tetuzi Akiyama, Seiji Morimoto, Jessika Kenney, David Rosenboom, Annea Lockwood, Keith Rowe, Lance Austin Olsen, Jamie Drouin, Mathieu Ruhlmann, David Behrman, Tim Olive and many more. Cole’s work has been published on various labels including Black Truffle, Penultimate Press, Ultra Eczema, Boomkat, Students of Decay and Second Editions. She has exhibited her work in Canada, Russia, Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the UK and Thailand.

cryscole.com https://cryscole.bandcamp.com/

New Jersey, United States

D.D. Jackson

Solo Piano Ruminations on Trump & Home

D.D. Jackson is a 2x Emmy-winning composer/songwriter/producer and a Juno-winning jazz pianist/composer who has recorded 13 CDs of mostly original music as leader or co-leader (including 2 for the major label BMG), ranging from his Juno Award-winning solo piano CD “…so far”, to his larger-scale meditation on the events of 9/11 (“Suite for New York”).

He has also performed/recorded and/or toured around the world with diverse artists ranging from saxophonist David Murray, violinist Billy Bang and drummer Jack Dejohnette, to Questlove and Tariq Trotter of The Roots, and previously composed two jazz-influenced operas, including “Québécité” with librettist George Elliott Clarke (based in part on the story of his African American father and Chinese mother).

As a composer for television he has written songs and other music for a wide range of shows from Peg + Cat (PBS), to The Wonder Pets (Nickelodeon) and Sesame Street (PBS/HBO); and as a writer, he also penned a popular column for DownBeat magazine entitled “Living Jazz” for 5 years. As an educator, Jackson is an award-winning professor and is currently on faculty at: Jay-Z’s new “Roc Nation” school at Long Island University, Brooklyn, where he teaches courses covering Music Tech, piano, and music production; and at Brooklyn College, where he previously helped manage the Global Jazz Masters program and direct the Big Band, and where he currently teaches Media Scoring in their Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema.

D.D. lives in Maplewood, NJ (just outside of New York City) with his wife Elizabeth, their 15-year old son Jarrett and 13-year old daughter Aria.

Ontario, Canada

Dave Wilson

Galaxia-7B Silveroid (3 Dance Muses) – Coming Off Interior Ice

Dave’s dance company, The Parahumans are an interdisciplinary and experimental dance company. The company’s main focus is on Post-Contemporary Dance. This style (formally founded by the company, May 11, 2017) blends contemporary dance techniques along with everyday actions, theatre, novel movement, and semi-structured performance presentations.   

The company was founded in 1992 with the inaugural production of ‘Parazone Future.’  

The Parahumans performed in England in 1995, 2002, 2003 (London, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Derbyshire), and in Canada’s Fringe Festival of Independent Dance Artists (fFIDA), Dance Ontario Dance Weekend, Guelph Contemporary Dance Festival, and Art Gallery of Hamilton. 

Productions include – ‘Experimental Solo Dance Showcase’; ’21 Chopin Nocturnes’; ‘The 77 Minute Dance improv’; ‘coexisDance’; ‘Short Dances/New Blue Festival’; ‘Boy Dancer’ – a 47-minute documentary hip hop film – Fan’s Award at the 2011 New York – Long Island film festival’; Dance for Parkinson’s choreography; Plato Was A Raver (2001/2011) – 20-section dance story; ‘New Jazz Dance Improvisations’; 1880s dance in Hokusai’s ‘How To Teach Yourself Solo Dances’; 30 minute, Post-Contemporary Dance – ‘Solo Z: The Muscles Think In Infinite Parts.’ Dave recently performed in Pina Bausch’s Nelken Line, hosted by Moonhorse; Choreography for ‘Nesia’ – a Holocaust dance film, Director Mikel Guillen. 

Gujarat, India

Dhruv Jani (Studio Oleomingus)

Folds of a Separation.

Dhruv Jani is the founder of a game design and research studio called Oleomingus; Where he practices at the intersection of post-colonial writing, speculative architecture, and interactive fiction.  

He uses videogames to study colonial power structures and the histories that they occlude and explores the possibility of authoring hypertext that can be used to pollute and challenge a single reductive record of the past as a form of protest. 

His work is currently supported by the Serendipity Arts Foundation and Humble Bundle Inc, and he is the recipient of the AMAZE Humble Award 2020. He has also been a resident at Khoj International Artists Association, and has received an Arts Practice Grant from the India Foundation for the Arts. 

He has created and exhibited games at V&A London, G|39 Gallery in Cardiff,  Somerset House London, Phoenix gallery Leicester, Jawahar Kala Kendra Jaipur, Fantasia Malware in Berlin, VideoGame Art Gallery Chicago, TENT Biennale – Kolkata, Eye Myth – Mumbai, Shenzhen New Media Arts Festival, WordPlay at Ontario and at the Overkill Festival – among other places.  

Manitoba, Canada

Doreen Girard

Doreen Girard is presented by ArtsEverywhere Festival

Fleabane, Wind and Clover

Doreen Girard is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist working with sound, installation, and expanded cinema, and was a co-founder of the Negative Space and Bent Light artist collectives. She performs solo, and with the electro-acoustic piano duo Burden, as well as in a number of experimental and minimal sludge projects. Girard’s approach focuses on experimentation of the resonant and refractive properties of glass, wood, string and metal, aiming to activate the participant’s awareness of their perceptual field.

Her interests include early music, funereal doom, trauma theory, and the physics of sound and light. She has performed and presented work throughout North America.

Headshot credit: Robert Szolnicki

United States

Douglas R. Ewart

For the Love of Guelph

Douglas R. Ewart, Professor Emeritus at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1946. His life and his wide-ranging work have always been inextricably associated with Jamaican culture, history, politics, and the land itself. His father, Tom Ewart, was one of cricket’s most internationally celebrated professional umpires, eventually earning induction into the Cricket Hall of Fame. His aunt, Iris King, was a leading member of Norman Manley’s People’s National Party, and later, the first woman mayor in Jamaica.  

Professor Ewart immigrated to Chicago in 1963, where he studied music theory at VanderCook College of Music, electronic music at Governors State University, and composition at the School of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. The AACM is renowned for its wide-ranging experimental approaches to music; its leading lights include Muhal Richard Abrams, Joseph Jarman, Fred Anderson, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Lester Bowie, Kalaparusha Ara Difda, George Lewis, Malachi Maghostut Favors, Roscoe Mitchell, Amina Claudine Myers, Henry Threadgill, and many others, including Professor Ewart himself, who served as the organization’s president between 1979 and 1987. 

Professor Ewart’s extremely varied and highly interdisciplinary work encompasses music composition (including graphic and conceptual scores as well as conventionally notated works), painting and kinetic sound sculpture, and multi-instrumental performance on virtually the full range of saxophones, flutes, and woodwinds, including the flutes, pan-pipes, rainsticks and percussion instruments of his own design and construction for which he is known worldwide. Professor Ewart’s work as composer, instrument maker and visual artist has long reflected his understanding of the importance of sustainable and natural materials, particularly bamboo, which serves not only as primary physical materials for many of his sculptures and instruments, but also crucial conceptual elements of some of his most important recordings, such as the widely influential Bamboo Meditations At Banff 1993 and Bamboo Forest 1990. His visual art and kinetic works have has been shown at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Ojai Festival, Art Institute of Chicago, Institute for Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, and many others. 

His graphic/conceptual instrumental work Red Hills (1979), an homage to his native Jamaica, is very widely performed, and his work as a performing instrumentalist has been presented in the Caribbean (Jamaica, Cuba, and Haiti), Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Holland, UK), Japan, Bali, South America, Scandinavia, and Australia, as well as the United States and Puerto Rico, and recorded on numerous labels, including his own Aarawak recording company. Professor Ewart is the leader of such important musical ensembles as the Nyahbingi Drum Choir, Quasar, Orbit, Quasar, StringNets, and the Clarinet Choir, and in addition to his AACM colleagues, Professor Ewart has performed with Cedric Im Brooks, Ernest Ranglin, Cecil Taylor, James Newton, Anthony Davis, Robert Dick, Jin Hi Kim, Alvin Curran, Von Freeman, Yusef Lateef, Richard Teitelbaum, Mankwe Ndosi, Edward Kidd Jordan, Wadada Leo Smith, Steve Lacy, George Lewis, Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, and others. 

Professor Ewart’s highly communitarian work as a conceptual artist is best represented by Crepuscule (1993-present), a massive participation performance coordinated by his ensemble, Douglas R. Ewart and Inventions. Strongly informed by the Jamaican Jonkunnu tradition, Crepuscule is an all-day event that is collectively created by scores of musicians, dancers, visual artists, poets, capoeira, puppeteers, martial artists, activists, elders, children and more, in streets and parks in Chicago, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Paris, France, and more.  Moreover, this communitarian orientation has long included educational work in underserved communities, such as his work since 1992 in Minneapolis’s ArtStart, summer interdisciplinary arts program since its inception in 1992 and his work since 1980 at Chicago’s Urban Gateways Center for Arts Education, which was documented in the 1992 British telefilm On the Edge: Improvisation in Music. 

Among his many honors, Professor Ewart was personally presented with the Outstanding Artist Award by Chicago’s first African American mayor, Harold Washington.  He has received two Bush Artists Fellowship (1997, 2007), three McKnight Fellowships (1992, 1994 and 2001), among others, as well as the U.S.–Japan Creative Artist Fellowship (1987), a year-long residency in Yokohama where he studied Japanese techniques of instrument building. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and others. 

Ontario, Canada

Ellen Waterman

Bodily Listening in Place : Dusk at Warbler’s Roost

Ellen Waterman’s distinctive musical practice blends flute and vocalization. Her instructional score for intersensory improvisation Bodily Listening in Place was commissioned by New Adventures in Sound Art for World Listening Day 2022. Ellen has performed at national and international festivals and venues including Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound, Guelph Jazz Festival, Suoni Per Il Popolo, and the Onassis Stegi in Athens. She has participated in artist residencies including the Sound Travels Festival (Toronto), the Chicago Creative Music Workshop (Chicago Jazz Festival), Koumaria (Sellasia, Greece), and New Adventures in Sound Art. Her current projects include the improvisation duo Pama with Michael Waterman (theremin and invented instruments). Ellen holds the Helmut Kallmann Chair for Music in Canada at Carleton University where she directs the research centre for Music, Sound, and Society in Canada.

Headshot credit: Graham Blair

New Brunswick, Canada

Emily Kennedy

Chitticks Beach

Emily Kennedy is a cellist and sound maker based in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Often seen collaborating across disciplines and art forms, her personal writing is an opportunity to synthesize her classical training with her interests in improvisation, minimalism, and pop music. She mulls over translation, repetition, self-reflection, and time in her work, using field recordings, loop, and effect pedals to expand the possibilities of her instrument.

Her interest in performing and writing new music has brought her to Banff’s Concert in the 21st Century residency, the Britten-Pears: Composition, Alternative Performance and Performance Art program in Aldeburgh, UK, Montreal Contemporary Music Lab, and RE:FLUX Festival in Moncton, NB. This past winter Emily was part of the first cohort to participate in Pathwaves Incubator Program, a forward-looking learning engine led by the teams at Envision Management and OCAD.

As a classical musician, she frequently performs with the Elm City String Quartet, Symphony New Brunswick, Atlantic Sinfonia, and as a part of UNB’s music UNB Performance Series. Outside of the classical music world, Emily is active in genre-crossing projects, collaborating with pop musicians, poets, textile artists, and dancers. She has toured Eastern Canada with electronic project Property//, created installation work with all female electronic improv trio Terre Wa, and writes and sings for the string duo Pallmer.

Ontario, Canada

Emilyn Stam and John David Williams

Moving On

Ontario-based duo Emilyn Stam and John David Williams merge the voices of clarinet, violin, diatonic and chromatic accordions to create a modern sound steeped in tradition. They met in 2011 as members of the Lemon Bucket Orkestra. During quiet hours of busy tour schedules they discovered a similar sensibility in improvisation and composition, and began to create a distinctive duo sound mainly featuring clarinet and violin. They both draw on wide musical influences and experiences including Klezmer, early jazz and blues, and various fiddle traditions from Canada and abroad. Their first CD is a collection of original compositions based on improvisation and exploring playful instrumental duet dialogues. Currently, they are focusing on the folk music and dance traditions of western Europe. In addition to exploring traditional dance styles and tunes, they are developing a repertoire of original music meant equally for social dance and concert settings. They have released an album of this repertoire titled “Honeywood” in July 2020. They are also primary organizers of the first Canadian festival dedicated to music and dance from western Europe: The Big Branch Festival.

New York, United States

Eri Yamamoto

Eri Yamamoto “This World”

Since moving to the United States in 1995, Eri Yamamoto has established herself as one of jazz’s most original and compelling pianists and composers. Jazz legend Herbie Hancock has said, “My hat’s off to her… already she’s found her own voice.” 

During the past twenty-six years, Eri has been sharing her uniquely lyrical and evocative music with listeners in New York City, throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, Africa, Jamaica, and Australia; with appearances in concerts, clubs, and major festivals. 

In 2018 Eri premiered the Goshu Ondo Suite, an extended work for chorus and her trio. The suite is based on a traditional circle dance song from Shiga, Japan, and draws on the music of many cultures, including Japanese folk music, American jazz, gospel, and blues; and even Congolese Drum rhythms.  The live record has received popular and critical acclaim, receiving 4-star reviews, and being chosen among the top recordings of 2019. 

Eri has also been collaborating with such creative and celebrated musicians as William Parker, Daniel Carter, Hamid Drake, Federico Ughi, Yves Leveille and Paul McCandless. Eri has appeared on several William Parker recordings, including a solo piano CD of his original compositions. and has performed in the U.S. and throughout the world with his groups.

Québec, Canada

Éric Normand

Dionnée – octobre 2021

Éric Normand is an improviser, bassist, composer and printer. He lives in the small town of Rimouski (Eastern Quebec). He directs Tour de bras, an organization dedicated to improvisational music and multiplies cultural actions on a local and global scale. He is one of the founders of the Grand regional group of liberated improvisation ( GGRIL, 2007), an ensemble dedicated to the exploration of “ compositions for improvisers ” . 

Improviser, Éric Normand invents a personal and radical language. Armed with ” customized-house ” basses , he is a tamer of electricity who, through precise and light gestures, cultivates a refined room noise, but always at the edge of the ravine… Favoring the formula of dialogue, he is the interlocutor of several improvisers with the most singular languages, with an assumed penchant for reed colleagues, whether Xavier Charles ( Avis aux Reactors ), Philippe Lauzier ( Not the Music ) or Jim Denley ( Plant ). His multiple collaborations also make him cross paths with the composerJean-François Laporte , accordionist Robin Servant , trombonist Matthias Müller and trumpeters Petr Vrba and Franz Hautzinger . 

His musical activity is also deployed through the participation in numerous collectives and orchestras in projects involving many aesthetics and several creative processes ranging from jazz to acousmatic music, podcasting or song. On these paths he crossed paths with guitarist Louis Beaudoin-de la Sablonnière , gambist Pierre-Yves Martel , and even veteran pianist Burton Greene , or else he “ schemed a bad move ” with Jean Derome . He also co-fronts the free-folk band The Surruralists with guitarist Arthur Bull . 

As a composer, he creates ensemble music using various syntaxes. His works offer performers “ paths of sound gestures ” questioning the relationships between sounds and the way they are produced. Integrating unusual gestures and objects into concert music that is both austere and playful, he creates small sound theaters in which the performer is led to make decisions without ever ceasing to improvise. He has written pieces for several ensembles including the Quasar saxophone quartet , the Tone List quintet (Perth, Australia), as well as cellist Marina Hasselberg . 

A multiple artist, he also offers “ Manoeuvres ” , sound installations or films (alone or in collaboration with Anne-F Jacques , John Blouin or Annie St-Jean ). 

At the turn of the forties, he developed a belated interest in linocuts, prints and mail art. In 2021, he undertakes the creation of an epistolary score with Angélique Cormier (France), Gino Robair (USA), Mazen Kerbaj (Lebanon) and Yan Sun (China). 

He has released over 30 albums on Canadian and foreign labels and his music has been performed at various festivals in over 20 countries.

Netherlands

Ernst Reijseger

Thinking of Lelio Gianetto

Cellist and composer Ernst Reijseger is a creative partner of film and theatre makers, actors, storytellers, poets, dancers, dj’s, painters, sculptors, photographers, glass blowers, inventors, athletes, and horses. www.ernstreijseger.com

Reijseger is a genre-bender. His musical collaborations include improvised and jazz music (Harmen Fraanje, Han Bennink, Misha Mengelberg, Steve Lacy, Uri Caine, Deborah Brown), classical and baroque music (Yo Yo Ma, Giovanni Sollima, Erik Bosgraaf, Dutch Wind Ensemble, Forma Antiqua) and traditional music (Trilok Gurtu, Tenore e Concordu de Orosei, Groove Lélé, Nana Vasconcelos, A Filetta, Mola Sylla, Ceylan Ertem).

Apart from playing live concerts, Reijseger scored 12 films for Werner Herzog (a.o. The White Diamond, Cave of Forgotten Dreams) and the film Walking Out by Alex&Andrew Smith.

During summer 2017 he scored and performed his music to Shakespeare’s Hamlet at The Public Theatre in New York City (with a.o. Oscar Isaac, Keegan Michael Key, and Gayle Rankin, directed by Sam Gold).

Irish music filmmaker Myles O’Reilly frequently follows Ernst Reijseger’s encounters and tours. www.arbutusyarns.net

Reijseger’s catalog exceeds 200 albums. Reijseger’s first internationally distributed solo album was Colla Parte (1997). Since 2021, Reijseger’s music and videos are released on his label Spring Music, available on all digital platforms. www.springmusic.nl

Reijseger plays a five-string cello by Bolink & Steinhauer, granted by the Dutch National Foundation of Musical Instruments. He plays an electric five-string cello by NS Design. Cello strings are endorsed by Thomastik Infeld.

Ontario, Canada

Erwan Noblet

In the middle

Erwan Noblet likes to explore the infinite power of the human voice. He enjoys singing, acting, teaching, making music, and playing with his voice and body. He recently studied with mentors such as Bobby Mc Ferrin, Rhiannon, Robert Sussuma, and Jorge Parente. Erwan released 2 Eps under Layenn, co-wrote Concert Room—a theatre piece about the impact of hormones in music memory, collaborated with Ensemble Resauvage, and co-created Feedback Loop—an interactive exhibition about the future. In 2021, he started his Ph.D. at the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI) at the University of Guelph, reflecting on increasing human connection in higher education through free vocal improvisation.

Newfoundland, Canada

ETA (Andrew Staniland, Dani Oore and Ambrose Pottie)

ETA 11 minutes

ETA 12 minutes

ETA is an improvising trio made up of Daniel Oore, Ambrose Pottie and Andrew Staniland. Formed in the isolation of the pandemic, they make music using Sonobus, embracing the latency and technical challenges that are inherent with vast distances.

Canada and Wales

Euros Rowlands and Tricia Enns

Euros Rowlands and Tricia Enns are presented by Elysium Gallery

Through / Flow : Llif / Trwy

Euros Rowlands and Tricia Enns are two artists separated by great distances and experiences, the former located in Swansea Wales and the later located in Montreal Canada. Brought together by Elysium Gallery’s “Reframing the Past >>> Emerging Futures” pilot project, we have spent the last six months exploring the layers of humans, textures, languages, and politics that make up the two cities we reside in. Videos, audio recordings and photographs, of Swansea and Montreal, were shared, and collected, through a call-and-response style of back-and-forth exchange using WhatsApp between Rowlands and Enns. Rowlands’ practice is rooted in the exploration of memories and the layers that exist within our relationships, while Enns uses walking and engaging with traces left in space to uncover the many hidden layers of places. This project documents layers, traces, and relationships that exist within both Swansea and Montreal in a seemingly unstructured and entangled way to encourage the viewer to consider what it means to live within, and relate to these two cities. What can we learn about a place if we simply allow it to flow through us and for us to through flow? 

For more information about Euros Rowlands: https://www.eurosrowlands.com/. 

For more information about Tricia Enns: https://www.triciaenns.com/. 

Scotland

Evelyn Glennie

Waterphone Improvisation

Dame Evelyn Glennie is the first person in history to create and sustain a full-time career as a solo percussionist, performing worldwide with the greatest orchestras and artists. Evelyn paved the way for orchestras globally to feature percussion concerti when she played the first percussion concerto in the history of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall in 1992. Evelyn has commissioned over 200 new works for solo percussion and has recorded over 40 CDs. She regularly provides masterclasses and consultations to inspire the next generation of musicians, and runs Dame Evelyn Glennie experience sessions. The film Touch the Sound, TED Talk and her book Listen World! are key testimonies to her unique and innovative approach to sound-creation. 

Leading 1000 drummers, Evelyn had a prominent role in the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games which also featured a new instrument, the Glennie Concert Aluphone. 

Evelyn was awarded an OBE in 1993 and has over 100 international awards to date, including 2 Grammy’s, the Polar Music Prize and the Companion of Honour. She was recently appointed the first female President of Help Musicians, only the third person to hold the title since Sir Edward Elgar and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. Since 2021 she has been Chancellor of Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland. 

Evelyn is the curator for The Evelyn Glennie Collection which includes in excess of 3500 percussion instruments. Through her mission to Teach the World to Listen she aims to improve communication and social cohesion by encouraging everyone to discover new ways of listening in order to inspire, to create, to engage and to empower. 

Headshot credit: Horniman Museum © Caroline Purday

Italy

Francesco Ganassin

Francesco Ganassin is presented by nusica.org

Stormire – Rustle

His musical research is focused on the dialogue between sound and landscape, between music and
other expressions (theatre, cinema, calligraphy, sound art, jewelry, architecture, fairy tales, sculpture, coding, painting).

As a clarinet player, composer and improviser he held concerts all over Europe: Kaustinen Music Festival, Festival Interceltico do Morrazo, Nuoro Jazz, Bologna Jazz, Tradicionarius Barcelona, Fira Mediterrania de Manresa, Museo di Arte Orientale Ca’Pesaro, Notte della Taranta, Trad.It! Groningen, De Ruimte Amsterdam, Middle East Technical University Ankara, Corum Hittite University, Itinerari Folk, Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci, MITO SettembreMusica, Dolomiti Contemporanee, Biennale di Venezia, etc.

With Calicanto he has won Prix Coup de Coeur by Academie Charles Cros (Paris, F) for “Isole senza mar” reported as one of the four best sorld music CDs worldwide in 2006.

He composes and performs music for theatre, with Giuseppe Battiston, Andrea Pennacchi, Giuliana Musso, Laura Curino, Marco Baliani, Titino Carrara, Ermanno Cavazzoni, Vasco Mirandola, Massimo Cirri, Mirko Artuso, and many others.

Always looking for an inclusive and innovative approach in didactics, he conceives educational paths of sound discovery for children (Pìnfate!), holds workshops in large ensemble (All-In Orchestra). He teaches Traditional Music at Conservatorio di Padova and Ear Training (Jazz-Pop) at Conservatorio di Rovigo.

Belfast, Northern Ireland

Franziska Schroeder, Catriona Gribben, and Glenn Marshall

Improvised Neural Art

Franziska Schroeder
Is an improviser and a professor of music and cultures at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University Belfast. At Queen’s she leads the “Performance without Barriers” Research group, which, for the last 7 years, has dedicated itself to exploring the role of technology in removing access barriers encountered by some disabled musicians in producing creative outputs.

Catriona Gribben
Is an experienced traditional multi-instrumentalist and singer from Northwest Donegal, Ireland. Although having just finished her Masters in Research, at Queen’s University Belfast, she is still immersed in several projects within the university.

Glenn Marshall
His professional career in computer animation spans over 20 years, seeing him utilize experimental CGI, generative and AI technologies to pursue a philosophical vision of tomorrow’s digital art. He is a recipient of the Major Individual Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, their highest recognition given to leading artists in the country, and also a two-time Prix Ars Electronica winner, a Lumen Prize finalist, and has collaborated with Peter Gabriel and Tangerine Dream on music videos and concert visuals.

Spain

G.at.0

G.at.0 is presented by 17, Institute of Critical Studies

G.at.0 members: Pedro Alcalde, Núria Andorrà, Marina Hervás, Wade Matthews, and Henar Rivière

CADÁVER EXQUISITO NR.1

G.at.0 works with, on, and around the practices of free improvisation. Based in Spain, they have a fundamental and transatlantic relation with 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticosin Mexico City under the aegis of Benjamín Mayer-Foulkes. Their members reflect the same breadth of approaches as their activity, which includes music making, theory, analysis and writing, and teaching. Four of the five are university professors, three are professional musicians and creators, four are published authors of theoretical or analytical texts, three are women, two are men, all are committed to their craft, making G.at.0a sort of Venn diagram of free improvisation. To put it mildly, they practice what they preach.

Núria Andorrà

percussionist, improviser and composer. “Alicia” award from the Catalan Music Academy,the special Zirkòlika 2020 award, Puig Porret award at the Mercat de Música viva de Vic 2019. She is the artistic director of MontMusic Festival and teaches improvisation at the ESMUC, Barcelona, Spain. http://nuriaandorra.com/

Wade Matthews

Doctor of Musical arts from Columbia University, where he studied electronic synthesis at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center with Mario Davidovsky, Matthews is active on five continents as an improviser. He is the author of several books and numerous articles on improvisation. http://www.wadematthews.info/Wade_Matthews/HOME.html

Marina Hervás

PhD in Philosophy at Autonomous University of Barcelona. In 2012 she was awarded the first national Archimedes Prize for research in social sciences and humanities of the Spanish ministry of Education. She is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Musicology at the University of Granada. https://marinahervas.com/

Pedro Alcalde

PhD in philosophy and musicology from the Freie Universität in Berlin. His works have been performed worldwide at leading venues and opera houses including the Berlin State Opera, the Royal Theater in Madrid, the Théâtre du Châteletin Paris, the Theatre Mossoveta in Moscow or the New York City Center. http://pedroalcalde.com/?lang=en

Henar Rivière

PhD Art Historian and Curator. She is a Teaching and Research staff at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) and Research and Project Manager at Archivo Lafuente (Santander). She specializes in action music and action art, as well as in experimental writing. https://www.ucm.es/trama/henar-rivi%C3%A8re-rios

Netherlands

Genetic Choir – with Cecilia Bengtsson

Distribution

Genetic Choir 

The Genetic Choir is a vocal ensemble that composes music in the very moment they are singing. The vocalists train themselves as a musical organism, a flock of birds that interacts through spontaneous sound, becoming music. Their music is related to chaos theory, complexity and the self-organizing principles of interrelated nodes in a living network. Genetic Choir compositions create meaning and beauty from seeming randomness, not unlike genes that multiply and mutate, or oscillators that sync with each other after a certain tipping point. The ensemble likes projects that are rooted in real life contexts, for example turning the sounds of a train station into music (Loop-Copy-Mutate, 2017), bridging the gap between muslim, christian and atheist communities in Amsterdam ((Non)Corpus: God, 2019), or developing forms of meaningful vocal contact with people with dementia (Stem&Luister, 2020-2023). Due to their additional affinity to nature processes, collaborations with artists who have the same interest are manyfold and the projects that involve dancing on the edge of animal/plant and human life are too many to mention. Find all these projects and more on their website: www.genetic-choir.org 

Genetic Choir singers of ‘Distribution’ (2022): 
Thomas Johannsen, Petra Pieck, Moira Mirck, Marjolijn Roeleveld, Lily van Leeuwen, Jeannette Huizinga, Ilyas Nadjafi 

Thomas Johannsen (DE, 1974)  

Thomas is an Amsterdam based performer and artistic director creating work centred around self-organisation, dynamic open systems and improvisation. In 2007 he founded the Genetic Choir, the ensemble of performers and makers with which he develops diverse research projects and performances, often interdisciplinary and usually on the border of social and artistic driven interests. His projects and workshops in the context of music, fine art, dance and theatre have been invited to various European countries, the US and Japan. 

Cecilia Bengtsson (SE 1984)  
Having a background in classical music, Cecilia studied a BA Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam and has completed the Artistic Research Master in the Hague. Through sculptural performances, video works and events she tries to understand the formation of the self and the drawing boundary that conceives the ‘other’. Departing from a notion of loss she explores the interrelation between forming entities and singular and communal experiences. She has exhibited in various contexts including de Appel and Lumen Travo, STROOM and 1646. www.ceciliabengtsson.com 

Ontario, Canada

George Elliott Clarke

Elegy on J.F.K

The 4th Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-15) and the 7^th Parliamentary/Canadian Poet Laureate (2016-17), George Elliott Clarke was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, in 1960. Educated at the University of Waterloo, Dalhousie University, and Queen’s University, Clarke is also a pioneering scholar of African-Canadian literature, with two major tomes to his credit:  Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (2002) and Directions Home: Approaches to African-Canadian Literature (2012).

A professor of English at the University of Toronto, Clarke has taught at Duke, McGill, the University of British Columbia, and Harvard.  He holds eight honorary doctorates (including one from SMU), plus appointments to the Order of Nova Scotia and the Order of Canada at the rank of Officer. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. His recognitions include the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellows Prize, the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry, the National Magazine Gold Award for Poetry, the Premiul Poesis (Romania), the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry (US), and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award.  He has titles available in Chinese, Romanian, and Italian.

Ontario, Canada

Georgia Simms

grateful

Georgia has called Guelph home for the past 22 years. Much of that time has been spent dancing and sharing dance with others as a performing artist, choreographer, teacher, and facilitator.  

Her dance performance career, both as a company member with Dancetheatre David Earle and as a freelance artist, has taken her to different parts of Canada, France and South Korea. She most recently enjoyed an artistic residency with Guelph Dance in 2020-2021. 

She currently hosts technique and improvisation classes for adults, a first-year seminar at the University of Guelph, and workshops with the organization Art Not Shame. She continues to find richness in the rituals of modern dance, paired with ongoing investigations into improvisational composition – and she is really enjoying the creative task that is motherhood.  

British Columbia, Canada

Gordon Grdina

Balsam Street

Gordon Grdina is a JUNO Award (Canadian Grammy) winning oud/guitarist whose career has spanned continents, decades, and constant genre exploration throughout avant-garde jazz, freeform improvisation, contemporary indie rock and Arabic music. His singular approach to the instruments has earned him recognition from the highest ranks of the jazz/improv world. Grdina has performed and collaborated with a wide array of field-leading artists including Gary Peacock, Paul Motion, Marc Ribot, Mark Helias, Mats Gustafsson, Hank Roberts, Mark Feldman, Eyvind Kang, Colin Stetson, Mat Maneri, Christian Lilinger, Matt Mitchell, & JimBlack.

In 2019 He took two years out to develop his classical guitar technique before recording a series of classical guitar albums. The new direction allowed the dense harmonies and polytonal complexity to blend and soften creating a blending of sonorities unlike any of his previous work. For moments on Prior Street and Pendulumthe Oud takes on a new role experimenting in the same atonal world as the guitar before settling back down into the intricate world of Maqam.

Canada

Gordon Monahan

Gordon Monahan is presented by Electric Eclectics

Boiling Water

Gordon Monahan composes for piano, loudspeakers, video, kinetic sculpture, and computer-controlled sound environments. His works span various genres from avant-garde concert music to multi-media installation and sound art.

As a composer and sound artist, he juxtaposes the quantitative and qualitative aspects of natural acoustical phenomena with elements of media technology, environment, architecture, popular culture, and live performance. Since 1978, Monahan has performed and exhibited in numerous performance spaces, museums, galleries, and festivals, in Canada and internationally, including Massey Hall (Toronto), Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), the Secession (Vienna), the Venice Biennale, the Kitchen (New York) and the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis).

Early in his career, Monahan specialized as a pianist. He composed extended works for acoustic piano and amplified prepared piano. Monahan won First Prize at the 1984 CBC National Radio Competition for Young Composers. In 1988, he was CBC Radio’s entry to the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris. His career accomplishments include many international commissions and artist residencies, including a fellowship with the New York Foundation for the Arts in 1991, the D.A.A.D. Berlin in 1992, and the Beethoven Foundation, Bonn, in 2016. Monahan received the Governor-General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2013.

The renowned composer John Cage once said: “At the piano, Gordon Monahan produces sounds we haven’t heard before.”

Mexico City, Mexico

Héctor Infanzón

HUAPANGUEANDO

Inexhaustible creator, recognized as one of the most important pianists and composers in Mexico. 

For more than 40 years, he has been especially recognized in the genre of jazz and concert music, whose solid classical training and extensive experience in various musical genres, allows him to fuse tradition with contemporary languages ​​in his music.  

He has been invited as a soloist and as a composer by the prestigious orchestras: Tonkünstler Orchestra in Vienna, Twilight Orchestra in Indonesia, Nagoya College of Music Orchestra in Japan, The String Orchestra of the Rockies-Montana and Bryan Symphony in the United States.  

In Mexico, he has collaborated with the National Symphony Orchestra, the Fine Arts Chamber Orchestra, the Mexico City Philharmonic Orchestra, the UNAM Philharmonic Orchestra, the Acapulco Philharmonic Orchestra, the Querétaro Philharmonic Orchestra, the Aguascalientes Symphony Orchestra, and the Michoacán Symphony Orchestra, Puebla Symphony Orchestra, Mexiquense Symphony Orchestra and Sinaloa Symphony Orchestra of the Arts.  

He has performed in prestigious concert halls and festivals: Musikverein-Gro&er Saal and Ost Jazz Club, in Vienna; Palace of Fine Arts, Nezahualcóyotl Hall, Degollado Theater and Juárez Theater; Montreal Jazz Festival, in Canada; Newark Jazz Festival and Blue Note Jazz Club, in New York; Java Jazz Festival, in Jakarta, Indonesia; SingJazz Fest in Singapore; Orange Peel Jazz Club in Hong Kong; JZ Jazz Club in Shanghai and Hangzhou in China; No Black Tie Jazz Club in Kuala Lumpur, AmericArtes in Washington, D.C.; Heritage Jazz Festival, Snug Harbor Jazz Club and Tulane University in New Orleans, USA; Medellín International Jazz Festival, in Colombia; Jazz Plaza in Havana, in Cuba; Expo Lisboa, in Portugal; “Mex I am” Festival in San Francisco, California USA; “Change de World, City of Ideas” Festival in Puebla; Clazz Latin Jazz Festival.  

His compositions have been captured on thirteen albums under his name and he has collaborated on countless productions and tours with renowned artists from different musical genres around the world. 

Due to his artistic career, he has been awarded various prizes and awards.  

In 2021 he obtained a double nomination for the Latin Grammy 2021 for his album “Tres Historias Concertantes” where he recorded three of his symphonic works with the Sofia Radio Symphony Orchestra, in Bulgaria. 

Nova Scotia, Canada

India Gailey

India Gailey is presented by Upstream Music Association 

Latent Strands of a Violet Love

India Gailey (she/they) is a Nova Scotian musician—cellist, composer, vocalist, and improviser––who crosses many eras and genres, most often performing the realms of classical and experimental music. Pinned as a “young musician to watch” (Scotia Festival), she has performed across Canada, the United States, and Germany as a soloist and collaborator. She has worked with numerous contemporary composers, including Yaz Lancaster, Philip Glass, Nicole Lizée, and Michael Harrison. India is the recipient of several honours, including awards from the Nova Scotia Talent Trust, the Canada Council for the Arts, and McGill University, where she earned her Master of Music in cello performance. Her most recent performances have been presented by organizations such as Upstream Music Association, the Canadian Music Centre, International Contemporary Ensemble, Metropolis Ensemble, and Government House of Nova Scotia. India is also member of the environmental quartet New Hermitage, which recently released their fifth album, Unearth, to critical acclaim. 2022 will bring the release of a new solo cello album, as well as a series of commissioned works written especially for India by Canadian composers. India has worked with Upstream Music Association on many projects, including the Up in the Air collaboration with Breaking Circus, as part of the improvisational ensemble UpStrings, and as a composer for the Upstream Orchestra.  

https://indiayeshe.com/

Headshot credit: Dario Lozano-Thornton

Ontario, Canada

James Harley and Gerard Yun

Consort of the Birds

Gerard Yun 

Trained in the Western Classical tradition as a conductor, composer, global music performer and scholar, I have held professional posts with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, the Colorado Youth Symphony Orchestras, the San Jose Civic Light Opera and The Colorado Lyric Theatre.  

My work with instruments such as the Australian Didgeridoo and the Lakota Flute eventually became part of my professional portfolio. This is especially true of my work in Tuvan and Tibetan Overtone Singing and the Japanese Zen Buddhist Shakuhachi. 

Currently, I teach courses in Music and Contexts and Global Musics in the Faculty of Music at Wilfrid Laurier University and conduct choirs at Laurier and Conrad Grebel University College. I serve as instructor of Japanese shakuhachi at York University. 

James Harley is a Canadian composer-musician teaching at the University of Guelph. He obtained his doctorate at McGill University in 1994, after spending six years (1982-88) composing and studying in Europe (London, Paris, Warsaw). His music has been awarded prizes in Canada, USA, UK, France, Austria, Poland, Japan, and has been performed and broadcast around the world. Recordings include: Neue Bilder (Centrediscs, 2010), ~spin~: Like a ragged flock (ADAPPS DVD, 2015), Experimental Music for Ensembles, Drums and Electronics (ADAPPS CD, 2019). As a researcher, Harley has written extensively on contemporary music. His books include: Xenakis: His Life in Music (Routledge, 2004), and Iannis Xenakis: Kraanerg (Ashgate, 2015). As a performer, Harley has a background in jazz, and has most recently worked as an interactive computer musician. 

Ontario, Canada

Jemma Llewellyn

The Four Rs

Group members: Nida Ansari, Nicole Cheung, Allison Chevrier, Rashmeet Kaur, Yumna

The Four Rs is a collaborative project between PhD student Jemma Llewellyn, University of Guelph undergraduate students, and a support work from The Grove Hubs – Youth Wellness Hubs Ontario Guelph-Wellington branch. Responding to the 4Rs Youth Movement Canada, our piece, The Four Rs, explores, in four vignettes, (response) ability, relevance, respect, and reciprocity for reconciliation as settler/ immigrants. This piece is made up of literary inspirations and artistic responses we have collected during our settler-indigenous reconciliation working group. Including the following:  

A Digital Land Acknowledgement. Existing As a Settler On Unceded Land: A Guide. Deirdre Lee. 2020. 

Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume One: Summary: Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future. 2015. 

Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis, & Inuit Issues in Canada. 2016. 

Towards Braiding. Elwood Jimmy and Vanessa Andreotti with Sharon Stein. 2019. 

Nida Ansari is an undergraduate co-op student at the University of Guelph majoring in Psychology and minoring in French Studies. She is passionate about pedagogy and mental health. 

Nicole Cheung is a Master of Teaching candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) with a background in Early Childhood Education. In her free time, I enjoy exploring outdoors, singing and meeting new people! 

Allison Chevrier (she/her) is an undergraduate student at the University of Guelph, who has a profound interest in youth mental health and equity, diversity and inclusion work. She has had the privilege of working at The Grove Hubs as an Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Indigenous Reconciliation coordinator and as a mentor for onboarded students pursuing similar roles. 

Rashmeet Kaur is an MPH student at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health. She is a queer poet and artist of colour who loves building community and empowering others to explore art as a storytelling and social justice tool. Online portfolio: https://dissectionoftheself.wordpress.com/ 

Jemma Llewellyn is a PhD student on the Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph.  

Yumna is a Child and Youth Care Practitioner, working to support youth at a youth mental health hub in Ontario, Canada. 

Mexico

Jerónimo Naranjo and Milo Tamez

Jerónimo Naranjo and Milo Tamz are presented by 17, Institute of Critical Studies

Graviton

Instrument: Suspended Drum Set by Jerónimo Naranjo (Mexico) 

Performers: Jerónimo Naranjo and Milo Tamez (Mexico) 

Jerónimo Naranjo and Milo Tamez’s collaborative work goes back to 2017. It began at Jerónimo´s Bucareli 69 Casa de Artes cultural center in Mexico City, founded in 2014, where some 450 concerts and exhibitions have been curated and presented by artists and artists-in-residence from around the world. 

The Suspended Drum Set crystallized early in 2022, after a series of collaborations between Naranjo and Tamez, including their work for Mexican singer and performance artist Carmina Escobar, during a residency in 2021 in Mono Lake, CA. This Suspended-Expanded-Prepared Drum Set proposes a sonic and percussive multidimensionality based on the diversification of the attack-response and the sustained-delaying natural amplification of the inner harmonics of the drums. The expanded connectivity of membranophones and idiophones achieved by using long steel piano strings and metal springs of different calibers opens a unique palette of non-gravitational polyphonic orchestral resonances, allowing for a broad percussive playground.  

“Graviton” is the first result of a couple months of playing the instrument, installed at Bucareli 69 during May and June of 2022. This improvisational composition is an investigation into percussive sound, motion, active listening, action-reaction, theatrical instrumental space-place, resulting from a powerful stimulator of musical inventiveness within the wide natural production of rhythms, timbres, textures, harmonic voices, tonalities, phases, microtonality, silence and noise. It evolves dynamically, full of nuance within complex, psychoacoustic parameters. 

 

Jerónimo Naranjo is a composer, researcher, instrumental inventor and constructor , improviser, sound-installer, and producer. Among some of his most remarkable pieces and projects are “Huey Mecatl” (2008); “Caja de Música Gigante” (2014); “Koto Ōkī” (2016); “El Piano Suspendido” along with his composition “La Cantata Suspendida” (2017); “Piano Kinēsis” (2019); and his most recent collaboration with Mexican singer and performance artist Carmina Escobar which consisted in creating an entire ensemble of resonating spring drums for Carmina´s hybrid performance-film “Bajo La Sombra del Sol”, filmed at Mono Lake CA and premiered at The RedCat Theatre in Los Angeles, CA (2021). 

Milo Tamez work been a drummer and percussionist, composer, researcher, educator, improviser, and creator of multiple projects for drum set and percussion ensemble and new music. His work incorporates a wide array of percussive languages ​​and artistic perspectives, defining his own place among the paradigms of universal drumming. His instrumental development transcends the linear limits of percussive reason, and his research is focused on musicological discovery and analysis, tracing rhythmic dialects through cultural migration routes that have shaped percussive evolution as thought and language. His works for solo drums and percussion represent a continuous historical review of universal percussion music, with a deep diasporic orientation that intertwines diverse attitudes ranging from free forms to the phenomenological complexities of compositional processes. He has created various educational projects, such as the Tamborero Lab Studios Workshop (2004), whose ten volumes are soon to be published. He is also the creator of the Drumming Music Practice Program (2020); Taller Abierto: Procesos Composicionales (2017); “Pollock – Tambores Pintores” (2017); Collage Ensemble (2018). Tamez is a continuous participant, co-creator, collaborator and performer of international works and projects. 

Ontario, Canada

Jesse Stewart

Welcome

This video features percussionist Jesse Stewart playing the melody of John Coltrane’s “Welcome” on vibraphone with interpolated rhythmic accompaniment on drum set.

Jesse Stewart is a Canadian composer, improviser, percussionist, instrument builder, visual artist, educator, and community arts activist dedicated to re-imagining the spaces between artistic disciplines. He has performed and recorded with musical luminaries including Pauline Oliveros, Hamid Drake, William Parker, Joe McPhee, David Mott, Ernst Reijseger, Stretch Orchestra (with Kevin Breit and Matt Brubeck), Michael Snow, and many others. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honours including the Order of Ottawa, and the 2012 Juno Award (the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy) for “Instrumental Album of the Year” for Stretch Orchestra’s self-titled debut CD.

His music has been heralded as “exceptional” (Cadence Oct. 2002), “phenomenal” (Cadence Nov. 1999), “ingenious” (Exclaim! June 2006), and “brilliant” (Truths for Serious Drummers, 2012). “Stewart quietly opens the door for us to a limitless world of delicate sonic beauty,” writes Randy Raine-Reusch in Musicworks 97. “Highly recommended ear-cleansing” states a review in Italy’s Touching Extremes (2007). “Jesse Stewart is an eloquent and poetically powerful percussionist, composer, improviser and teacher—a man of ideas and inventions,” writes jazz legend William Parker. “Jesse is an incredibly innovative artist. He’s a performance artist, he’s a jazz drummer, he’s an incredible creative force” states Roman Borys, cellist with the internationally acclaimed Gryphon Trio. He has been described as “one of the finest young drummers and percussionists on the scene today” (Frank Rubolino, One Final Note Summer/Fall 2002) and as “one of the most innovative musicians in Canada” (OttawaJazzScene, 2015).

Jesse is a professor of music in Carleton University’s School for Studies in Art and Culture and an adjunct professor in the Visual Arts program at the University of Ottawa.

Canada and Wales

Jessica Lerner and Andrew Maize

Jessica Lerner and Andrew Maize are presented by Elysium Gallery

a room but one mirror

Jessica Lerner

I am a visual and movement artist. Originally from London, I have been living in Carmarthenshire, Wales since 2002, where I now have a movement studio. My practice focuses on questions of materiality as natural choreography, the body and self and relationship to objects and relational environment.

I am influenced by my drawing practice and somatic movement. My pieces can be described as autobiographical improvisations where movement is in conversation with objects, images and location.

I have been making and showing work since 1989 within experimental dance venues and galleries. I have collaborated with Film, dance and sound artists. My work is live performance, installation, film and painting.

https://www.jessicalerner.uk/

Andrew Maize

I am an artist and educator (and other things too). My playful and process-oriented approach to making art uses language, technology, and movement as catalysts for larger conversations – the expression a result of connection to space, community and place – taking seriously both the conceptual framework and materials as a starting point, to engage the audience in political, historical and geographical contexts.

As an arts educator and organizer, I have been involved in collaborative projects that engage communities with art, both in traditional and non-traditional spaces. I graduated with a BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax NS in 2012, and a MFA from the University of Guelph in 2021.

http://andrewmaize.ca/site/

British Columbia, Canada

Jesus Caballero

Jesus Caballero is presented by Coastal Jazz & Blues

Silent Scream

Jesus Caballero is a drummer/composer residing in Vancouver, BC. His drumming approach is inspired by the old traditions of African dances. Milo Tamez (Caballero’s old time mentor), recruited him in 2007 to be part of “Tamborero Lab”–drumming lab from Mexico focused in African music, combining elements of jazz language: Improvisation, soloing, Head-in/head-out, tutti, D.C., D.S., Coda, etc.

Since moving to Canada in 2010, Caballero felt he needed to create a similar project of his own, and present it to the Canadian audience–this is how “Silent Scream” was born. Not until 2019 did he start to write music for drums. The only time Caballero has performed such music was at the beginning of 2020, right before the pandemic.

Caballero is also part of–or have played with–other ensembles/groups in Vancouver:
*Omianan, 2022 Western Canadian Music Awards nominee for Global Artist of the Year
*Ron Samworth’s “The Etiquette of Dying”
*NOW Society with Dr. Thokozani Mhlambi (June 2022)
*James Meger’s “How to Do Nothing”–Vancouver, Ironfest (November 2021)
*Peggy Lee & Cole Schmidt Trio (January 2020)

Italy

Jimmy Weinstein and Lilly Santon

DISTORTIONS² MUSIC ON ART

Jimmy Weinstein

Born in Chicago, Jimmy moved with his family to California and Spain. A Berklee College of Music alumnus ’89 and leader of a consortium of New York-based ensembles, Jimmy has been on the move for over 25 years, touring the US, Europe and Japan. Major associations include recordings and tours with virtuoso improvisers, Ahmed Abdullah, Chris Cheek, Ben Monder, Satoko Fujii, Alex Harding, Jeff Parker, Oscar Noriega, Natsuki Tamura, Frank Carlberg, Elie Massias, Sten Hostfalt, Masa Kamaguchi and Matt Renzi. As a sideman he has worked with Sheila Jordan, Jay Clayton, Noah Preminger, Rachel Gould, Greg Burk, Marcello Tonolo and Reggie Veal. In collaboration with Abdullah, Harding and Kamaguchi he founded the adventurous and highly acclaimed melodic quartet NAM, whose album Song of Time was voted among the top 25 all-time live performances by critic Kevin Whitehead.

As a leader, his discography contains albums released by Fresh Sound, CleanFeed, Accurate, CIMP, El Gallo Rojo and Gunther Schuller’s GM Recordings. Among Weinstein’s current projects, is a quartet featuring the pianist extraordinaire Satoko Fujii, in addition to trumpeter Natsuki Tamura and vocalist Lilly Santon. As a teacher, Weinstein’s experience has brought forth TRAVELING SCHOOL PLAYJAZZ, an organization dedicated to conducting jazz workshops where he often performs with his students. Jimmy’s new quintet features Chris Cheek, Ben Monder, Tom Beckham and Dave Ambrosio, all musicians who he has worked with over the past 25 years, coming together to perform Jimmy’s new compositions on his latest album”Sobrinos”. Traveling School Playjazz has been organizing the yearly jazz workshop at the acclaimed Mallorca Jazz Sa Pobla Festival since 2006. Over the years Jimmy has coordinated workshops with leading artists including LeeKonitz, Sheila Jordan, Jay Clayton, Chris Cheek, Dennis Irwin, Matt Garrison, Noah Preminger, Pedro Cortejosa, Perico Sambeat, Matt Renzi, Eladio Reinon and Marco Mezquida.

Lilly Santon

Santon trained as an architect before venturing into the world of jazz and energy therapy. After spending her formative years in Brazil, she attended middle and high school in Padua, Italy and received her degree in architecture from the University of Venice. Santon lived in Munich and New York between 1980 and 2002, working as an architect and studying jazz with the likes of Barry Harris, Sheila Jordan, Mark Murphy and Jay Clayton. While deepening her musical studies, she learned bio-energetic healing practices, which have been integrated into her teaching methods applied in private classes and workshops. In 2002, Santon re-established residence in Italy, and co-founded Traveling School. Lilli performs regularly with Satoko Fujii, Jimmy Weinstein Quintet, Traveling School Band and her own quartet featuring pianist Marcello Tonolo.

Ontario, Canada

Joe Sorbara

Maeve’s Water Table

Canadian drummer and percussionist Joe Sorbara has spent more than two decades developing a reputation as an imaginative and dedicated performer, composer, improviser, organiser, writer, and educator. A consummate sonic adventurer, Sorbara’s music draws from a vast array of influences. He is equally comfortable playing jazz, freely improvised music, indie rock, and chamber music, but most at home playing them all at the same time. He has performed and recorded with Ken Aldcroft, Jared Burrows, Anthony Braxton, Nikita Carter, Paul Dutton, François Houle, Germaine Liu, Evan Parker, Allen Ravenstine, Clyde Reed, and Friendly Rich, among many many others. His own projects and ongoing collaborations include a Toronto-based sextet and a Vancouver-based quartet as well as bands such as Alien Radio, Never Was, The Imperative, Other Foot First, Reliable Parts, My Misshapen Ear, and the Imaginary Percussion Ensemble.

Joe is a long-time student of master drummer Jim Blackley. He holds an Honours Bachelor of Fine Arts in Music from York University in Toronto as well as a Master’s degree in English from the University of Guelph where his work focussed on critical improvisation studies, literary and cultural theory, and pedagogy. He is currently studying toward a PhD with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. Joe has worked extensively as a workshop facilitator and guest lecturer and has taught for twelve years in the School of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Guelph.

Ontario, Canada

John Kameel Farah

Transition (for piano & string quartet)

Group members: John Kameel Farah (composer, pianist, synthesizer) with the Oriel Quartett: Josa Gerhard, violin / Kundri Schaefer, violin / Dilhan Kantas, viola / Alice Dixon, cello

John Kameel Farah is a composer and pianist who embraces aspects of Baroque and Early Music, Middle-Eastern Music, Improvisation and all forms of Electronic Music. He studied composition and piano at the University of Toronto, where he received the Glenn Gould Composition Award. In 1999 he studied privately with Terry Riley in California, and later at the Arabic Music Retreat in Hartford. 
 
In concert, Farah combines the piano with synthesizers and electronics, moving freely between improvisations, soundscapes, and driving, asymmetrical rhythms, referring to it as “Baroque-Middle-Eastern-Cyberpunk”. He also presents his project, “Music for Organ and Synthesizers” in churches across Canada and Europe. 
 
Collaborations include performing for rising ballet star Robert Binet and iconic choreographer Peggy Baker, for whom he received a Dora Mavor Moore Award in 2016. He composed soundtracks for simulations of galaxy formations and collisions by astrophysicist John Dubinski, and became a member of the Canadian Electronic Ensemble in 2010.  
 
Farah also creates intricate ink drawings, sometimes projecting animations of them during his concerts. He performs regularly across Europe, the U.K and North America, and has performed in South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, and Israel/Palestine, giving master-classes at the Edward Said National Conservatory in 2003. 

John is currently doing a residency with the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, composing a new work for piano and orchestra, to be premiered in 2023. 

Headshot credit: Leonie-Hochrein

California, USA

John-Carlos Perea

Tattoo (composed by Lewis Jordan, arranged for cedar flute by John-Carlos Perea)

John-Carlos Perea (Mescalero Apache, Irish, Chicano, German) is an electric bassist, singer, cedar flutist, composer, and ethnomusicologist. He currently serves as Chair and Associate Professor of American Indian Studies in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University.

Following a one-year Visiting Associate Professor appointment in the Department of Music at UC Berkeley (2021-22), Perea now serves as Visiting Researcher, Composer, and Performer (2022-23) at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) to develop a musician-specific augmented performance with voice, cedar flute, drum, and emerging technologies. His research interests include jazz and improvised music performance and composition, urban American Indian lived experiences and cultural productions, music technologies, recording and archiving practices, social constructions of “noise,” Native and African American jazz cultures, and the Creek and Kaw saxophonist Jim Pepper.

In addition to his scholarly activities, Perea maintains an active career as a GRAMMY® Award winning multi-instrumentalist and recording artist in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has recorded on eighteen albums as a sideman and three as a leader, First Dance (2001), Creation Story (2014), and Cedar Flute Songs (forthcoming 2022). In April 2019, Perea was recognized by the San Francisco Arts Commission’s American Indian Initiative for his musical contribution “to reclaim space, to challenge false narratives, and to reimagine public art from the perspective of Indigenous Peoples.”

Ontario, Canada

Joyful Joyful (Dave Grenon & Cormac Culkeen)

All At Once

Joyful Joyful are a Peterborough/Toronto-based duo of voice and electronics. From the singular voice of Cormac Culkeen an enveloping world of electro-acoustic soundscapes is woven. Their musical practices drift between the improvised and the composed and their live performances embrace the aleatoric interventions of the world as it is. Their debut album (on Idée Fixe Records) was listed for the 2022 Polaris Music Prize. About it, Dominionated’s Jim Di Gioia says, “It’s beautiful and heartbreaking. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever heard in my life before and likely won’t ever again.” 

Joyful Joyful works in a world between through-composed and improvised music. While most of our live performances are of specific sets of songs, there remain ungovernable elements in our live work. We both come from a world of long-form improvisation in radio-art/noise/experimental music. It is endlessly fulfilling for us to return to that mode of creating.

Headshot credit: Jeff Bierk

Ontario, Canada

Judit Csobod

Untitled Transit Improv

An enthusiast of music cultures, a supporter of socially and politically involved arts, and a veteran fan of free improvised music and punk, Judit has been involved with various alternative associations across Europe over the years. Among them is a long association with Mediawave Festival in Hungary, where she served in various functions; program curator, international network representative, and festival coordinator. Another example is the Doek collective in Holland, where Judit was involved in starting a collective community calendar for the local creative music scene. She was also a part of the independent record label Barefoot Records in Denmark as a label and project manager. Judit is now working on a research project investigating the changing political horizons of free improvised music scenes in Europe as a PhD student at the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation.

Ontario, Canada

Judith Thompson and Bill Thompson, Phil Graham, Naomi Sunderland

Climbing the Hill

Judith Clare Thompson is a Canadian playwright and theatre-maker who lives in Toronto, Ontario. She has twice been awarded the Governor General’s Award for drama. As well, she received the Susan Smith Blackburn Award for a female playwright writing in English and is proud to have won the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award. She is the Artistic Director of Rare Theatre, a company dedicated to creating theatre with under-represented communities.

Bill Thompson is an Australian / Canadian of Irish ancestry. He has composed music for film and theatre and is a Professor of Psychology at Bond University, Australia. He is the author of the book “Music, Thought and Feeing: Understanding the Psychology of Music” (2014, Oxford University Press). 

Phil Graham is an Australian musician and academic who holds honorary Professorships at the University of the Sunshine Coast and Griffith University’s Creative Arts Research Institute. 

Naomi Sunderland is a singer, songwriter, and drummer living on Kabi Kabi Country at the Sunshine Coast in Australia. She is a descendant of the Wiradjuri First Nations People alongside strong European ancestry. She is Professor at Griffith University and lead investigator of the international Remedy Project: First Nations music as a determinant of health.  

Slovenia

Kaja Draksler

Kaja Draksler: Organ Piece nr1

Group members: Kaja Draksler, Szymon Gąsiorek

Kaja Draksler (1987) is a Slovenian pianist and composer. After her studies in the Netherlands (BA in jazz piano and MA in classical composition), she decided to stay in Amsterdam, where she became an active member of the improvisors scene, performing extensively all over the Europe. After 13 years in Holland, she decided, in 2018, to move to Copenhagen, Denmark, where she currently resides.

Her main project is her Amsterdam-based Octet, which she formed in 2016. Besides her frequent solo concerts, she has been working internationally over the past years with trio Punkt.Vrt.Plastik, quartet Hearth, and in duets with Terrie Ex, Susana Santos Silva, Eve Risser (To Pianos), Onno Govaert (Feecho) and Szymon Gąsiorek (Czajka & Puchacz). She is one of the founding members of the interdisciplinary group I/O and part of the internationally acclaimed Doek collective. As a composer she has been commissioned by various international groups, ranging from vocal and chamber ensembles to big bands and orchestras.

Kaja is interested in finding ways to merge the composition and (free) improvisation by working with different structures and musical logics. In the spirit of the Dutch jazz/improvised music legacy, she is drawn to the idea of erasing the stylistic and historical musical borders, and discovering personal expression and language through composition and improvisation.

Ontario, Canada

Karen Kew and Waleed Abdulhamid

Sonance

Karen’s experimental video work examines identity, representation, and internalisation, within and at the backdrop of coloniality. Her focus shifts between de/constructing cultural narratives to catalyzing acts of resistance from the margin. Karen currently finds herself happily ensconced at MABELLEarts, a community-engaged arts organization in Toronto.

Waleed Abdulhamid is a Canadian Multi-instrumentalist; Composer; Vocalist; Music and Film Producer, known for his striking vocals, innovative bass technique, and his speed and precision on percussion. He has been an active member of the Toronto music scene since his arrival, in1991 from Sudan, where he began to perform as early as six years old. He is the recipient of the Canadian New Pioneer Award; African Tama Award; Reel World Film Festival Award and Canadian Film Board of Excellence Award. In addition, he has not only received other international awards, but was also twice honoured with a DORA Award.

Headshot credit: Darrell Edwards

Saskatchewan, Canada

Kathryn Ricketts

COVID LUG 3

Kathryn has been working for the past 35 years in the field of dance, theatre and visual arts, performing and teaching throughout Europe, South America, Africa, Australia and Canada. Her work in studios, galleries, theatres and environmental sites focuses on social/political issues through dance, theatre, text, technology and visual art as the languages. Her Doctoral research furthered this into areas of literacy, embodiment and cultural studies with a method she has coined Embodied Poetic Narrative.  She is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education in the University of Regina as the chair of the Dance area. She runs The Listening Lab, a visual and performing arts ‘incubator’ and presents exhibitions and performances in her loft in the John Deere Tractor Building. Kathryn is also the Director of Professional Development and field Experience in the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina. 

British Columbia and Québec, Canada

Kevin McNeilly and Geoff Mitchell

Defibrillator

“Defibrillator” is a set of six improvisations for voice, piano, and live electronics based on a handmade graphic score; the score was transcribed, erased, and re-scrawled from the text of a poem. Kevin McNeilly and Geoff Mitchell recorded several versions of this suite live in the studio in Montreal on May 15, 2022. 

Kevin McNeilly is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia and a researcher with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. A book of poems about early jazz trumpet players, Embouchure, is published by Nightwood Editions. He teaches and writes about contemporary poetics, media aesthetics, comics, and listening. Audio, video and more can be found through his websites, kevinmcneilly.ca and kevinmcneilly.com, or on his Bandcamp page, kevinmcneilly.bandcamp.com.   

Geoff Mitchell is an improvising musician living in Hudson, Quebec. A Truro, Nova Scotia, native, he studied Jazz at St. Francis Xavier University and at McGill University (MMUS, 1995). He played and studied with drummer Jerry Granelli in Halifax in 1987-89, and subsequently with Art Lande and Don Cherry at the Naropa Institute in Colorado. Geoff has appeared at the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Tremblant International Blues Festival, and the Atlantic Jazz Festival. He works in film sound as a rerecording mixer based in Montreal. Some recordings can be found at geoffmitchell.bandcamp.com.

Italy

Kinga Araya

Walking Via Sacra

Kinga Araya is an independent scholar and visual artist currently living in Rome, Italy.  

While on a student trip, she literally walked away from Poland, defecting in Florence, Italy in 1988. She came to Canada in February 1990 to continue her art historical and visual arts education at the University of Ottawa, York University in Toronto, and Concordia University in Montréal where she obtained a doctoral degree in the Special Individualized Program (Art History and Visual Studies). Amongst other prestigious awards she received an Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities by the University of Pennsylvania. Araya has published on cultural displacement, migration and exile and showed her art in numerous national and international solo and group art exhibitions, film, video and performance art festivals in Canada, USA, Poland, England, Yugoslavia, Italy, France, Spain, Lebanon, and Australia.  

To learn more about her interdisciplinary art project, Walking with Kinga please see: https://bunkier.art.pl/?wystawy=kinga-araya-walking-with-kinga-2&lang=en 

Other links: 

PhD Thesis: https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/7975/1/NQ90374.pdf 

Walking in Exile, Performance of Walking along the Remnants of the Berlin Wall: https://www.mythogeography.com/kinga-arayarsquos-ten-steps-walking-in-circles.html 

Salty Feet: Passeggiate Romane (Video Extraits and Narration) http://musemedusa.com/dossier_9/araya/ in: MuseMedusa, Revue de Litterature et d’Art Modernes: Ulysse figure intemporelle: Voyage, exile, fluidité, l’Université de Montréal, Canada, 2021 

Canada and Germany

Knuckleduster (Debashis Sinha and Robert Lippok)

Zwischen Nacht und Tag (Between Night and Day)

Knuckleduster, the trans-Atlantic collaboration of electronica/sound artist Robert Lippok (Germany) and sound experimenter and percussionist Debashis Sinha (Canada) began through a mutual fascination with sound and sound production in the early 2000s. Through long discussions around tables all over the world, Lippok and Sinha created a foundation for music making based on the respect of each other’s work that has resulted in an array of projects that has lasted over a decade and a half. Their first CD, Nuukoono, was recorded in Berlin and released on the Gustaff record label. 

Robert Lippok has long been on the bleeding edge of the Berlin electronic music scene with a prolific presence in galleries, stages, warehouses, online and elsewhere. His wide ranging practice draws on conceptual art, installation, and improvisation, resulting in a variety of works that have placed him at the forefront of Europe’s sound-forward artists. He has released records to critical acclaim on the Monica, Staubgold and raster.media labels among others.  

A stalwart and consistent presence in the Canadian sound world, Debashis Sinha has realized projects in radiophonic art, sound art, theatre, dance, and music across Canada and internationally. He is a winner of multiple Dora Awards and nominations for his work on theatre stages, and his live sound practice on the concert stage has led to appearances at MUTEK, ISEA, Madrid Abierto, and other venues. He is currently an assistant professor teaching sound design and music at Toronto Metropolitan University. 

Japan

Koichi Makigami

Unknown Songs

Makigami Koichi is the leader/vocalist/theremin/mouth harp player for the rock band HIKASHU, known for his virtuosic vocal range and expression as well as his unique incorporation of elements of theatre, performance, and entertainment, all of which make this Japanese band so widely acclaimed both critically and popularly.

He is also active as a voice improvisation artist and solo performer. In addition to recordings with HIKASHU, Makigami released a solo album in 1992 of re-worked, reinterpreted old Japanese popular songs, produced by John Zorn. Together with this recorded work, he has conducted a series of concerts under this project.

From 1993, Makigami has been acting as organizer and promoter for the monthly Tokyo session of John Zorn’s game piece COBRA.

Makigami has worked and collaborated with a great many artists and musicians in a wide variety of areas and styles, such as John Zorn, Ikue Mori, David Moss, Lauren Newton, Anthony Coleman, Umezu Kazutoki, Carl Stone, Jon Rose, Guy Klucevsek, and Derek Bailey.

Other career highlights include:

1995 solo voice Album KUCHINOHA by tzadik

2008 AD of JAZZ ART SENGAWA Festival in Tokyo

2017 1st Prize of International khoomei contest modern category in Tuva

2019 AD of MUSIC FOR THE FUTURE FESTIVAL in ATAMI

2020 1st Ooka Makoto Poet Prize for literary excellence and activities

British Columbia, Canada

Lorna Crozier

Love, Again

An Officer of the Order of Canada and a Governor-General Award winner, Lorna Croziers latest book is Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats). Her new book of poetry, After That, will be published by M&S next fall. 

Ontario, Canada

Lucy Bilson

Digital Harvest

Lucy Bilson is a designer, artist, researcher, and educator working at the periphery of contemporary graphic design practice. In addition to operating an independent studio, Lucy’s creative practice explores the interdisciplinary space between design and art, often using her work to contest the boundaries of contemporary practice. Lucy recently curated an exhibition at the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery titled Articulating Legibility, which explored the implications of illegibility in works from the permanent collection. She has also been pursuing a series of site-specific public art works, which include a 650 square foot graphic installation about environmental stewardship at the new Eastside Branch library in Waterloo, and twelve works about green space within the urban environment along the Laurel and Spur Line trails as part of her work as Artist in Residence for the City of Waterloo. Much of Lucy’s work crosses disciplinary boundaries, flouting convention and prescribed media in favour of exploring questions about placemaking and disciplinary issues through practice-based research. Lucy has a Master of Design and Graduate Diploma in Curatorial Studies in Visual Culture, in addition to a Bachelor of Design (Hons), from York University and is a PhD student in the Critical Studies in Improvisation program at the University of Guelph.

Singapore

Lynette Quek

Lynette Quek is presented by LASALLE College of the Arts

Scapscape

Lynette Quek is an audiovisual maker from Singapore. Emerging from a music and audio technology background, Lynette has nurtured an interest in the sonic arts, combining audio and visual elements in her various works. She is currently engaged in examining synchronisation and interaction within audiovisuality, challenging the notion of the heard/unheard and seen/unseen. Incarnations of her work include site-specific pieces, installations, composition through sound manipulation, and cross-disciplinary performance with the computer, all utilising an ever-expanding list of media including sound, video, performance, and sculpture.

Ontario, Canada

Marcela Echeverri

Combined Footing

Marcela Echeverri is a musician, anthropologist, and improviser currently based in Guelph, Ontario. She is a bass player who has played with bands in Colombia and Estonia. Her Master’s projects concerned themselves with the use of sound recording methodologies as a means to produce and present research findings on the intermingling of agencies. She is interested in exploring the possibilities of improvisation in the context of education and community-building. COMBINED FOOTING is an exploration of commonalities between the foundations of the body and the foundations of construction. This improvisation seeks to present interrelations of beings existing in the outdoor world as sounding participants of a collective experience.

Québec, Canada

Markus Floats

Untitled

Montréal/Tiotia’ke based musician Markus Lake uses his laptop to improvise delicate and complex soundscapes combining digital synthesis, samples from the black literary canon and live signal processing techniques. Since his 2011 debut EP for Dream Sequence, Lake’s recorded work and live shows have explored themes of attention, obscurity, visibility and repetition through a constantly expanding palette of digital instruments. His third LP, Third Album, was released by ConstellationRecords in March 2020. He is a graduate of the Electroacousticprogram at Concordia University and has also played bass inMontréal bands Elle Barbara’s Black Space, Egyptian CottonArkestra, Sheer Agony, Silver Dapple, Hand Cream as well as providing vocals in a short-lived punk band called Neighbour’sGuitar. He is in the process of figuring things out.

New York, United States

Marshall Trammell

Music Research Strategies’ Deep Phonology

Music Research Strategies

Self-styled Music Research Strategist Marshall Trammell is an experimental, percussionist, composer, conductor and archivist. As Music Research Strategies, LLC, the performing political education explores poetics of self-determination as expressed through sound, narrative, critical investigation, organizational sense-making methodologies and intercultural-situated technologies.

Music Research Strategies the 2022 Artist-in-Residence at Borealis Festival (Norway), the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum, Yucca Valley Material Lab, Prelinger Library and spent the last three years as a Pro Arts Commons Common Knowledge Fellow. In 2020, Music Research Strategies received the Music/Sound Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (NYC) and Rauschenberg Residency (Florida) and the remainder of the year and into 2023 he will lead performances and workshops in Amsterdam, Vancouver, Augsburg and Darmstadt.

Trammell is known as a percussionist working in current collaborations with Pulitzer Prize in Music award winner Raven Chacon and John Dieterich (Deerhoof) in the band White People Killed Them, separately with award-winning violinist Laura Ortman and bassist Carlos Santistevan in the band In Defense Of Memory and for his recent multimodal production of The Moon Is Down: The Status Quo is My Enemy, featuring four women of color addressing the meaning of self-determination in a mid-sized Norwegian city with live audio and video processing and heteroglossic drums performance on two drum sets. Other collaborators include Aaron Turner, Tashi Dorji, Chris Brown and NAKA Dance Theater.

Music Research Strategies is based in NYC.

Québec, Canada

Masoon Balouch

Masoon Balouch is presented by Teesri Duniya Theatre

Does This Really Happen?

Group members: Mahmuda Sekendra Mahin (Project Manager), Masoon Balouch (Writer and Performer), Olivia Woods (Director), Sanjeev Mannan (Videographer)

But does this actually happen in my community? Don’t they just use and dramatize stories of abuse for tv series? It can’t be that big of a problem . . .

In Does It Really Happen, Masoon Balouch makes the invisible visible by revealing her journey out of an abusive marriage. This powerful story is for South Asian women who may not know that another way of living is possible.

AB, Canada

Matthew Cardinal

Sound from This Moment

Matthew Cardinal (he/him) is an amiskwaciy (Edmonton, AB) based musician, sound artist, and photographer known for his work with Polaris Short List nominee group nêhiyawak. Cardinal’s solo full-length album Asterisms was released in October 2020 on Arts & Crafts. Cardinal’s music utilizes modular synthesizers, vintage analog equipment, electric pianos, and samplers to create cinematic and dreamlike soundscapes.

Cardinal’s photographic works come from a daily practice of collecting and photographing the natural environment, and objects of interest with vintage Polaroid and 35mm cameras.

Ontario, Canada

Megan Arnold

Megan Arnold is presented by Ed Video

A Deal with Dog

I am a Filipinx-Canadian multidisciplinary artist currently based in Guelph, Ontario, on the ancestral lands of the Attawandaron, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee peoples and the treaty lands and territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit. In my work, I use humour as a coping mechanism to deal with anxiety in the face of an impending apocalypse. I am interested in essential facets of humanity and how they manifest in the 21st century: mortality, liveness, connection, and community. Using a combination of performance, video, drawing, and pop music, I seek to collapse the divisions between humour and pathos, art and entertainment, and fantasy and reality.

A Deal With Dog, graciously sponsored by Ed Video and their summer equipment residency for IF 2022, is a new video work shot on June 16th on a farm in Treaty 19 Territory, Southwestern Ontario. In it, I walk with a border collie over the rolling hills of the farm while singing KateBush’s song “Running Up That Hill”. Although we disappear from the video fairly quickly, the viewer can still hear me singing breathlessly, often getting the words wrong; my legs trudging through thigh-high grasses, and the occasional pant of Farley the dog as we cross paths. Dogs are fantastic improvisers because they live one hundred percent in the moment.

Canada and Wales

Megan Arnold and Penny Hallas

Megan Arnold and Penny Hallas are presented by Elysium Gallery

The Future of the Universe / Mae Dyfodol y Bydysawd

MEGAN ARNOLD 

I am a Filipinx-Canadian multidisciplinary artist currently based in Guelph, Ontario, on the lands of the Attawandaron, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee peoples and the treaty lands and territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit. In my work, I use humour as a coping mechanism to deal with anxiety in the face of an impending apocalypse. I am interested in essential facets of humanity and how they manifest in the 21st century: mortality, liveness, connection, and community. Using a combination of performance, video, drawing, and pop music, I seek to collapse the divisions between humour and pathos, art and entertainment, and fantasy and reality.  

PENNY HALLAS 

Born in Yorkshire, England, I live in a village in the Black Mountains, Wales – an area typically seen as a site of natural beauty but which is riddled with the scars of industrial activity. The land itself  mirrors hierarchies of power and control. It conceals and reveals the history of our attitudes and desires in relation to it and the way different systems – agricultural, industrial, ecological, natural, artistic – come into being, become enmeshed and fall apart. Collaborative approaches are integral to my practice: I welcome the disturbance, challenge and enrichment of multiple perspectives. Sources/theoretical underpinnings include: art historical interrogations of landscape: art psychotherapy/systemic psychotherapy frameworks: archival material, poetry, myth and ritual. https://www.pennyhallas.co.uk/ 

JOINT STATEMENT 

After talking about the paths laid out for us, whether on the land or in our stars, we decided to follow will o’ the wisps. Through a process of call and response we have exchanged video, performance, sound, and texts which have taken us both off the beaten track and into unfamiliar terrain. Guided by instinct, embracing risk and open to accident we found ourselves playing in the margins between freedom and restraint, gravity and absurdity. The Future of the Universe / Mae Dyfodol y Bydysawd is a karaoke-inspired video that subverts ideas of pre-determined futures on a personal, global, and galactic level. 

TITLE – The Future of the Universe / Mae Dyfodol y Bydysawd (video: duration 5 minutes) 

Click here to sing along at home with our easy(ish) to read lyrics!  

Québec, Canada

Mili Hong

Mili Hong is presented by Coastal Jazz & Blues

Midst of a meeting

Mili Hong is a Montreal-based Korean drummer who has been playing various styles of music for over a decade including jazz, pop, improvised music, rock, and folk. Her ability to adapt sensitively to music, with a wide range of dynamics, allows her to express a wide range of emotions and to be connected more deeply with the bands she collaborates with.

Ontario, Canada

Nagata Shachu

Nagata Shachu, based in Toronto, has enthralled audiences with its mesmerizing and heart-pounding performances of the Japanese drum (taiko) since its formation in 1998. The group has toured widely throughout Canada, the US, and Italy, and has performed at major engagements in Lebanon and Mexico.

While rooted in the folk drumming traditions of Japan, the ensemble’s principal aim is to rejuvenate this ancient art form by producing innovative and exciting music that seeks to create a new voice for the taiko. Taking its name from founder Kiyoshi Nagata and the Japanese word shachu meaning group, Nagata Shachu, has become renowned for its exacting, physically demanding, and energetic performances on the taiko, as well as for its diverse repertoire.

In addition to having recorded five CDs of original music and five DVDs, Nagata Shachu, has produced its own annual concerts focusing on the presentation of new works. For the last nine years, Nagata Shachu has produced a three-concert season, featuring collaborations with both local and international artists.

Featuring an arsenal of taiko, bamboo flutes, the three-stringed shamisen and an array of gongs, cymbals, shakers and wood blocks, Nagata Shachu will take you on a musical journey beyond all borders.

Ontario, Canada

Nick Fraser

A Life in The Clouds

Nick Fraser has been an active and engaging presence in the Toronto new jazz and improvised music community since he moved there from Ottawa in 1995. He has worked with a veritable “who’s who” of Canadian jazz and improvised music including Justin Haynes, Mike Murley, Phil Dwyer, Michael Snow, John Oswald, Andrew Downing, Jean Martin, Christine Duncan, Lina Allemano, Quinsin Nachoff, David Braid, Ryan Driver, David Occhipinti, William Carn, Nancy Walker, Kelly Jefferson, John Geggie, Scott Thomson, Marilyn Lerner, David Mott, Lori Freedman, Jean Derome, Ron Samworth and Kirk MacDonald. 

In addition, he has had the opportunity to perform and/or record with such international artists as Tony Malaby, Michael Moore, Donny McCaslin, Marilyn Crispell, Anthony Braxton, Joe McPhee, William Parker, Jean-Luc Ponty, Bela Fleck, Dave Liebman, Joe Lovano, John Scofield, Wynton Marsalis, David Binney, and Bill Carrothers. Nick’s recorded works as a leader include Owls in Daylight (1997), and If There Were No Opposites (2021). 

For 10 years, he co-led the co-operative group Drumheller with Brodie West, Rob Clutton, Eric Chenaux and Doug Tielli, who released four critically acclaimed CDs between 2005 and 2013. Other projects that occupy Nick regularly are Ugly Beauties (with Marilyn Lerner and Matt Brubeck), Peripheral Vision, the Lina Allemano Four and Titanium Riot. 

“Fraser not so much plays the drums as hurls himself whole body and soul against skin and metal… truly talented.”   Bill Stunt, CBC Radio.

Ontario, Canada

Olivia Shortt

Nina Boujee and Jeeves, Unlikely Friends before the end of the world

(They/Them: Anishinaabe, Nipissing First Nation with settler ancestry – canadian & irish) Olivia Shortt is a noisemaker, improviser, composer, video artist, theatremaker, curator, trouble-maker and professional disrupter. 

Highlights include performing Raven Chacon’s ‘For Olivia Shortt’ at The Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC) as part of Chacon’s series of solo works ‘For Zitkála-Šá’ during the 2022 Whitney Biennial; playing at the Lincoln Center (NYC) with the International Contemporary Ensemble; performing in their film debut in Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan’s 2019 film ‘Guest of Honour’; as well as recording an album of Robert Lemay’s music two kilometres underground in the SnoLAB (Neutrino Lab in Sudbury, Canada). Recent projects include a new opera in partnership with Loose Tea Music Theatre (Toronto), a commission for Blueridge Chamber Festival (Vancouver), and a collaborative new work with thirtyminutes (Canada/England). Works created over the last two years include commissions from Long Beach Opera (California), the JACK Quartet (NYC), and Din of Shadows (Toronto). 

Shortt was a finalist for the 2021 Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award as well as awarded and named one of the 2020 Buddies in Bad Times’ Emerging Queer Artists. Shortt was featured in the 2020 Winter edition of Musicworks Magazine. www.olivia-shortt.com @oliviash_rtt (Instagram) 

Headshot credit: Alejandro Santiago, Heshaka Jayawardena (glitter edit)

Norway

Øyvind Skarbø

Skarbø Skulekorps

Skarbø Skulekorps is the brainchild of drummer/composer Øyvind Skarbø. The skulekorps, which translates to school band, was initially a commission for the Nattjazz Festival 2019 in Bergen, Norway. Inspired by his own early beginnings in the local school band in countryside Norway, with uniforms and all, the initial idea was to include any and every influence Øyvind found interesting. Afrobeat with techno bass? 60s jazz with 80s synths? Avant garde with banjos and steel guitar? Yes please! Says Skarbø, “I wanted an outlet that would let me use all my diverse interests and influences in one place, instead of having fifteen bands. The material is all over the place – just like in my school band growing up. We’d play a Sousa march and then Theme from Rocky, then maybe something from a Disney film. Noone found this mix strange, and I still don’t.”  

The combination of the catchy with the unpredictable struck a chord with the audience. Their first album Skarbø Skulekorps (Hubro, 2019) got rave reviews internationally and was voted Album of the Year by French radio station LeGriGri. The follow up Dugnad (Hubro, 2021) raised the bar even higher, and Øyvind was recently nominated for the prestigious EDVARD award for his music for the album. A popular band on the Norwegian live scene, Skarbø Skulekorps recently performed on Lindmo, the premier Norwegian talk show, and will play at the Øya Festival this Summer, Norway’s largest music festival. 

The line-up reads like an all-star team of Scandinavian jazz musicians, with members from bands like Jaga Jazzist, Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, Huntsville and more.  

Skarbø Skulekorps is: Eirik Hegdal (C Melody sax, clarinet, vibraphone), Signe Emmeluth (alto sax, electronics), Stian Omenås (trumpet, synth, percussion), Erik Johannessen (trombone, electronics), Ivar Grydeland (guitar, pedal steel), Chris Holm (bass, synth) and Øyvind Skarbø (drums, compositions). 

Skarbø Skulekorps is currently working on their third album to be released in 2023.

Ontario, Canada

Pantayo

Pagkabangon Mula Sa Silong (Arising From Under The Shaded Tree)

Pantayo is an all-women kulintang ensemble based in Toronto. They combine percussive metallophones and drums from kulintang traditions of Southern Philippines with electronic and synth-based grooves. They also offer music and cultural workshops to teach kulintang. Pantayo explores the possibility of kulintang through their experiences as queer diasporic Filipinas.

New York, United States

Patricia Nicholson

Patricia Nicholson is a dancer, poet, and organizer of movement, music, and causes. She has developed her work within the aesthetic of free jazz, and she founded Arts For Art and the Vision Festival to promote and advocate for free jazz. Beginning with the belief that dance is the visual manifestation of sound and energy, Ms. Nicholson has developed a singular practice, one drawing from both traditional and unconventional techniques to create an eclectic yet intuitive approach to movement and composition. This same aesthetic is manifest in all her work from writing to organizing to being present in each moment. Nicholson’s dance and poetry are featured in her active projects: What It Is Ensemble (co-led with William Parker and ft. James Brandon Lewis, Melanie Dyer, Devin Waldman and Gerald Cleaver); Revolution Resurrection (with art by William Mazza and music by TA Thompson and Jason Hwang); BLUE (with art by William Mazza and electronics by Val Jeanty); and Hope Cries for Justice, duos and trios with William Parker and Hamid Drake.

Québec, Canada

Pierre-Yves Martel

UNACCOMPANIED 

Unaccompanied is a solo improvisation for prepared soprano viola da gamba, zither and pitch pipes. The piece was performed live, without the use of overdubs.   

Pierre-Yves Martel is a musician and composer based in Montréal, Canada. A multi-instrumentalist, he specializes in the creation of sonic worlds both on stage and in the studio, where he handles all aspects of production. Blending the analog with the digital, signal with noise, the traditional with the experimental, Pierre-Yves aims to make music that transcends genre and style to become utterly singular. 

British Columbia, Canada

Randy Raine-Reusch and Mei Han

寂 ( Ji ）

Mei Han & Randy Raine-Reusch are internationally acclaimed concert artists performing contemporary music for the Chinese zheng. Han is one of the world’s leading virtuosi on the instrument and continues to forge innovative new repertoire for the zheng. She is also one of the world’s leading scholars on the zheng and has lectured worldwide in combination with her performances. Raine-Reusch is an internationally renowned multi-instrumentalist, composer, an improvisor performing on instruments from a wide variety of world cultures. He has been creating innovative works for the zheng for over 35 years. Both are very experienced improvisors and have performed together or independently with a long list of artists live, on video, and on CD.  In 2019, Han & Raine-Reusch were featured in two of China’s top TV shows with an audience of approximately 500 million viewers each, and both these performances included improvisation by both artists.  

Taking this 2500-year-old instrument into the future, Mei Han and & Randy Raine-Reusch have introduced the instrument to many new performance contexts including world music, contemporary opera, free jazz, real-time interactive computer music, chamber music, orchestral music, funk, jazz, rock, folk, electro-acoustic music, and experimental music. Mei Han & Randy Raine-Reusch continue to bring new, techniques, new approaches, new technology, and new contexts to the zheng yet always strive to maintain its core aesthetics in every performance. 

Ontario, Canada

Reza Yazdanpanah

Heewaa (Hope)

Group members: Reza Yazdanpanah and Shelir Ebrahimi

Reza Yazdanpanah is an Iranian musician who is a teacher, improviser, and composer. Until 2019, he was a music faculty member at the University of Guilan,Iran where he taught Persian classical repertoire_Radif, and Improvisation on Tar and Setar (Persian plucked chordophones).  

Me, Myself, and I; Reza et Moi, Tamashay-e- Saba, Eshq Amad, and Goshayesh are his released albums, composed/improvised based on folkloric, traditional, and classical Persian music. 

In 2016, focusing on children’s music education, Reza established his private music school (Yazdanpanah Music School) in Shiraz, Iran with his brothers. His recently published book is called Shur-e-Tar which is a comprehensive guide for both music educators and self-teaching students.  

In 2021 Reza graduated from the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI) at the University of Guelph. His research interest is creating improvisational games for children as social practices in order to equip them for their future lives. 

Texas, United States

Rob Mazurek

Tumultuous Seasons Utopian Futures

Rob Mazurek is an interdisciplinary artist who has spent much of his creative life in Chicago and in Brazil. He currently lives and works in Marfa, TX.

In all disciplines, Mazurek’s work is prolific, focused, expansive and evocative. His creative practice uses self-developed strategies and innovative technologies for composition and performance. His creative process is ouroboric; his sound work and visual work are inextricably linked and have been the basis of his varied multimedia projects since the 1990’s.

He is a respected composer, improviser and ensemble leader in the international creative music and avant-jazz scenes. Mazurek’s expansive vision and vast catalog, of over 450 compositions and 80 recordings, have kept him reshaping modern music over the last three decades. His numerous ensembles, ranging in size from duo to orchestra, include leading creative musicians from three continents.

As a visual artist, Mazurek has exhibited his painting, print, sculpture, film, video, sound and installation work since 2002. His diverse multimedia projects have been supported by major arts institutions, including the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud, New Music USA, The Andy Warhol Museum, Sons d’hiver, the Berlin Jazz Festival, SESC São Paulo, and the Frankfurt Jazz Festival.

Nigeria, Africa

Samson Oklobia

Dreaming Reality / Into the Unknown

Samson Oklobia is a Documentary Filmmaker and Television Producer with almost a decade of experience under his belt. A graduate of Mass Communication from the prestigious University of Jos, he got his training as Cinematographer and Filmmaker from PEFTI Film Institute, Lagos and New York Film Academy, Abu Dhabi. 

He is a Producer and Editor with Flame Tv, an independent television station run and operated by Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). He still freelances here and there when time and chance permits but his absolute use of spare time is to teach budding filmmakers Cinematography and Non-Linear Editing. 

He is also a Poet and Non-resident Research Associate at the Center for Socially Engaged Theatre and an intending Masters student at the Media, Art and Performance department of University of Regina. His research work will focus on Theatre and Immigration as well as Equity, Diversity and Inclusion as it concerns immigrants. He hopes to explore the role of Folklore in driving these elements in his research.  

Headshot credit: Samson Oklobia

Québec, Canada

Sarah Pagé and Jonah Fortune

Sarah Pagé and Jonah Fortune

To encapsulate the career of Montreal-based artist Sarah Pagé, one would have to draw long, constellation-like shapes across genres, borders and histories. Her first solo LP, Dose Curves, affirms this versatility and reveals Pagé as one of Canada’s most accomplished experimentalists. Employing a myriad of techniques and tools to accentuate the harp, Pagé capitalizes on both the very physical and altogether mystical tones inherent in the instrument. She is currently working on her next solo release and studying the Japanese koto as a member of the Sawai Soukyokuin. Pagé is touring as a soloist and in collaboration with Nadah El Shazly, Bùmarang, and Land of Kush. Past collaborations include Lhasa DeSela, The Barr Brothers, Esmerine and Patrick Watson.

Jonah Fortune is a musician who has been active in the improvised, punk rock and creative music scenes of Victoria, Vancouver and Montreal for the last 25 years. A multi-instrumentalist, with a current focus on the contrabass and shakuhachi, he can be heard playing drums, trumpet, trombone, bass clarinet, and koto among other instruments, on numerous recordings. Some current musical influences and interests include: maqam music of North Africa and shamanistic and religious musics of Korea, Japan, and America, Collaborations include projects with: Sam Shalabi, Nadah El Shazly, Wilbert De Joode, Lori Freedman, Josh Zubot, Lee Hutzulak, John Heward, Carla Bozulich, and many others. He is currently based in Montreal.

Ontario, Canada

Shaghayegh Yassemi

The Journey of a Poem

Shaghayegh Yassemi is a filmmaker and a performance artist. She received her Bachelor’s and Master’s in Theater from Soore University in Tehran, Iran. In 2015, she moved to Montreal and finished her second Master’s, this time in Film Production, at Concordia University. She started her PhD in Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph in 2020.  She is particularly fond of the communication between people and the surrounding architecture. For now, she is researching on: 

• How can a performance art piece or a film with performative characteristics create the experience of poetry? 
• How can a mélange of fragmented poetry and stories be made out of performative and improvisatory practices? 
• How can poetic pathways be created and improvised?  

The methodology of her practice-based research is based on a journey through the process of making films and performance art pieces. This journey coincides with different strategies like community-based practices, the investigation of written, oral or artistic sources, and the spontaneous and unexpected. The project has roots in the way Shahrzad designs and tells stories in One Thousand and One Nights. 

British Columbia, Canada

Sonnet L’Abbé

Sonnet L’Abbé is presented by Hillside Festival

The Body Homes A Lyric Voice

Sonnet L’Abbé is a writer, performer, editor and educator. They are an editor for poetry publisher Brick Books, and a professor of Creative Writing and English at Vancouver Island University. They are the author of the poetry books A Strange Relief and Killarnoe, and their most recent book of poems, Sonnet’s Shakespeare, was a Quill and Quire Book of the Year for 2019. Since 2020, they have turned to songwriting and have performed poems and songs at festivals, open mics and small shows across the country, including a début solo show at the Port Theatre in 2021. 

Alberta, Canada

Stacey Bliss

Gong Bath

When not researching, teaching, or playing gongs, Stacey Bliss enjoys cycling along the Bow River in Calgary, coffees, and her ferocious cat, Frances Bean. Stacey wears a few different hats as an Independent Scholar; she is a Research Associate with IICSI at the University of Guelph, an Appointed Academic Colleague at the University of Alberta, a Guest Scholar at the Humanities Research Institute, University of Regina, and an instructor at varying postsecondary institutes. Her most recent project, a SSHRC Insight Development Grant study (2021-2023) titled: Toward a Sound Pedagogy: A Sonic and Performative Ethnography of ‘Sound Healers’ in Canada explores how ‘sound healing,’ as well as sonic events and experiences, are currently offered in communities across Canada. This project queries sonic and improvisational practices as pedagogical for individual and social wellbeing. She plans to share the research multimodally at multiple venues across Canada in 2023. Stay tuned! Find out more about Stacey’s work and events at www.blissresearch.org.  

Saskatchewan, Canada

Steve Bates

Steve Bates is presented by ArtsEverywhere Festival

untitled (13-07-2022)

Steve Bates is a musician and artist living in Treaty 6 / Saskatoon. Early experiences with punk rock, combined with an undergraduate degree in theatre design and philosophy, were influential as was working as a gardener for 12 summers with the City of Winnipeg. After years of performing music and making radio art in Winnipeg, where he grew up, he founded and directed Send + Receive: A Festival of Sound (1998-2004). Upon moving to Montréal he worked for 8 years as the sound technician at Hexagram Institute for Research/Creation in Media Arts Technologies at Concordia University while continuing to develop his music and art practice. During this time, he completed his MFA at Concordia where he was awarded the inaugural Stephen and Claudine Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art upon graduation. He has been working as a professional artist since this time. He imagines his work to be a method of listening to noise through desire, agency and encounter. In improvised contexts, Bates has performed solo and with Seijiro Murayama, Burkhard Stangl/Martin Siewert/SteveHeather, Kiyoharu Kuwayama, Elizabeth Anka Vajagic, and in the improv/art/punk duo, Lanterner, with Marc-Alexandre Reinhardt. His next solo release will be published by Constellation Records and he also releases music both solo and collaboratively through his own small-scale publishing and curatorial project, The Dim Coast. His work has been exhibited, transmitted and performed in Canada, Europe, the USA, Chile and Senegal.

Ontario, Canada

Steve Donnelly

analogue doomscrolling 

An 8-minute edit of a 45-minute piano play-around at Silence, Guelph. 

On the 8^th July 2022 (a day where Rodgers Internet was disrupted across Canada) I found myself following an urge to sit at a piano and attempt to remember how/not to play. It had been close to 20 years since I last played a piano, having taken lessons and completing several grades between the ages of 8-13. My inability to read music and my reliance on playing by ear, left me ill-prepared for an external examiners instruction to play from a score I had never seen before. Needless to say, I failed that particular exam. Gazumped of my ambitions for further certification, I vowed to forever avoid key-based instruments. That was, until the internet broke. 

Steve Donnelly‘s work explores and combines his interests in improvised play, performance, popular culture, belief, humour, and the commons.  

Steve is currently an PhD student in Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph. 

United Kingdom

Steve Johnson

A Musical Train of Thought

A self-proclaimed agent of chaos, Steve leaves in his wake a trail of loose ends that he promises one day will come together. He lives in a creative stupor, unable to leave anything alone, driven by an insane curiosity to dive in and bathe in his latest fixation, whatever that may be. There’s a narrative to be found, a song to be heard and a picture to unfold, but not today. Today is about the dream. Steve lives in Brighton, UK, plays bass in the band Idle Bones, and produces code, music, art and video for and with fellow artisans.

Headshot credit: Steve Johnson

Maryland, United States

Susan Alcorn

Susan Alcorn Improvisation

One of the world’s premiere exponents of her instrument, Susan Alcorn has taken the pedal steel guitar far beyond its traditional role in country music. Having first paid her dues in Texas country & western bands, she began to expand the vocabulary of her instrument through her study of 20th-century classical music, visionary jazz, and world musics.

Though known for her solo work, she has collaborated with numerous artists including Pauline Oliveros, Eugene Chadbourne, Chris Cutler, the London Improvisors Orchestra, the Glasgow Improvisors Orchestra, Joe McPhee, Ken Vandermark, Nate Wooley, Ingrid Laubrock and Leila Bourdreuil, George Burt, Evan Parker, Caroline Kraabel, Michael Formanek, Zane Campbell, and Mary Halvorson among others. In 2017 she received the Baker Artist Award and in 2018, along with saxophonist Joe McPhee, the Instant Award in Improvised Music. Her album “Pedernal, released in 2020, was included in several “Best of the Year” lists including the New York Times.

Wild and beautiful and disturbing and downright bloody odd in turn. Frankly, trying to describe Alcorn’s music is bit like trying to paint wind: you’re better off just turning it on and letting it happen. – Bob Fitzpatrick, The Guardian

A pioneer of the pedal steel guitar in improvised music. – Bill Milkowski, Downbeat

Susan Alcorn pulls an energy out of the pedal steel that feels both ancient and otherworldly. – Lars Gotrich, NPR

Ontario, Canada

Taylor Marie Graham

Travel Rhythm

Taylor Marie Graham (she/her) is a writer, educator, and theatre maker living and working in Cambridge, Ontario / Haldimand Tract. Both her creative and scholarly work often explores rural feminist identities, the decolonization of bodies in space, and relationships to land/environment. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and has multiple plays and operas produced to critical acclaim. In a five-star review Graham’s most recent play Post Alice was described as, “a lyric, Chekhovian meditation on the loss of the past and the loss of the people we once thought we were . . . masterful . . . a profound, beautifully crafted play” (Hoile).

Currently, she is a PhD Candidate in theatre at the University of Guelph, and teaches English/Theatre/Creative Writing at various universities in South Western Ontario. This summer she is writing a new play focused on rural women and climate change supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Waterloo Region Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, and Lyth Arts Centre in Caithness, Scotland.

Awards/Scholarships/Grants: Dora Award nomination and Waterloo Regional Emerging Artist Award, Canadian Association for Theatre Research Grant, Ontario Government Scholarship, College of Arts Scholarship, Board of Graduate Research Scholarship, Graduate Entrance Excellence Scholarship, Carole Stewart Arts Graduate Scholarship, Connie Rooke Scholarship, George Ryga Bursary for Excellence in Playwrighting, as well as multiple regional, provincial, and national theatre grants.

Alberta, Canada

The NaAC Professional Dance Ensemble

The NaAC Professional Dance Ensemble is presented by National accessArts Centre (NaAC)

ICONIC

Group members: James Silcock, Karin Hazle, Kathy Austin, Pixel Kim, JorDen Tyson, Hank “Dommix” Round Tia Srivastava, Ashley Brodeur – Performing Arts Manager, Chawna Exner – Performing Arts Assistant, Christahh Ahh, Minuet Charron, Margarita Rebetskaya, Daniel Vais (Culture Device) – Creative Director, Jairus Shariff – Musical Accompaniment

The National accessArts Centre (NaAC) is Canada’s oldest and largest disability arts organization – and the country’s first multidisciplinary disability arts organization, providing artistic training, creation, and exhibition/presentation opportunities for artists with developmental, physical, and acquired disabilities. Currently supporting more than 350 artists in programs across multiple disciplines, including visual arts, digital media, literary arts, dance, theatre, and music. Since 2018, the NaAC has become the most prominent disability arts organization to be showcased on the global stage, with artists and/or their works being shown in Hong Kong, Seoul, New York, Dubai, Guadalajara – and most recently, at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow.

The NaAC Professional Dance Ensemble was formerly part of the Momo Movement organization prior to its merger with the NaAC. These artists consistently push the boundaries conceptually and physically. Creating original works, the Ensemble often works in multidisciplinary capacities including spoken word, visual art and movement into their performances. Some of our performers have been working together for more than 10 years on various projects and trainings.

In May, the NaAC Ensemble reunited after many months a part. Daniel Vais of Culture Device (Drag Syndrome, UK), this project stems from contemporary movement, Conceptualized through work with individual expression and collaboration. A collection of solos, duos and group work, this performance piece captures the essence of each performer individually and who they are, along with the stories they want to tell and Icons they wish to be. From the musical score to the movement, Iconic was a work of improvisation and will only belong to this moment in time.

Singapore

Tim O’Dwyer

Timothy O’Dwyer is a part of/presented by LASALLE College of the Arts

Metamorphosis II

Tim O’Dwyer is a saxophonist, composer/researcher and is the Head of Music at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. His research investigates the post-structuralist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze within the context of his practice, and has published with Routledge and De Gruyter, and given papers on his research at the Deleuze and Artistic Research Conference at the Orpheus Institute, Belgium. Timothy is one of the founding members of the seminal punk/jazz group bucketrider, the improvised music series The Make It Up Club in Melbourne, and one of the inaugural artistic fellows of the Akademie der Künste der Welt Köln. He has been a member of ELISION Ensemble since 1994, and is a current collaborator with the Australian Art Orchestra. Timothy has performed his original works at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and the Sydney Opera House, and performed at all the major arts festivals in Australia. He has published recordings with Leo Records, FMRCD, Creative Sources, and LaoBan Records.  

Québec, Canada

Tuned Air Trio (Eric Lewis, Ayelet Rose Gottlieb, and Deanna Radford)

Leaving Their Mark on the Seabed – Lachine

Tuned Air Trio explores the variety of ways meaningful sounds can be made–text-voice-music–tuning the three to each other in dream-inspired soundscapes. Our improvisations are seeded in Deanna’s site-specific poetry. Deanna Radford is currently working on completing her first book of poetry on how the internet, climate crisis, and human intimacy are intertwined. Eric Lewis is a Montreal-based improvisor on brass, reeds and electronics. Vocalist Ayelet Rose Gottlieb’s most recent album, “13 Lunar Meditations: Summoning the Witches” explores her connection to nature in a multi-lingual song-cycle. 

Canada

Vertical Squirrels

inexhaustible

Group members: Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, Lewis Melville, Ted Warren, Aimee Copping

Called an “an unclassifiable blast of fresh air” by the Montreal Mirror, with their first album Hold True (Accroche-toi) chosen as one of the top ten offerings in 2010, the music of the Vertical Squirrels is group improvised, live in the moment and draws on a potent mixture of free jazz and post-rock sensibilities with nods to Indian ragas, jazz-inflected minimalism, Zappa-esque bouts of sonic anarchy and Krautrock.

Like the music they play, the Vertical Squirrels came together through a mixture of chance and perseverance. Long-time collaborators Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and Lewis Melville started playing together as a group upon the arrival in Guelph of multi-talented drummer/percussionist Rob Wallace, in 2008, later adding acclaimed drummer Ted Warrento the mix in 2011.

Their most recent album, Le gouffre / The Chasm, released in 2021, comes after three critically acclaimed albums, Time of the Sign and Hold True (Accroche-toi), also with Montréal’s magnificent label Ambiances Magnétiques and Winter’s Gate (BarCode Free Music). The band has developed a reputation for creating spontaneous organic soundscapes and incendiary, energy-driven improvisations that consistently defy genre.

A unique voice on the Canadian instrumental scene with constantly mutating sonic risk-taking at the core of their musical practice, the Vertical Squirrels’ contribution to the 2022 IF festival, inexhaustible, features Aimee Copping’s videography. inexhaustible shows the group instant-composing richly textured melodies and harmonies that were live improvised at the Guelph DIY venue Silence––the three-part piece, documents the first 18 minutes that the band played together after over a year and a half of pandemic-caused separation.

Ontario, Canada

Viv and Ethel Moore

Saturday Nights

The Shed

Viv Moore (vivmoore.com)

Born in England, Viv has been dancing, choreographing and acting both collaboratively and as a solo artist since 1979. She co-founded Remote Control with Dave Wilson, performing and teaching in Sweden, Australia, England and Canada; worked with community dance in London, England and Canada; was National Coordinator of Fight Directors, Canada (Advanced Actor Combatant level in 6 weapons). Viv taught Dance and Movement part-time at Humber College since 1985.

A Chalmers Arts Fellowship (2012) took her to England, L.A. and Vienna to study Step and Clog, Bullwhip, Knife, Tomahawk, Archery and Butoh respectively. Her solo choreography/performance (Worcestershire Saucy) is inspired by an eclectic mix of theatrical styles. Viv has received a Harold, Paula Citron fFIDA Award (Bogie Woman) and several Dora nominations. She has been an Artist in Residence 2022 at Luminato Festival.

Selected credits: Fujiwara Dance, Sashar Zarif, Allison Cummings (Dance); Theatre Rusticle (Acting); Theatre Direct – Sanctuary Song (Choreography); Outside eye on dance and theatre productions; Movement Director (YPT’s Under The Stairs); movies The Witch (stunt double), TV series The Strain (episode); Damien (recurring role); Artistic Director and Curator for Body Percussion Festival (2014, 2017).

Ethel Moore

Ethel is 102. Born in 1919, Ethel has seen many changes, but her love of Movement and Dance remains a constant. She represented her school when she was 11, doing folk dance at Cadbury’s, Birmingham. During World War 2, she learned new dances at the community centres and became a popular partner due to her dance ability. The right shoe soles were important!!

Ethel performed Hags a modern theatrical dance piece at the Toronto Fringe, with her daughter Viv. A few years later she danced in a film called Waking the Witch which was shot in England. Ethel dances at every opportunity she can get and is very pleased to be in the piece Saturday Nights for this festival.

Connecticut, United States

Wadada Leo Smith

Wadada Leo Smith’s Solo Performance

Wadada Leo Smith was born in Leland, Mississippi, and his musical life began in high school concert and marching bands. At the age of thirteen, he became involved with the Delta Blues and other music traditions. 

Mr. Smith received his formal musical education from his stepfather Alex “Little Bill” Wallace, composer and guitarist, and one of the pioneers of electric guitar in Delta Blues. He was further educated through the U.S. Military band program at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri (1963); Sherwood School of Music (1967-69); and Wesleyan University (1975-76). He has researched a variety of music cultures: African, Japanese, Indonesian, European and American. 

Wadada Leo Smith, trumpeter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser is one of the most acclaimed creative artists of his times, both for his music and his writings. For the last five decades, Mr. Smith has been a member of the historical and legendary AACM collective. He distinctly defines his music as “Creative Music.” Mr. Smith’s diverse discography reveals a recorded history centered around important issues that have impacted his world. 

Mr. Smith started his research and designs in search of Ankhrasmation in 1965. His first realization of this language was in 1967, which was illustrated in the recording of The Bell (Anthony Braxton: ‘Three Compositions of New Jazz’), and has played a significant role in his development as an artist, ensemble leader, and educator. 

He has been on the faculty of the following institutions: The University of New Haven (1975-’76), The Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, NY (1975-’78), and Bard College (1987-’93). From 1994 he was on the faculty at The Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts. There he was the director of the African-American Improvisational Music program. Mr. Smith retired from CalArts in 2013. 

He is a member of these professional organizations: ASCAP, Chamber Music America, and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. 

Mr. Smith’s awards and commissions include: DownBeat Magazine’s 65th Annual Critics Poll: Artist, Trumpet, and Album of the Year (America’s National Parks). Mr. Smith is featured on the cover of the August 2017 issue of DownBeat. And in the 2016 Jazz Times’ Critics Poll, he was honored the Artist of the Year. His  America’s National Parks  earned wide praise as one of the best albums of 2016 from media like The New York Times, the NPR Jazz Critics Poll, The Wire and many other publications. 

A finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, he received the 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award and earned an honorary doctorate from CalArts, where he was also celebrated as Faculty Emeritus. 

Mr. Smith was also honored by the Jazz Journalists Association as their 2017 Musician of the Year as well as the 2017 Duo of the Year for his work with Vijay Iyer. The JJA also named him their 2016 Trumpeter of the Year, 2015 Composer of the Year, and 2013 Musician of the Year. Also, in 2013 he was also selected as DownBeat’s Composer of the Year and he graced the cover of that magazine in November 2016. 

Wadada Leo Smith’s Ankhrasmation language scores have recently been exhibited in major American museums. In October 2015, The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago presented the first comprehensive exhibition of these language scores. In 2016, the scores were also featured in the Hammer Museum’s ‘Made in L.A.’ exhibition; he also received the Hammer Museum’s 2016 Mohn Award for Career Achievement honoring brilliance and resilience. His scores have also been shown at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Michigan, and Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco, California. 

Ten Freedom Summers, (Defining Moments in the 
History of the United States of America) is a large work (four-CD box set) inspired by the civil rights movement. TFS has been awarded: MAP Fund Award (2011), Chamber Music America New Works Grant (2010), NEA Recording Grant (2010), commissioned by Southwest Chamber Music with support from the James Irvine Foundation and Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation, and Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2009-2010). 

He was awarded an Other Minds residency, that commissioned Taif, a string quartet (2008); simultaneously a Fellow of the Jurassic Foundation (2008); FONT (Festival of New Trumpet) Award of Recognition (2008); Islamic World Arts Initiative of Arts International (2004); Fellow of the Civitela Foundation (2003); Fellow at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (2001); “Third Culture Copenhagen” in Denmark presented a paper on Ankhrasmation (1996); Meet the Composer/Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Commissioning Program (1996); Asian Cultural Council Grantee to Japan (June-August 1993); Meet the Composer/Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Commissioning Program (1990); New York Foundation on the Arts Fellowship in Music (1990); Numerous Meet the Composer Grants (since 1977); and National Endowment for the Arts Music Grants (1972, 1974, 1981). 

Headshot credit: Jimmy Katz

France, Germany, Brazil, The Netherlands, Sweden, UK, and others worldwide

WHAT IIIF? Nowhere & Everywhere

WHAT IIIF? Nowhere & Everywhere features various artists and is presented by WHAT IIIF? festival

WHAT IIIF? Nowhere & Anywhere

Group members: Chris Parfitt (Wales) Danielle Davidson (NL) Clarice Rito Plotkowski (BR) Zoé Buyse (FR) Rémi Stengel (FR) Catharine Cary (US/FR/CA/SE) Benedikte Esperi (SE) Anke Ames (DE) Roland Borch (DE) Denitsa Dikova (ES) Anat Ben-David (UK) Susanne Martin (DE) Astro Dadanza Medellin (CO) Maria Michailidou (NL) Maria Sappho (UK) Claire Astruc (FR) Anet Van Elzen (NL) Angélique Wilke (CA) Heini Nukari (FI) Soila Sariola (BL) Yuri Bongers (NL) Tommaso Roland (IT) Anna Riesel (FR) Kate Allen (UK) Deszo Virag (NL) Beni Lerner (NL) Miguel Lopes (CO) K Rolland (UK) Frank Fiedler (UK) Doris Kollman (DE) 8 participants of SAALFREI through 3 computers arranged in their practice space belonging to Johannes Blattner, M. Gunkel and Selina Koch Nicolas Allwright (FR) Joëlle Valterio (IT) ANKE AMES (DE) SHELLEY OWEN (UK) HENRY DOUGAL MCPHERSON (UK) CONNOR ELLIMAN (UK) ESMERALDA DETMERS, LOES RIETKERK (AMSTERDAM) ULRIKE BRAND, REINHARD GAGEL, SIMON ROSE, INGO REULECKE (BERLIN) OORCONTACT (LEIDEN, NL) GENETIC CHOIR (AMSTERDAM NL) CHANDANA SARMA (ROTTERDAM, NL) PETRA PIECK (UTRECHT, NL) THOMAS JOHANNSEN (AMSTERDAM, NL) JEANNETTE HUIZINGA (AMSTERDAM, NL) IRENE RAMETTA (PISA, IT) ELSA VAN DER LINDEN (NL) KAMURA OBSCURA (LONDON) MYRHNA BOCHAT (RIO DE JANEIRO) EMMANELLE PÉPIN (NICE, FR) SHAGHAYEGH BAGHERI (TEHERAN, IR) SAAL FREI PLATTFORM FÜR IMPROVISATIONSKUNST (STUTTGART) THE PERFORMANCEIMPROVISATIONGROUP INSTANT PIG AND GUESTS : MARTINA GUNKEL ALEXANDRA MAHNKE CLAUDIA SENONER LISA THOMAS MAGDA AGDUELO OLIVER PRECHTL KURT APP (STUTTGART, DE) VINCENT MOULINET (FR) La Soulane (FR) Exploratorium Berlin (DE) Galeri 54 (Gothenberg, SE), Authentika Vin Bio (FR), Jordi Pallarès Barbèra, (ES) Yanki Biçaçki (NL/DE).

WHAT IIIF? NOWHERE & EVERYWHERE IS THE ONLINE OFFSHOOT OF THE WHAT IIIF?, THE NOMADIC RESEARCH FESTIVAL THAT FOR THE LAST 6 YEARS HAS ASKED THE ABSURD QUESTION “CAN IMPROVISATION BE DOCUMENTED?” 

WHAT IIIF? GATHERS EACH YEAR IN DIFFERENT EUROPEAN CITIES TO RESEARCH, PERFORM AND SHARE LUNCH, DOCUMENTING OUR FINDING IN OUR CELLS AND IN OUR RESEARCH DATABASE : https://instantcomposition.com/

WHAT IIIF?’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE 2022 IMPROVFEST EXCERPTS WHAT IIIF? NOWHERE & EVERYWHERE, OUR WEEKLY 40 MINUTE GATHERING (FREE ZOOM ACCOUNT, THANK YOU!) WHICH HAPPENS EVERY WEDNESDAY AT 14H AMSTERDAM TIME. COME AS YOU ARE, IT STARTS, IT FINISHES, YOU NEVER KNOW WHO WILL BE THERE. ALL WELCOME.

WhatIIIF? original initiators and regular gardeners: Benedikte Esperi, Catharine Cary, Thomas Johannsen

Additional WhatIIIF? founding members in Amsterdam 2017: Andrea Hackl, Esmeralda Detmers, Jagna Anderson, Marianthi Michailidou, Shelley Owen

WhatIIIF? researchers and kindness givers of London 2018: Independent Dance, Sue Davies, Anat Ben-David, Sally Dean, Jasper Llewellyn, Dick James Hall, Maggie Nicolson, Dam Van Huynh Company, Centre 151, Pietro Denaro, Marianthi Michailidou, Catharine Cary, Thomas Johannsen, Shelley Owen, Esmeralda Detmers, Benedikte Esperi, Jay Luxemburg, Rosalie Walhfrid, Kajoli Ilojak, Agata Kik, RutBlees Luxemburg, Annette Giesriegl, Middlesex Filter Beds, Trip Dance and the Royal College of Art.

WhatIIIF? researchers and performers of Gothenborg 2019: Tuva Hildebrand, Nathalie Fari, Marianthi Michailidou, Catharine Cary, Reinhard Gagel, Thomas Johannsen, Shelley Owen, Esmeralda Detmers, Benedikte Esperi, Alexandra Mahnke, Galleri 54, Tiny Festival Producers, Theater Trickster, Anders Göransson

WhatIIIF? researchers and performers of Berlin 2022 : Ulrike Brand, Reinhard Gagel, Susanne Martin, Doris Kollmann, Danielle Davidson, Shelley Owen, Yanki Biçaçki, Jordé Pallarès Barbèra, Exploratorium Berlin, Denitsa Dikova, Olivier Prechtl, Esmeralda Detmers, Catharine Cary, Thomas Johannsen.

New York, United States

William Parker

William Parker is a bassist, improviser, composer, writer, and educator from New York City, heralded by The Village Voice as, “the most consistently brilliant free jazz bassist of all time.” In addition to recording over 150 albums, he has published six books and taught and mentored hundreds of young musicians and artists. William Parker’s early collaborations with the dancer and choreographer Patricia Nicholson created a large repertoire of composed music for ensembles ranging from solo works to big band projects. Parker played in the Cecil Taylor Unit from 1980 through 1991. He has also performed with musicians from the AACM such as Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, Ernest Dawkins, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. He has also played with David S. Ware, Don Cherry, Bill Dixon, Grachan Monchur III, Dave Burrell, Charles Tyler, Gunter Hampel, Jeanne Lee, Milford Graves, Rashied Ali, Andrew Cyrille, Matthew Shipp, and Steve Swell. His piece, “A Trail Of Tears,” music/dance/spoken word/film was presented at Roulette in January 2020. He is currently working on a piece about the Jewish holocaust called “Silhouette In The Dust.”

Mexico

Zoonoros

Closed circuit / Open source

Group members: Maricarmen Graue, Edgar Lacolz, Fores Basura and Isaías Herrera

Zoonoros is an interdisciplinary project formed in 2020 by Maricarmen Graue, Edgar Lacolz, Fores Basura and Isaías Herrera. The project integrates sound and improvisation with digital devices encoded with free software and analog hand-made instruments created with reusable objects. Their production aims to reflect on precariousness, poetry, life and humor. 

‘Closed circuit / Open source‘ is a dialogue between humans and an artificial intelligence (AI) about dreams through a musical improvisation. 

In the first part of the interaction, an open-source AI says a dream with Siri’s voice, while the Zoonoros ensemble is improvising, generating music according to what they hear. 

In the second part, an AI is musically improvising around the dream of a human. The AI called Oneiric Regression (https://regresiononirica.net/) created by Isaías Herrera, improvises sound around a dream of one of Zoonoros’ members written down on its interface. 

What is at stake is questioning the inertness of an artificial code that becomes “alive” and “sensitive” from its interrelation with humans through improvisation, unconscious stories and musical manifestations.