Recording: Prices Easy & New Chance

Artist: Prices Easy & New Chance

Song: [3rd section]

Recorded at Burdock Music Hall (Women From Space Festival – Night 4), March 11, 2019.

Prices Easy & New Chance - [3rd section]

The first Women From Space Festival saw four excellent concerts take place over the course of the International Women's Day weekend. Organized by Bea Labikova and Kayla Milmine, the festival felt like a really savvy gathering, always more than the sum of its parts and showcasing the depth of talent in the city's various creative music streams in a women-centred environment.

I had previously seen poet Aisha Sasha John holding a room in a more traditional "reading" scenario, but this new collaboration with Victoria Cheong moved in interesting new directions. With some well-chosen musical backdrops adding an extra layer of fluidity, John's words (mixing the personal and political) were even more performative here — poetic but allowed to stretch out in spoken word segments that moved with dream-drift logic, and deploying vocal effects to underline and enhance certain phrases. This was one of the festival's more ear-catching sets, and I presume there will be more to come from this collaboration.

Recording: Public Recordings

Artist: Public Recordings

Song: To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation [excerpt, in two parts] [composer: Pauline Oliveros]

Recorded at City Hall's Council Chambers, February 17, 2018.

Public Recordings - To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation [excerpt, part 1]

Public Recordings - To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation [excerpt, part 2]

This joyfully ambitious undertaking saw Chris Willes and his Public Recordings crew bringing music — radical music, music that demands deep listening and focused attention — into the City Hall chambers, a space associated with noisemaking of a different kind. The culmination of a process reaching back a couple years (including its previous mounting at the Gardiner Museum), this version brought a larger audience and bigger crew of musicians into its larger space. (Adding to the logistical complexity of the entire undertaking, there were also a series of public rehearsals in different venues in the week leading up to the performance.)

The beginning of a new form of composition from Pauline Oliveros, this piece for open ensemble has guidelines, but few musical directives, meaning there are a wider range of possible sonic outcomes than with a through-composed piece. With simple instructions and shared light cues, this large ensemble of musicians and non-musicians weave together a drone symphony, a slow-moving sound-river that invites closed-eye meditation (though, especially in an environment such as this, also some open-eyed gawking at how the spectacle is creating itself). The participant list reveals artists from many fields coming together to make these sounds: Anne Bourne, Allison Cameron, Victoria Cheong, Prices Easy, Ishan Davé, Ellen Furey, Thom Gill, Claire Harvie, Ame Henderson, Brendan Jensen, Germaine Liu, Bee Pallomina, Liz Peterson, Heather Saumer, Brian Solomon, Anni Spadafora, Evan Webber, and Christopher Willes.

[This concert was co-presented by the Music Gallery, who have had an ongoing stream of Pauline Oliveros-related events this season. The last instalment of the Anne Bourne-facilitated Deep Listening Workshops ("Sounding Difference Through The Text Scores Of Pauline Oliveros") will be at 918 Bathurst on Sunday, April 28th. Free with registration.]

Recording: Aisha Sasha John

Artist: Aisha Sasha John

Poems: selections from I have to live

Recorded at The Garrison (Venus Fest Winter Solstice Celebration), December 21, 2017.

Aisha Sasha John - selections from I have to live

Jennifer Castle's solstice celebration, long a seasonal highlight, was co-presented this time 'round as part of Venus Fest's monthly concert series. Seizing the opportunity to present some intersectional/multidisciplinary vibes, this spoken word set from local poet Aisha Sasha John saw her read her work with dry humour concealing some barbed hooks. Like in Jennifer Castle's work, there was a porous boundary between chill-on-the-couch bon mots and cut-to-the-core existential quandaries. Leading with some new work in raw form (some of the lines ripped straight from her tumblr musings), she then read from last year's I have to live, considering how identity shifts from the ideal (and the idealized) with every real-world fact and compromise.