CHRISTIANS
Christians is an improv project that appears in various configurations led by Vancouver guitarist Jeremy Stewart. Their music translates the sonic vocabulary of metal, blues, and punk into the musical language of free improvisation.Their latest record, S/Z (titled after Roland Barthes’ structural analysis of narrative codes), was recorded at Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie)’s dilapidated church studio in Anacortes, WA. This allowed Christians to take on the guise of a classic Pacific Northwest power trio, with Stewart joined by Stanley Jason Zappa on bass and drummer Nick Skrowaczewski. Other members who have been known to appear with Christians in recent years include drummers Justin Arding and Wayne Adams.
[Christians’ S/Z is] “splendidly fiery… close to the ideal of what fusion can be”
Byron Coley, The Wire
JOSÉ DELGADO-GUEVARA
Mr. Delgado-Guevara, originally from Costa Rica, is an accomplished musician who has made significant strides in his field. He earned his Associate Degree in Music Education from the Conservatory Castella for the Visual and Performing Arts in Costa Rica, a Bachelor’s degree in music from the University of Costa Rica and a Master’s degree in viola performance from Western Michigan University. His formal training is complemented by extensive composition studies with notable figures such as Bernal Morales, Benjamin Gutierrez, and Luis Diego Herra in Costa Rica and C.C. Smith in Michigan. Delgado-Guevara aims to achieve profound emotional depth with minimal musical material. He categorizes his works into two distinct types: autobiographical compositions that reflect his personal experiences and pure music that exists independently of narrative. Mr. Delgado-Guevara is currently focused on composing pedagogical works for the harp and is determined to inspire and educate future musicians.
EARS OF LEAD
Chris Albanese – guitar
Kal-El Orthey – drums
Mostly when people are playing music they are just playing one thing but it sounds different to the people who are listening because they are in a different place from the people who are playing. The music is a thing that is a lot of other things that are also thoughts. The thoughts are mostly the same kind of thoughts which is how the people who are listening know that it is music. The difference between the thoughts is mostly because of where or when they are because the thoughts are mostly the same things in different places. No one knows what the people playing the music are thinking.
Chris Albanese is a guitarist, composer, and improviser. Kal-El Orthey is a tendency in a multi-instrumental system. They have collaborated since meeting in a 2006 Vancouver New Music performance of Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise.
LORI GOLDSTON
Classically trained and rigorously de-trained, possessor of a restless, semi-feral spirit, Lori Goldston is a cellist, composer, improvisor, producer, writer and teacher from Seattle. Her voice as a cellist, amplified or acoustic, is full, textured, committed and original. A relentless inquirer, her work drifts freely across borders that separate genre, discipline, time and geography.
Current and former collaborators and/or bosses include Earth, Nirvana, Mirah, Jessika Kenney, Ilan Volkov, Eyvind Kang, Stuart Dempster, David Byrne, Terry Riley, Jherek Bischoff, Malcom Goldstein, Steve Von Till, Lonnie Holley, Cat Power, Ellen Fullman, Maya Dunietz, Mik Quantius, Embryo, O Paon, Tara Jane O’Neil, Natacha Atlas, Broken Water, Ed Pias, Christian Rizzo and Sophie Laly, Threnody Ensemble, Cynthia Hopkins, 33 Fainting Spells, Vanessa Renwick, Mark Mitchell, Lynn Shelton, and many more.
Her work has been commissioned by and/or performed at the Kennedy Center, Sydney Festival, Cineteca Nacional de México, Tectonics Festival, Frye Art Museum, Time Based Art Festival (TBA), WNYC, The New Foundation, Paris Fashion Week, Northwest Film Forum, On the Boards, Seattle International Film Festival, Seattle Jewish Film Festival, Bumbershoot, Crossing Border Festival, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Joe’s Pub, the Stone, University of Chicago, and venues large and small throughout North America, Mexico, Australia, and Europe.
CATHY FERN LEWIS
Catherine Fern Lewis is renowned as a highly versatile soprano and sound artist. An ambassador and active exponent of Canada’s new music and art scene, Lewis has premiered over one hundred pieces by prominent composers and created her own multi-media works that push the boundaries of performance. Lewis earned a BMus from the University of Victoria, BC, where she was influenced by professors Rudolf Komorous and Martin Bartlet. She devoted three subsequent years to vocal training in Europe and Canada, studying under luminaries Frances James Adaskin, Selena James, Mary Morrison and Pierre Bernac. She appears as soloist with symphony orchestras and in recitals of new and traditional music. Her improvisations have shaped the work of collaborators from other disciplines; many pieces have been written expressly for her.
Lewis’ personal creative explorations are uniquely interdisciplinary, combining movement, sound, film and installation. Her site-specific work has been presented by art galleries and festivals in Canada and Europe. Lewis lives in Victoria BC and teaches at the Victoria Conservatory of Music.
Sean Bickerton, Director of BC CMC upon her recent concert with new music specialist pianist Rachel Iwaasa, Nocturnes – Canadian Art Songs, says; “Canadian art song at its most moving, artistic, collaborative, colourful, beautiful and inspiring. Thank you for an extraordinary evening of great music-making!”
Photo by Maggie MacPherson
STEPHEN CARL O’SHEA
Art Punk. Predominantly. Community leader. Sometimes.
Born on coastal Salish lands. Grateful settler.
Performing solo at Casse-Tete.
Contributor to the downtown Abbotsford art punk scene during the early aughts. Picked up the nickname Steve O’Scene. Toured the world and experienced community disconnect. Got off the road after a traumatic death. Years of collaboration and experimentation. Nominations and awards bestowed, including Fraser Valley Music Award: Electronic category.
Currently developing an album a DECADE in the making. Please enjoy many of these one minute snippets: reconsidered and decontextualized.
DANIELLE SAVAGE
Danielle Savage is a composer/ songwriter who loves working with various folk traditions, field recordings, modular synth, and audio editing. With pieces ranging from multichannel fixed media, collaborative exhibitions & chamber works, to synth-pop, folk, and music for film, she has performed and presented work at hundreds of venues, including Ignite the Arts Festival, San Francisco Tape Music Festival, Foro De Música Nueva, Visiones Sonoras, 60×60 festival, Montreal/ New Musics, ArtsWells, Lux Magna, and many more.
After many years of traveling and playing festivals, bars, and street corners, she obtained a BFA in Composition and a BFA in Electroacoustics, both from Concordia University in Montréal, QC. These days, she is teaching music, learning the mandolin, prepping a new EP with her band Loon Town, gigging with friends, working on a quadraphonic installation, and twiddling knobs on her modular synth in the mountains of BC.
ANJU SINGH
Anju Singh is a sound artist and composer experimenting with texture and compositional structure in her practice. Using methods of deconstruction and reanimation, her work studies experimental techniques, sound density, and dynamic range. Her source materials include electronics, custom-made/found objects, field recordings, and traditional instruments using extended techniques. She has presented her work across Canada, in Europe, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, and the United States for over 20 years. Anju is also a multi-instrumentalist performing in several projects including under the moniker “The Nausea”, a violin harsh noise project.
Instagram: @whatismakingussick or @the.nausea
Photo by Dani Osbourne
MATTHEW TOMKINSON
Matthew Tomkinson is a composer and sound designer based in Vancouver. He holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from the University of British Columbia, specializing in disability arts. Working across film, theatre, and contemporary dance, his music has been presented widely throughout Canada, the United States, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Austria, Ireland, India, Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the United Kingdom — in collaboration with companies such as Ballet BC, Company 605, Raven Spirit Dance, Théâtre la Seizième, Kinesis Dance, Magazinist, the All Bodies Dance Project, and many solo artists. His debut album as Mathoms, The Woe Trumpets, was recently featured on Bandcamp’s “New and Notable,” as well as Perfect Circuit’s “Bandcamp Picks” list. Matthew lives on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam people.
JONATHON WILCKE
Jonathon Wilcke is a saxophonist, composer, and community organizer whose music ranges through strict forms, jazz, free and structured improvisation, text-sound, and vocal accompaniment, in both solo and group situations. Wilcke combines a well-rounded musical vocabulary drawing from jazz, contemporary composition, and various lineages of free improvisation with a high level of proficiency in the outer ranges of their instrument’s possibilities. Based in Calgary/ Moh’kins’tsis, Wilcke has collaborated on many musical projects, including Eating Speed with Rob Oxoby (bass) and Eric Hamelin (drums), the Chris Dadge (drums) and Jonathon Wilcke duo, Circular Sparrow, Robots on Fire, ffffffft!, The Real Featuring the UnReal, Midnighties, and Mechanics Who Can Drive. They have shared the stage with players such as Joe Morris, Peggy Lee, Mats Gustafsson, Eugene Chadbourne, Jens Lindeman, John Butcher, Han Bennink, and Jack Wright, and is the co-producer of the long-running Bug Incision Presents series.