Showing posts with label mary-katherine finch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mary-katherine finch. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 9, 2019

Recording: Contact Contemporary Music

Artist: Contact Contemporary Music

Song: Beneath a Landscape [excerpt] [composer: Jason Doell]

Recorded at Vaughan Metropolitan Centre Station (Intersection Day 1: Music For Subways), August 29, 2019.

Contact Contemporary Music - Beneath a Landscape [excerpt]

A couple years back, Intersection made its first step into presenting creative sounds in unconventional environments. This sequel moved from the core to the end of the line, exchanging a jam-packed greenhouse for plenty elbow room in the city's newest subway stations. At that literal end-of-the-line, the musicians of Contact (along with some of the night's earlier performers joining in) formed into a rough circle to begin an unhurried drone before some of them (especially those with melodicas) started to freely wander around the space.

As is often the case, composer Jason Doell attempted to downplay the notion that he actually did much composing, but there were some savvy music ideas here nonetheless. At the piece's start, one could see the musicians playing but could scarcely hear anything, as Doell had spent some time at the station, recording and analyzing its ambient hum, and then starting the musicians in that same zone. Slowly, the highs of the strings, followed by the other instruments, began to cut through the background hum as the soundfield evolved, seeping fog-like into the curved corners of the station's alien spaceship contours.

Friday, September 29, 2017

Recording: Contact

Artist: Contact

Song: Proximity/Response [edited excerpt] [composer: Johan Seaton]

Recorded at Yonge-Dundas Square (Intersection – Day 3), September 2, 2017.

Contact - Proximity/Response [edited excerpt]

In recent years, the Intersection Festival would normally consist of a paid concert, usually the night before the day-long extravaganza in Yonge-Dundas Square. This year, however, under the continued guidance of Burn Down The Capital's Tad Michalak the festival expanded to four events, including a pair of concerts at The Jam Factory. The day-long marathon in the concrete canyon of commerce remains at the festival's heart, though, exploring the frissons of experiencing strange and occasionally abrasive sounds competing with the city's mersh heartbeat.

Contact, the festival's founding presenter, still usually finds time to bring something fresh and different to the day. The biggest twist to this set was that the whole of the ensemble was being channelled through keyboardist Kristian Podlacha's laptop, which was especially central to this piece from Johan Seaton, which had emerged from the ensemble's Music From Scratch workshop for youth composers. Seaton was adding some subtle electronic mix feedback here, giving the piece an additional layer of hazy whoosh.

[Contact will be re-assembling to play with Elliott Sharp (last year's visiting Intersection composer) in a Burn Down The Capital show on Saturday, October 21st that mixes together some no-wave/weird-pop sounds.]

[You can see some footage from this set over at Brandon Caswell Douglas' Intersection playlist.]