montreal
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QUANTUM BLUES
France Jobin has been exploring quantum theory for many years now, an interest that has shown up in her compositions, sound installations, and work with VR. But the pandemic finally afforded the Montreal-based minimalist composer time for deeper study with a personal brain trust of physicists she’d assembled over the years. Jobin recently released Infinite…
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Across Time Patched Together
Across time patched together is an album-length medley of live and radiophonic works recorded between 2014 and 2018. This mix features selections from live sessions at CKUT 90.3FM, a 2014 live set (including violinist Norman Nawrocki), two live performances from 2018, and some unreleased recordings from the sessions that produced Temp de Travail, Syncope. Within…
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Montreal, Your Ears Are My Island
NORIENT SPECIAL004 –TIMEZONES EPISODE 07: MONTREAL Montreal, Your Ears Are My Island Episode 7 of the Timezones podcast series, co-initiated and co-produced by Norient and the Goethe-Institut. This episode portrays the diverse music scenes of Montréal. Producer Esther Bourdages traces their global connections and historical roots and explores the effects of gentrification on the city’s cultural life. …
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FREEDOM TO DESTROY
Esther Bourdages is an art critic, radio journalist, independent curator, and musician based in Montréal. She is an improviser of extraordinary sensitivity, bringing a playfulness to her tactile manipulation of vinyl records, sometimes outright mishandling them. This freedom to destroy is indicative of a resistance to structure and formalism, but Esther’s work can’t be easily…
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Montreal (QC) – 04/07/2021, 3:54 pm
Montreal (QC) – 04/07/2021, 3:54 pm is my first contribution to the Presque Tout project. Alleys are a defining feature of urban life in Montreal, and during the pandemic I’ve become especially sensitive to the gradual changes that take place. Last summer, I noticed a Palestinian woman would often stop to pluck a few grape…
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La Lumière Du Soleil Dans Un Semi Sous-sol
La Lumière Du Soleil Dans Un Semi Sous-sol is the third duo release with my friend Stefan Christoff. Each release has been its own project and the results are quite distinct. Les Rumeurs was made to document the Quebec student strike of 2012, comprised of field-recordings of protests and street actions we’d made independently, and…
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Anarchist Mountains Trio ~ La terre et la force
The Christoff brothers have roots in the Macedonia/Bulgaria area dating back to Ottoman times. They’ve cultivated connections in there, and were even able to find family records in Istanbul. Imagine that! My experience in the records archive in Napoli was very different… My family comes from all over southern Italy, but with some older roots…
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From Montreal to Brooklyn on a Vespa
Over ten years ago, in June 2010, I rode my Vespa from Montreal to Brooklyn. These are my notes from that time. — Day 1: Montreal to Argyle Thursday 17 June 2010. I set off from my apartment in the Plateau arrondissement of Montreal on my Vespa LXV headed for Park Slope, Brooklyn. My good…
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Montreal Underground
“Montreal Underground” – field-recording contribution to the Montreal Sound Map (2010) While I had made field-recordings on tape for years, I had only vague plans for them, and more often than not I used the micro-cassette recorder I carried around to record stray thoughts in the era before smart phones. Thus “Montreal Underground” (2010) is…
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Suoni per il Popolo
This post collects two previews written for Cult MTL. In honor of their upcoming 20th anniversary, I’ll be publishing a long overdue encomium to Suoni and to the Montreal experiment music community more broadly. Suoni 2015 The word “radical” literally refers to a search for roots, and so it is fitting that Montreal’s self-proclaimed festival…
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Live at Moon Villain
Stefan Christoff and I released Temps de Travail, Syncopé, our second tape together, around this time last year. The.release show was held at the Moon Villain loft in Boston, on 7 December 2018. I had been in Napoli for the prior few months. and came up to Boston from NY, before heading to Montreal for…
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On the Tenzier Label
Tenzier is a Montreal-based label that releases LPs of archival recordings significant to the history of late 20th century Quebecois experimental, electronic, and improvised musics. In their own words: Tenzier is a nonprofit organization which has as its mandate to preserve, celebrate and disseminate archival recordings by Quebec avant-garde artists. Since its founding in 2010,…
Sound Propositions 