Editor's Note: We are thrilled to announce that we are co-presenting a show as part of The Music Gallery's annual X AVANT Festival – undoubtedly one of the most adventurous and dynamic festivals in North America. This event will showcase abstract electronic music and feature performances by Tim Hecker, Markus Popp and The Global Cities Ensemble – please join us in Toronto on October 21st.
Friday October 21
Location: The Music Gallery
Doors 7pm, concert 8pm
Tickets $25 advance at Rotate This, Soundscapes & Ticketweb.ca – BUY NOW!
At the door: $30 regular, $15 member
Admission included in $85 All-Access Festival Pass
Music Gallery event info page
8:00PM – GLOBAL CITIES ENSEMBLE
Global Cities Ensemble was formed in 2010 by four respected musicians on the Toronto scene: Andrew Timar (suling - Indonesian flute), Araz Salek (tar – Persian lute), Abdominal (emcee) and Professor Fingers (turntables). GCE makes music with an inter-cultural flavour, at once international and local. Asian world music added to a bubbling cauldron of local hip-hop – this is new territory yet little explored. This new musical hybrid language and aesthetic is driven by instruments, intonation, tonal and rhythmic modes from Iran, Indonesia, India and Western classical music. GCE merges that with popular music, urban poetry and contemporary live electronic performance soundscapes.
9:00PM – OVAL
Oval is the musical alias of Berlin artist Markus Popp, creator of some of the most original electronic music of the last 20 years – termed “glitch” music. Emerging in the mid-1990s, glitch was the sound of embracing failure. Scratched and skipping CDs, hardware noise and computer crashes were all used as sound sources in this emerging movement, at which Oval – originally a trio including Sebastian Oschatz and Frank Metzger – were at the forefront. Seminal recordings like Systemisch and 94 Diskont showed a playful sense of melody shine through amongst the clicky chaos; a sensible which continue through to later collaborations such as Gastr del Sol’s Camoufleur (with Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs) in 1998 and SO (with Japanese vocalist Eriko Toyada) in 2003. Popp then went silent for seven years, before returning at full strength in 2010 with an EP, “Oh,” and an epic, 70-track double album, O. For these latest recordings, Popp has left his past in the realm of glitch and custom software platforms behind, instead challenging himself to create music using a commercial PC outfitted with stock sounds and plug-ins. The result, though still distinctly Oval in its slippery shape-shifting, is also something distinctly more musical and mellifluous than anything we’ve heard from him before. We are very pleased to present Oval live at X Avant, as one his first appearances in Canada in more than 15 years.
10:00pm – TIM HECKER
A Music Gallery (and Vague Terrain!) favourite, tonight’s concert marks the third appearance by Vancouver-bred, Montréal based sound artist Tim Hecker in the last five years. But it also marks a special occasion, as Hecker will play a rarely-performed set utilizing St. George the Martyr Church’s pipe organ. This hybrid performance relies on a feedback system between pipe organ and computer, as organ tones are fed into a Max/MSP patch, run through guitar distortion pedals and out through bass amplifiers and the PA system. Sounds slowly stack, overlap, interweave and eventually dissolve into the air. This approach was developed while recording Hecker’s latest release, Ravedeath, 1972 in Reykjavik, Iceland with producer Ben Frost. Long-listed for the 2011 Polaris Music Prize, Ravedeath, 1972 approaches a form of secular musical transcendentalism from within the battered temple of spirituality. Recorded in a church and using a pipe organ as the primary sound source, the album is essentially a live recording. In reality, it exists in a nether world between captured live performance and meticulous studio work, melding the two approaches to sonic artifice as a unity. It is in parts a document of air circulating within a wooden room, and also a pagan work of physical resonance within a space once reserved for the hallowed breath of the divine.
