Doug Tielli on mushing and meandering
Doug Tielli is a multi-instrumentalist improviser, songwriter, and composer. We discuss what improvisation is, some varieties of improvisational experience, what giving more time and space to making things is...
improvised music
Nicole Rampersaud: strange sounds and 100 muscles
Listen to this interview with trumpeter, composer, and improviser Nicole Rampersaud. We discuss the 100 muscles it takes to play the trumpet, how not having shows can lead to...
Yang Chen’s skronk blang-blang
Percussionist Yang Chen interview: We discuss music-making as a social practice, how great percussion sounds, marching bands in Texas, shifting senses of time, and how a piece can go...
Mariam Rezaei talks turntablism and gooeyness
Interview with Mariam Rezaei, turntablist, improviser, composer, and teacher. Rezaei speaks fascinatingly about free juggling, needle dripping, old time turntable experiments from the early 20th century, Lukas Koenig, Elvin...
Karen Ng on saxes and cities
Karen Ng on saxophone and more…a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and curator based in Toronto. She talks with host Josh Thorpe about round-robin collaborative composing, how cities and spaces shape musics,...
Allison Cameron has charme
Composer and improviser Allison Cameron on indeterminacy, charme, wonder, cadences, fragmented melodies, treating the ensemble as a single instrument, codas, the ineffable, prepared vibraphone, small noise improvisation, and much...
Just music
This month it’s mostly listening. We listen to Allison Cameron, Powerdove, Semay Wu, Jon Hassell, Ailbhe nic Oireachtaigh, Eric Chenaux, and Raven Chacon and Marc Sabat…not necessarily in that...
Stephen Chase on natural harmonics
A listening session and interview with composer / improviser Stephen Chase. Stephen and Josh met at Glasgow’s Tectonics Festival to chat about various works. Listen to Stephen’s works for...
Stephen Chase follows his nose
A listening session and interview with composer / improviser Stephen Chase. Stephen and Josh met at Glasgow’s Tectonics Festival to chat about various works. Listen to Stephen’s works for...
Horse harps, games, and Rhodri Davies
Welsh harpist Rhodri Davies speaks with host Josh Thorpe about the telyn rawn, a horse-hair harp Davies made and performs with. We listen to a short work on this...
Strange sounds from Counterflows Glasgow
This episode Josh Thorpe listens to a few recordings from musicians and artists discovered at Glasgow’s Counterflows festival. Artists include an English-Ugandan collaboration w/ Rian Treanor and Ocen James;...
Guayaveras in the winter
This episode we take a break from chat. Instead we listen to almost an hour of quiet music. It’s Ryan Driver and Eric Chenaux and their sweet and gentle...
Interview w/ viola player Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh
Ailbhe joins me to listen to the viola, the violin, some guitars, a horse-hair harp, some outside jazz and a sewing machine. Ailbhe’s great to speak with and her...
Brodie West Quintet’s Fortress
The interplay here, particularly between West’s saxophone and Tania Gill’s piano, has me seeing a malleable object, a bright children’s toy or heavy paper, folded inside out and back...
Loving strange tones from Karen Ng and Scott Thomson
These sounds are so themselves and so otherworldy. Idiomatic and yet surprising at the same time. Lovely. And lovely in that it is dedicated to the late Ron Gaskin....
The wild viola of Ailbhe nic Oireachtaigh
Very happy to be listening to Dublin composer and improviser Ailbhe nic Oireachtaigh, now based in Glasgow. This gorgeous track purposelessness calls to mind Norwegian hardanger songs, bent by...
Rat-drifting launches 3 new titles
One of our favourite record labels, Rat-drifting (based in Toronto and France), recently re-launched on BandCamp after a few years of rest. The other day three new records came...
Alister Spence/Joe Williamson/Christopher Cantillo – “Opening”
Bells and bell-like sounds and cymbals, and other metal sounds, a searching piano and everything slowed down to a pace of uncertainty; in the middle the double bass like...
Ecstatic noise w/ Marshall Trammell and Tashi Dorji
Joy with ferocity. Rattling drums and dirty electric guitar feels like punk opera unwound and bent. Recorded live in Portland, Duo Damage, Vol I is loud and distorted in...
Banjo Music for Carole Finer
Allison Cameron brought this release by Stephen Chase’s mon se taire truc editions to our attention. A tribute to Scratch Orchestra original Carole Finer and a fundraiser for Resonance...