The subtitle “Expanding Circuits,” which was applied to the X Avant New Music Festival VII, couldn’t have been more apt for the two shows I witnessed this past Friday and Saturday nights. Both gigs at Toronto’s Music Gallery displayed the vast ways electronic music is being presented in music culture.
Friday night, Contact, a seven-piece ensemble that is “one of Canada’s leading interpreters of the music of our time,” performed Undercurrents by Canadian composer Jordan Nobles. The piece unwrapped slowly through a multichannel sound system, immersing the audience from all points of the church, where the Music Gallery calls home. The composition, written for a chamber quartet of piano, violin, viola, percussion, brass and guitar, was then remixed live by Toronto’s multitalented Sandro Perri. He took the sounds from the other musicians, manipulated them through the soundboard and fed them back through the speaker system.
While the audience was bathed in music from all sides, projections were literally drawn onto the ceiling beams and walls of the church throughout the performance. It played out like one of Norman McLaren's National Film Board animations from the 1950s, all shaking lines and morphing landscapes. The whole show was a feast for the ears and eyes.
Saturday’s concert was the opposite of Friday's contemplative sounds. It was all about lo-fi, noise and “zombie funk.” Pon de Replay opened the show with live drumming from multi-instrumentalist Colin Fisher. It was all free-form, with the drums and tapestry of electronic noise from de Play coming together and breaking apart. The sounds were enhanced by live projections created by Mani Mazinani, making for a sublime and hair-raising short set.
Man Made Hill (a.k.a. Randy Gagne) was up next. The audience was told Gagne would not appear that evening due to “legal” problems, but a "hologram" would take his place. Then a small cart was pushed onstage with the contents covered by a thermal blanket. The “hologram” rose from its confines. It was not a 3D image at all but a man dressed in a white torn short, judge's wig and red John Lennon glasses, his face covered in silver paint. He proceeded to play a kind of swampy electronic music, his vocals muffled and dense. His microphone had a tin can wrapped around the top, which he used as percussion, slamming it down on the side of his keyboard, punctuating the songs at appropriate points. His set ended with dog howls, and he crawled off the stage on his hands and knees to enthusiastic cheers from the audience. It was truly a strange and fun trip.
The final performance of the night came from composer and instrument-maker Jean-Francois Laporte. He was a last-minute stand in for Babe Rainbow, who was originally on the bill. Laporte played several pieces, including one that was amplified wind sounds layered on top of one another. The result was enormous and the audience could feel the power of the wind — a power not so apparent in our everyday lives.
Among the three other pieces he performed, "Rust" was the most arresting. He played the composition on the tuyos, an instrument Laporte created that uses air funneled through tubes and manipulated by pulling on balloons affixed to the ends. The sound produced was like a ship's horn blasting out into the room. Again, you got a sense of the enormity of the sound. It feels like Laporte wants his compositions to be experienced in the body and not just the ears.
Both nights were inspiring and I came away feeling like electronic music was in a healthy state. The curators of the X Avant New Music Festival VII programmed performers who are taking the genre in exciting directions, and should be well applauded for their varied choices of acts.
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