New this week
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Eric Boivin, the Montreal field recording and sound artist, introduced me to the idea of glitch art with an off-hand remark one Sunday night at CKLN-FM in Toronto. A CD he was playing started to malfunction on-air. The laser diode bounced around the disc’s content with a kind of beautiful abandon. “These discs are so…
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Brazil’s Ivo Perelman has delivered a breathtaking set of improvisational works in collaboration with three of jazz’s great guitarists: Marc Ribot, Elliott Sharp and Joe Morris. The three-disc box landed today on Mahakala Music. The prolific saxophonist with more than 100 LP credits on his resume played the guitar as a child, but gave it…
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In the notes accompanying the original release of Akira Kosemura’s Polaroid Piano in 2009, Lawrence English drew a parallel between the soft-focus nature of polaroid film and the 12 small wonders he recorded Kosemura performing in the Australian cities Brisbane and Hobart. “Played notes and the mechanism of the piano itself share equal presence in…
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Toronto composer Christopher Mayo is releasing an album of three compositions today, featuring grab-you-by-the-ears performances by guitarist Andrew Noseworthy and harpist Grace Scheele. Walk the Darkness Down is transfixing. To fully appreciate the album’s title piece, start with Townes Van Zandt’s 1969 track “Lungs,” which serves as a reference point. Mayo’s piece combines 10 open-string…
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Nichola Scrutton is a thoughtful composer and performer with a sound/art practice in Glasgow. This month, Glasgow Print Studio is hosting her A Kind of Scoring exhibit, described as “a series of abstract landscapes that evoke experiences of sound and listening.” Her new LP is a richly detailed sound art work entitled Scenes from the…
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The title of Canadian composer and improviser Meredith Bates’ new double LP is often associated with quantum mechanics, a field of physics that explains how tiny objects can act like both particles and waves at the same time. The Observer Effect, which lands today on the phonometrograph label, describes how looking at or measuring something…
The Moderns 