The following are our 2017 artists. 2018 artists will be posted in due course.
A SICKNESS OF MEANING
A Sickness of Meaning is a play with music by Raghu Lokanathan. In part, the play grew out of a performance prepared for Casse Tete in 2013(?), in which Raghu played bits of songs interspersed with distilled versions of dreams read accompanied by improvised electric guitar. This play involves theatrical bits, drawn from dreams, things heard, things remembered, things imagined, and musical bits including full songs, broken up songs, incomplete songs, short songs. One of the ideas behind it all is that if, as it seems, no full account of anything can be made , what is the experience of a series of partial accounts like? The cast consists of Eliza Houg, Naomi Kavka, Corbin Spensely, Robert Ziegler and Raghu Lokanathan, each of whom has a long history of varied involvements in the PG arts scene.
ANNETTE BROSIN
Originally from Germany, composer and bass player Annette Brosin has been living and working on Coast Salish territory in Victoria, BC since 2009, where she received her Ph.D. in composition at the University of Victoria in 2016. Her music has been performed and broadcasted in North and South America and Continental Europe. She is interested in investigating a variety of questions surrounding the increasingly complex relationship between digital technologies and music as a site of cultural reproduction. These questions are directly tied into her music, wherein she explores aspects of memory, historical and cultural disintegration, and the meanings of performance-based concert settings. In these contexts, the roles of repetition and ritual gain increasing significance and materialize musically in Annette’s work.
CATHERINE 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.
CHRISTIANS
Free-improvised metallic noise. Take up your cross and come with us.
CHRISTOPHER REICHE
Christopher Reiche is a performer and composer in Victoria BC known for his enthusiasm for performing and composing for unusual instruments and performance situations. His compositions have been performed by the Emily Carr String Quartet, Negative Zed Ensemble, Pembroke Symphony Orchestra, and Quatuor Bozzini. In 2013, he completed a solo performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations at Open Space Arts Society in just under 24 hours.
Reiche performs occasionally in Victoria at A Place to Listen or on concerts hosted by the Victoria Composers Collective. He is also known as Victoria Engagement Leader for the Canadian Music Centre’s Victoria Creative Hub, New Music Coordinator for Open Space Arts Society, and is currently President of the Canadian League of Composers. He teaches piano, theory, and composition lessons at Brentwood College and the Victoria Conservatory of Music.
CRAWLING HUMAN
Crawling Human
is three people in a room
meeting week after week
vocals/laptop, bass, guitar
they are not trying
to get very far
its improv
moodswinging
continuity
disruption
its not cool
its not in control
its a weekly ritual
its metal its hardcore its noise its dub
with its power sucked out
pulse weakened
coasting, floating
abyssal loathing
refuse left over
little vacation from life
just the small stuff
everybody does shit like this but they don’t put it out
slow death/crawling human
—
They dug and dug, and so
their day went past, their night. And they did not praise God,
who, so they heard, wanted all this,
who, so they heard, witnessed all this.
They dug and heard nothing more;
they did not grow wise, invented no song,
devised for themselves no sort of language.
They dug.
Paul Celan, “There Was Earth Inside Them,” 1959
MANZAP
MANZAP is a free music duet with Stanley Zappa (saxophones, clarinets, piano) and Andrew Wedman (piano, bass piano, altered tuning fender rhodes) that was born in the spring of 2016. Since then they have performed and recorded with the Jooklo Duo (Italy), Tatsuya Nakatani (Eastman PA) and Fiasco (Portland OR). Zappa and Wedman established the Untempered Festival of Dissonant Arts in Penticton BC.
MARINA HASSELBERG
www.marinahasselberg.com Along with being the Artistic Director of NOVO Ensemble, Marina is an active and passionate chamber musician specializing in new and baroque music. In 2008 Marina left her home country (Portugal) and moved to Canada where she was offered several scholarships and awards to pursue a Master’s in Literature and Performance at the University of Western Ontario (completed in 2010 with distinction). Since then Marina has performed with the Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Institute Orchestra (Toronto), American Bach Soloists Academy Orchestra (San Francisco), Victoria Baroque Players (Victoria, BC), Orchestra London (London, ON), Okanagan Symphony Orchestra (Kelowna, BC), Kamloops Symphony Orchestra (BC), and Vancouver’s Orchestra Armonia, NOVO Ensemble, Vancouver Metropolitan Orchestra, Redshift Music Society, Vancouver Pro Musica, Vancouver New Music, Stellaria, St. Andrew’s Wesley Oratorio Singers, The Little Chamber Music Series That Could, Turning Point Ensemble, Restless Productions, and Early Music Vancouver Cantata Project Players. An advocate for new works, especially those by Canadian composers, Marina has commissioned and premiered many new pieces with several more being written for future premieres. Marina’s love of all the arts, especially dance, film and theater, is leading to the creation of inter-disciplinary works that cross genre boundaries. As a baroque cellist, Marina dedicates a lot of her time to playing and studying the repertoire and historically informed performance practice of the 17th and 18th centuries. Marina plays an Italian cello from 1860, and a David Rubio baroque cello kindly loaned by Dianne Miskey.
MARK TAKESHI McGREGOR
Flutist Mark Takeshi McGregor has performed across North America, Europe, Australia, and Israel, including appearances at Festival Montréal-Nouvelles Musique, Vancouver New Music Festival, Music on Main (Vancouver), Athelas New Music Festival (Copenhagen), and the Internationale A•DEvantgarde-Festival (Munich). Notable recent solo engagements include the premiere of Nicole Lizée’s Tarantino Études for bass flute and glitch at the Melos Ethos Festival (Bratislava, 2015), and a concert of Canadian and international solo flute works at the International Symposium of New Music in Curitiba, Brazil (2016). He is the principal flute of Victoria’s Aventa Ensemble and director of Vancouver’s Tempest Flute Ensemble.
MOCK
MOCK SERVES THE MUSIC,NOT THE CULT OF PERSONALITY! MOCK PARTICIPANTS ARE SWORN TO FUN AND LOYAL TO PATSY CLYNE!MOCK IS A NON-GENRE COUNTRY & WESTERN ROCKnROLL IMPROVISATIONAL OUTFIT COVERED IN CHEAP RHINESTONES AND FAKE JEWELRY! MOCK MOCKS YOU WHILE YOU MOCK IT!MOCK DOES NOT EXPLAIN THINGS,MOCK JUST SMERKS AND LETS YOU DRAW YOUR OWN OPININATED DELUSIONAL CONCLUSIONS!MOCK ROCKS!
THE NEW NOISE
The Stevensons take their Family Band Time to the stage. Go for The New Noise!
NOT NOW, HAMELIN
Not now, Hamelin plays in the continuum of free jazz and free improvisation. Our repertoire includes original compositions and tunes by Sun Ra, Steve Lacy, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Thelonious Monk. We’re from Calgary, where we’ve appeared in venues. Once, we played with Joe Morris, but not all at the same time.
Our sound ranges from driving swing to triplets over blast beats, resonant with rural optimism and urban naiveté. Our approach is to open the spacetime portal and get into that place where the head hooks up to the external engine that makes music go.
notnowhamelin.bandcamp.com
Patrick Kilcullen
Born and raised in Prince George, Patrick is a regular local performer and music teacher. Although no stranger to classical, rock, folk and jazz, improvisational music is his specialty. Look long enough and you’ll find him embedded wherever the northern music scene reaches: in restaurants, aircraft hangars, or on stages in the middle of the woods (there’s a few).
PG9o9
Pg9o9 is the name applied to music/sound projects from Oro Barton. He is an electronics instructor and builds homemade analog audio equipment: synths, pedals and sequencers as a hobby. He lives in Prince George BC and tries to never use a snare drum sound.
STANLEY JASON ZAPPA QUINTET
Living Man. Pan-Tonality. New Textures. Jaya Saraswati. Born in California. Raised in New Jersey. “Educated” in Vermont. Masters degree in “doing things the hard way” in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Drove around America aimlessly. Then Portland. Now in Okanagan. Enormous debt to Bill Dixon, Charles Gayle, Milford Graves, Marco Eneidi, Daniel Carter, Rashid Bakr and many, many others in the Free Jazz disapora. Equal debt to Conlan Nancarrow, Frank Zappa, Die Winteriesse, Phil Lesh, Reggae and Lebenden Toten. “play every note at every tempo and every dynamic at least twice in no particular order.” “more = more”