Recording: Jesse Zubot

Artist: Jesse Zubot

Song: Manifestation [excerpt]

Recorded at Buddies in Bad Times Cabaret ("Soundstreams' Ear Candy: Almost Unplugged"), February 1, 2018.

Jesse Zubot - Manifestation [excerpt]

Soundstreams' Ear Candy series is "dedicated to musical exploration and discovery in Toronto’s hottest venues", creating intimate experiences in smaller spaces and bringing together contemporary performance practices that might be just a hair too edgy for their mainstage shows. This night featured two highly-skilled violinists approaching their instrument from different angles finding common ground. Long a staple performer in Vancouver's improvised music scene, Jesse Zubot has a list of indie-rock collaborations as long as his bow and has been most visible lately as half of Tanya Tagaq's nimble backing duo. This set allowed him to show off a couple different facets, playing a set of solo improvisations (a breath of fresh air in a context where the scored note usually reigns) as well as assembling a collaborative duo with Andréa Tyniec. Zubot had a small rack of effects to extend his sound, but didn't need to rely on it to show off the range of his abilities — though it was pretty awesome when was willing to go over-the-top with it, as with the gathering cloud of delay feedback heard near the end of this extract.

[The Ear Candy series returns to Buddies on Tuesday May 15th with Beat It!, a percussion-based programme from Ryan Scott & co. featuring a world premieres from composers Nicole Lizée and Michael Oesterle. Meanwhile, Soundstreams' Salon 21 programme has been re-branded as Encounters and has a new home at The Gladstone. These shows are free with registration and offer adventurous programming, so they're a great way to discover something new. Performers for the next couple shows haven't been announced (keep an eye out here) but there was a note to save-the-date for April 10th (evening show) and June 3rd (afternoon show).]

Contest: Andréa Tyniec and Jesse Zubot

Almost Unplugged with Andréa Tyniec and Jesse Zubot

February 1, 2018, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre

Soundstreams is one of the local heavyweights when it comes to presenting contemporary, composed music, and their main stage concerts are big events, often at Trinity-St. Paul's but occasionally expanding all the way to the likes of Massey Hall. But they also like to get their hands dirty and tear into the music's fibre in closer quarters, such as in last year's excellent Salon 21 series event featuring Germaine Liu's ceramic percussion. The Ear Candy series is dedicated to "musical exploration and discovery" in smaller venues and less formal environments, remixing and experimenting with new ways of being creative with sound (MFS fave SlowPitchSound is a frequent series collaborator).

The next show in the series mixes chamber music with improvised sounds by pairing violinists Andréa Tyniec and Jesse Zubot. The latter probably needs no introduction to readers of this blog, known as he is for his recent work with Tanya Tagaq on stage and album — and he's also worked with Destroyer, Fond of Tigers, Gordon Grdina and Peggy Lee, as well as the likes of Steve Reich, Francois Houle, Fred Firth, Mats Gustafsson and many others. Andréa Tyniec has an equally impressive background in the contemporary classical scene, and I'm looking forward to discovering her sounds at this show, including some icy cool electronic textures from Terri Hron. This show will see solo excursions from each of the performers exploring their own idiom, and then will culminate in a duet of an original piece created specifically for this performance.

TICKETS + MORE INFO

Single tickets are now available for purchase for $20 in advance (or $25 at the door).

CONTEST

Thanks to the cool folks at Soundstreams, I have a pair of tickets to the show to give away! Contest now closed, thanks for entering!

To enter, shoot me an email to mechanicalforestsound@gmail.com, with "contest" in the title and your name in the body. I'll randomly draw a winner on Tuesday, January 23, 2018 at noon.

Recording: Soundstreams

Artist: Soundstreams

Songs: Music for 18 Musicians (two excerpts) [composer: Steve Reich]

Recorded at Massey Hall (Steve Reich at 80), April 14, 2016.

Soundstreams - Music for 18 Musicians [excerpt 1]

Soundstreams - Music for 18 Musicians [excerpt 2]

The centrepiece of Soundscapes' season (with a series of spin-off concerts and other associated events) saw the new music ensemble upsize to a nearly sold-out Massey Hall for this celebration of American composer Steve Reich. Reich lead the evening off himself in a performance of Clapping Music (1972) with Russell Hartenberger — a most minimal act of minimalism from the sound of two sets of hands each clapping out a simple rhythm which slowly shifts for one of the players through a series of repetitions. That elemental percussive act was elaborated upon in the expansive Tehillim (1981) with a quartet of voices and further percussion adding layers of abstracted praise song.

The night's second half was given over to the epic Music for 18 Musicians (1976), a sustained rhythmic exercise in subtly-shifting textures. This performance came out at the longer end of the spectrum of performances of the piece at seventy-two minutes, which is a lot of time for the Reich Curve to rise and fall, rise and fall. Seeing this live involved grooving to the piece on two different (and sometimes contradictory) levels: the trance-inducing rhythms of the gloriously phasing pulses encouraging zone-out bliss while the fact of the performance itself constantly engaging one's attention. To the latter, it was fascinating to see how the eighteen musicians¹, playing without a conductor, handled the heroic regularity that the piece demanded, through musical and physical cues as well as an elaborately-choreographed rotation system that saw musicians trade off spots (and musical duties) as the piece progressed. Fascinating and absorbing — and the piece sounded pretty good in the old house on Shuter, which can sometimes be an acoustically-underwhelming boomy room.

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¹ There was a fascinating mix of musicians in the ensemble, drawing from from the local New Music scene and beyond. For the record, the eighteen musicians were:

• Lesley Bouza, voice
• Michelle DeBoer, voice
• Carla Huhtanen, voice
• Laura Pudwell, voice
• Anthony Thompson, clarinet/bass clarinet
• Lori Freedman, clarinet/bass clarinet
• Jesse Zubot, violin
• David Hetherington, cello
• Simon Docking, piano
• Gregory Oh, piano
• Tania Gill, piano
• Stephanie Chua, piano
• Ryan Scott, percussion
• Russell Hartenberger, percussion
• Garry Kvistad, percussion
• Bob Becker, percussion
• Michelle Colton, percussion
• Haruka Fujii, percussion