Recording: Nidus

Artist: Nidus

Song: [excerpt]

Recorded at The Tranzac (Living Room), December 20, 2022.

Nidus - [excerpt]

Interested, as always, in slow-moving continuous sonic expansion, Nidus settled down amongst the strings of christmas lights to create some sonic zones, wheezes and microtonal lurches keeping things just across the border of the uncanny valley.

Speaking of continuous expansion, you can catch some video from this set over on youtube:

Recording: Nidus

Artist: Nidus

Song: the gauzy meshwork of an invisible thought [excerpt]

Recorded at Cedarvale Ravine, September 11, 2021.

Nidus - the gauzy meshwork of an invisible thought [excerpt]

Wow. So it's been, uh, 515 days since I've posted a recording, so hopefully I remember how this-all works. Given everything we've learned in the past year-and-a-half, I'm pretty sure it'd be premature to evince any hearty sort of "we're back, baby!" sentiments — I feel like things will remain somewhat trepidacious for the next while. I'm still pretty unsure with gathering indoors in any sort of numbers, but we'll see how things develop in the next month or so. Stay tuned, is what I'm saying — presumably the next field recording will come sooner than this one.

Having reconnoitred an off-the-path clearing that had been turned into an informal zone filled with handcrafted wood sculptures/structures, Nidus invited some friends out for a safely-distanced Saturday drift. These sonic sorcerers (Marc Couroux, Jason Doell and Matthew Ramolo) are known for their durational explorations, so setting aside a couple hours to timestretch and agitate the soundfield felt like a reasonable return to action. Sounded nice against the fading sunlight, and even with a slightly-accelerated wrap-up this felt like a cozy return to drifting inaction.

I brought along my toy camera and gathered some footage, so here's some different sounds you can absorb in video format:

Recording: Nidus

Artist: Nidus

Songs: [two excerpts]

Recorded at Celestina, August 16, 2018.

Nidus - [excerpt 1]

Nidus - [excerpt 2]

Having another chance to make some sounds in the lovely studio space that'd hosted Track Could Bend a few months previously, I wanted to assemble some sonic adventurers in tune with the in situ vibes — which meant convincing the members of Nidus to convene for a don't-call-it-a-comeback night of audio manipulations and accumulations. Marc Couroux, Jason Doell and Matthew Ramolo created soundfields surging into each other, blurring ego-boundaries and pushing past the attention span's propensity for compartmentalization to achieve undifferentiated unity drift.

Recording: Nidus

Artist: Nidus

Songs: Abductive Transduction [three excerpts]

Recorded at Ratio (Abductive Transduction), January 28, 2017.

Nidus - Abductive Transduction [edited excerpt 1]

Nidus - Abductive Transduction [excerpt 2]

Nidus - Abductive Transduction [excerpt 3]

Taking over all of Ratio's performance space, even the customary artwork was temporarily removed to showcase a series of collage works by Franco Berti. They were overlooking the venue's owls, who were guarding a table of talismanic bones and artifacts. The deconstructed piano plate and strings that normally stay in a back corner was brought out to the middle of the room and laid on its side. All around it, resonators rattled pellets and other metal objects — even the speaker connected to a reel-to-reel player was tinfoil wrapped for some extra whispered vibrational sibilance.

The installation that felt like the apotheosis of the trio's endeavours, removing the humans from the loop to create a long-form lo-fi installation with a variety of devices (in several formats) playing back recordings of Nidus' performances and rehearsals. This pushed the abstract/durational aspect of the group's work even further out than their previous six-hour live set as, in theory, this one could go on forever, so long as there was someone to flip the tapes and restart the MP3 players.

The evening would continue with some overlapping abstract projections and the recorded installation work would eventually segue into a live set. I wasn't able to stick around for that, but this recording of recordings somehow seems conceptually up to the task of representing the event.

Here's a brief video that totally fails to convey how the room as a whole was set up:

Recording: Nidus

Artist: Nidus

Song: [excerpt]

Recorded at The Tranzac's Southern Cross Lounge (416 Toronto Creative Improvisers Festival – Night 1), November 2, 2016.

Nidus - [excerpt]

This night of abstracted sounds lead off a rather satisfying edition of the long-running 416 Festival. It'd been awhile since I had seen Marc Couroux, Jason Doell and Matthew Ramolo drifting together as Nidus. A last-minute cancellation on the night had the evening going forward with only two acts, but that played right into Nidus' don't-rush-us aesthetic. Preferring long stretches of sonic toffee drizzle, Couroux's keyboard vistas, Ramolo's modular blipdrones and Doell's pop culture interventions carried the trio through for about seventy-five minutes — it's best to think of every Nidus performance as a double-gatefold, triple LP set just waiting for you and your beanbag chair.

Recording: Nidus

Artist: Nidus

Song: Accumulations [three excerpts]

Recorded at Ratio (Accumulations: a 6-hour symbiotonotopic experiment), August 16, 2015.

Nidus - Accumulations [excerpt 1]

Nidus - Accumulations [excerpt 2a]

Nidus - Accumulations [excerpt 2b]

Nidus - Accumulations [excerpt 3]

After a few more "standard" gigs, Marc Couroux, Jason Doell and Matthew Ramolo upped the ante with this six hour "symbiotonotopic experiment" unfolding over an afternoon and evening at Ratio. Billed as a casual, drop-in-as-you-please affair, the marathon set heightened the band's investigations of the liminal spaces between foreground and background music as it surged and oozed along. I was on hand for about two-and-a-half hours (though I will confess I ducked out in the middle of that to grab a slice at Fresca) and in the third of the whole that I was on hand for the music ranged from austere chamber synthdrones to sci-fi dubscapes to percussive crests to weird swing to get-your-chant-on — suitable to massage all of your brain's zones.

Recording: Nidus

Artist: Nidus

Song: [excerpt from an improvisation]

Recorded at Array Space ("Somewhere There's Second Sunday Series"), July 12, 2015.

Nidus - [excerpt from an improvisation]

This trio of Marc Couroux, Matthew Ramolo (of Khôra) and Jason Doell specialize in a certain form of sonic-overlap-unto-synesthesia, often making it tough to decode which sound is coming from whom — and then extending that smeary mixture over longform improvisations. This particular extract sounds like it might be an archaeological reconstruction of the Cylons' equivalent of the blues. [P.S.: the group — Nidus, not the Cylons — has a bandcamp now, so keep an eye on that space for further developments.]

[The next show in the Second Sunday series (Aug. 9th) will pair Robert Cruickshank and Dafydd Hughes's audio-visual project Little Oak Animal with NYC visitors Aorist.]

Recording: Tanya Goncalves/Marc Couroux/Cory Latkovich

Artist: Tanya Goncalves/Marc Couroux/Cory Latkovich

Song: [excerpt from an improvisation]

Recorded at The Tranzac's Southern Cross Lounge ("troubleshooting~ v3"), July 1, 2015.

Tanya Goncalves/Marc Couroux/Cory Latkovich - [excerpt from an improvisation]

As is becoming standard, this night of Troubleshooting ended with the guests performing together alongside one of the event's conveners — in this case Cory Latkovich on cello and PD patches. His sounds mixed in with Goncalves' rhythmic interpolations and Couroux's queasy listening deconstructions.

[Troubleshooting will return to the Tranzac on Wednesday, August 5th.

Recording: Marc Couroux

Artist: Marc Couroux

Song: Click Migration (The Future Sure Is Dense) [excerpt]^*

Recorded at The Tranzac's Southern Cross Lounge ("troubleshooting~ v3"), July 1, 2015.

Marc Couroux - Click Migration (The Future Sure Is Dense) [excerpt]

Marc Couroux (of Nidus and other musical concerns) brought some phase-y dissociative techniques for his turn at this monthly that specializes in laptop-based improvisation. Slightly uneasy listening, like having a conversation with someone who is constantly shifting position to stay at the very edge of your peripheral vision. [The night also ended with a group improvisation, which you can check out here.]

[Troubleshooting will return to the Tranzac on Wednesday, August 5th.

^* Update: A peculiar cybernetic sursurration breathed this title into my ear.

Recording: Nidus

Artist: Nidus

Song: [excerpt from an improvisation]

Recorded at Johnny Jackson ("Track Could Bend #2"), May 5, 2015.

Nidus - [excerpt from an improvisation]

I was impressed enough by the hazy ambient improvisations of this trio when I heard 'em back in January that I was eager for more. I was also curious to see how their sound would translate in a rather different environment from the close-in vibes at Ratio, but Matthew Ramolo, Jason Doell, and Marc Couroux filled the bar up with a range of sounds that covered the gamut from "slow-motion bad dream" to "vintage sci-fi soundtrack". There's a bit of a mind-meld in effect as sometimes it's not easy to figure out who's adding what to the sonic soup, but that makes sense as there seems to be an undercurrent throughout, a voice whispering suggestions that you surrender your ego and give yourself up to the void/non-void.

[Track Could Bend #3 will be at Johnny Jackson on Tuesday, June 2nd. It will be a special late-nite edition with increased rock-improvisation action — full info coming soon!]

Recording: Eldritch Priest

Artist: Eldritch Priest

Song: The Brown Study¹ [excerpt]

Recorded at Array Space, April 16, 2015.

Eldritch Priest - The Brown Study [excerpt]

Called upon to give a lecture on his Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and The Aesthetics of Failure, scholar/composer Eldritch Priest seemed to be eager to say as little as possible (given that the 2013 book is now "old material" and has since been supplanted by new lines of inquiry) and mostly commented on the book's form in relation to its content before moving things along to the evening's musical portion.

But given that "The Brown Study" has a duration of somewhere around two hours, that was probably a wise move. A cavalcade of melody, the piece (for open ensemble²) moves along without harmony or counterpoint, the musicians choosing for themselves when to drop in or out. And rather than trying to be a full-on, immersive experience, the piece is meant to function either as foreground or background music, with Priest making sure to reassure the crowd it would be fine to get up and wander, or chat a little during the performance. Given that the piece was written in the same period as Boring Formless Nonsense, one assumes it is meant as a sort of reflection of those themes, embodying them musically while attempting to perform a little bit of dialectical ju-jitsu to come out the other side having fought them to at least a draw.

---

¹ I have no notion whether or not this piece's title is riffing on the urban myth of the "brown note", but given that immediately before the performance Priest chose to read a footnote from his book that referenced poopnames.com it does not seem outside the range of possibility.

² For this performance, the ensemble was: David Schotzko (vibes), Marc Couroux (synth), John Sherlock (keys), Anna Höstman (keys), Paul Newman (tenor sax), Bea Labikova (alto sax), Cory Latkovich (cello), Branko Džinovic (accordion), Nicole Rampersaud (trumpet), Heather Seeger (trombone), Eldritch Priest (guitar).

Recording: Nidus

Artist: Nidus

Song: [excerpt from an improvisation]

Recorded at Ratio, January 22, 2015.

Nidus - [excerpt from an improvisation]

A quick search online helpfully informs that a nidus is a "point or place at which something originates, accumulates, or develops," which sound intriguing, even if the remainder of the definition ("such as the center around which a tumour forms") is a bit darker. But it's fitting enough as this is a new partnership between Matthew Ramolo, Jason Doell, and Marc Couroux seems based on accumulating sounds and seeing what develops around them. The sonic tools do bring Ramolo's Khôra project to mind, but untethered from its rigourous internal architecture — in fact, the project is based more on improvisation than one might expect from a group with some ordered, compositional minds and relies heavily on creating a spacialized sound-field. In that regard, I'm unusually pleased with how this capture came out, with some nice, wide stereo separation, so I heartily recommend headphones for this one.

Recording: DUST

Artist: DUST

Song: [excerpt from an improvisation]

Recorded at Ratio, January 22, 2015.

DUST - [excerpt from an improvisation]

Ten members deep this night out, there was once again some of the intriguing quiet rustles that I had heard before from this wilfully-quiet improvisational big band. But this wonderful little atmospheric segment here managed to explore something a little different from what I'd heard them do before.

Recording: DUST

Artist: DUST

Song: ECSTASIS [an excerpt in two parts]

Recorded at The Tranzac (Southern Cross Lounge), November 21, 2014.

DUST - ECSTASIS [excerpt, part 1]

DUST - ECSTASIS [excerpt, part 2]

Under the guidance of the elusive Abraham Dust, the ever-shifting members of "the quietest big band in the known world" continue to invert the standard musical paradigm by generating the least amount of volume possible, leaving in their wake only the bare husks of melodies and residues of rhythm. Drums, cello, synths, violin and saxophone all take on strange qualities when played with the minimum force to register, which multiplies when the quietudes rustle against one another.

[This longer segment has been broken into a couple parts, in case you want to separate Part 1's "deep cut" from Part 2, which'd be known in the biz as "the single". The group is taking a seasonal break, but will return to The Tranzac in February; you can keep up with their whisperings via their facebook page.]