DAY 1: THURSDAY, AUGUST 29, 2019
MUSIC FOR SUBWAYS
Intersection presents 4 site-specific performances in Toronto’s newest subway stations on Line 1 (Yonge-University). Performances start at 7:30 pm sharp at Sheppard West Station & then travel north.
SARAH HENNIES & GERMAINE LIU
CLARINET PANIC
MIKA POSEN
JASON DOELL with CONTACT
SARAH HENNIES & GERMAINE LIU
@ Sheppard West Station / 7:30pm
Sarah Hennies is a composer based in Ithaca, NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & trans identity, love, intimacy, psychoacoustics, and percussion. She is primarily a composer of solo and chamber works, but is also active in improvisation, film, performance art, and dance. She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist. For this performance, she will be joined by Toronto percussionist Germaine Liu in a vibraphone duo.
CLARINET PANIC
@ Pioneer Village Station / 8:15pm
Clarinet Panic brings their expanded sax-infused ensemble to the public arena for your pleasure, featuring Olivia Shortt and Naomi McCarrol-Butler, along with the regular quartet of trouble makers. Hectic dream jams from cellist Cory Latkovich, avant percussionist/eccentric genius D. Alex Meeks (Hooded Fang, Holiday Rambler), saxophonist Karen Ng (Andy Shauf, Convergence Ensemble, etc), and guitarist Sebastian Shinwell. Clattering ahead like the score to a never-ending horror film, inching towards climax as cello and sax play a game of back & forth only to be driven forward by systematically antagonistic drum patterns and their own instrumental curiosity. Rigid breakdowns give way to seemingly free form guitar & sax chaos, only to slam us back in the exacting grid like patterns with more force & precision that ever before. Bastard chamber music meets math rock. Sponsored by Beef Jerky Unlimited.
MIKA POSEN
@ Highway 407 Station / 9pm
Ottawa-based violin & violist Mika Posen’s composition work sits somewhere between contemporary classical, ambient, and the more outsider tendrils of popular music. She has collaborated with Timber Timbre, Basia Bulat, The Weather Station, Evening Hymns, Snowblink, Maylee Todd, Broken Social Scene, and Feist to name a few. Her piece of Highway 407 Station will be a string quartet work tied to the arrival & departure of the subway trains.
JASON DOELL with CONTACT
@ Vaughan Metropolitan Centre Station / 9:45pm
Composer Jason Doell teams up with contemporary classical ensemble Contact to present a piece of new music in Vaughan Metropolitan Centre Station. Doell’s work merges contemporary classical ideas with a background in Avant rock/punk & jazz that informs his approach to composition. This piece sees Contact’s musicians spread throughout to concourse of the station merging their acoustic sounds with the natural hum of an active subway station.
DAY 2: FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2019
JOAN LA BARBARA
ELI KESZLER
GERMAINE LIU
9 pm @ The Jam Factory (2 Matilda St.)
JOAN LA BARBARA
Avant-garde composer/performer/sound artist & actor Joan La Barbara explores the human voice as a multi-faceted instrument expanding traditional boundaries in developing a unique vocabulary of experimental and extended vocal techniques: multiphonics, circular singing, ululation and glottal clicks that have become her “signature sounds”, influencing several generations of composers and singers. She has composed commissions for chamber ensembles, orchestra, multiple voices, interactive technology, dance, video, and film, including a score for voice and electronics for Sesame Street and pieces for the film “Arrival” with Jóhann Jóhannsson. In her expansive & diverse career, La Barbara has premiered works by such composers as Robert Ashley, John Cage, David Behrman, Morton Feldman, Alvin Lucier, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Morton Subotnick. Her solo performance in Toronto will include 3 pieces: “Solitary Journeys of the Mind”, “Erin”, and “Windows … ”
ELI KESZLER
NYC-based percussionist/composer Eli Keszler creates intricate music from the simplest ingredients. Merging live percussion with electronics, his “so fast it’s slow” style dips into new age territory while also taking cues from free jazz, dub, and avant-garde electronic music. His pointed drum hits decay into the distance, as dubbed-out electronic beats & chimes wave over his textural tapestry. Ghostly remnants of past beats dissipate as ringing tones reach over them. Keszler has collaborated with Oneohtrix Point Never, Ashley Paul, Loren Conners, C. Spencer Yeh, Oren Ambarchi & many others. Don’t miss his first solo gig in Toronto supporting his newest record “Stadium”
GERMAINE LIU
Germaine Liu brings her ever-mutating group, Imaginary Percussion Ensemble to the Jam Factory. This iteration features Evan Cartwright (Eucalyptus), Kat Estacio (Pantayo), Germaine Liu (the one & only!), Naomi McCarroll-Butler, Heather Saumer, Joe Sorbara, Brandon Valdivia (Not The Wind, Not The Flag, Lido Pimienta), and Mark Zurawinski.
DAY 3: SATURDAY, AUGUST 31, 2019
DAY 3: SATURDAY, AUGUST 31, 2019
EVAN ZIPORYN and CONTACT play BOWIE, ENO & FRIPP
MAN FOREVER
AVA MENDOZA’S UNNATURAL WAYS
RETIRED
AVRHA
NULL POINT ENSEMBLE plays HENNIES & DUNN
THE VELVET CRYSTALS
LORDE AWESOME
2 – 10 pm @ Yonge Dundas Square (1 Dundas St. East)
EVAN ZIPORYN and CONTACT play BOWIE, ENO & FRIPP
Post minimalist composer & Bang On A Can founder Evan Ziporyn joins Toronto contemporary classical ensemble Contact for a set of music by David Bowie, Brian Eno & Robert Fripp. New arrangements of iconic instrumentals from classic albums Low, Heroes, Lark’s Tongues in Aspic, Red, Evening Star, and more! Contact feels more like a rock band, or a group of Avant jazz experimentalists, and in a time of melting genres & lost classification, they are a shoo-in.
MAN FOREVER
Kid Millions of Oneida fame returns to Toronto with his minimalist compositional psych percussion ensemble joined by a crew of local drummers, for a sure to be a pummelling, visceral live experience. Kid weaves threads of swaying percussion together like an orchestrated landslide. Voices float calmly above trance-like structures, constant motion, vibration, pulsing rhythms. Beats melt into a single wave, celestial hums coalesce around dance snares.
AVA MENDOZA’s UNNATURAL WAYS
Brooklyn, NY based freak punk / Avant rock trio led by guitarist/vocalist Ava Mendoza (John Zorn, Nels Cline, Carla Bozulich) & featuring Tim Dahl (Lydia Lunch, Child Abuse) on bass and Sam Ospovat on drums lands in Toronto on the heals of their 3rd record “The Paranoia Party” on Sleeping Giant Glossolalia. Over their years of playing together, the group has developed a deeply personal sound; raw, heavy, and never far from an absurd nervous breakdown. Drawing from their backgrounds in noise rock, free jazz, and metal the band pushes the boundaries of written music to put on powerful and unpredictable live shows. Consistent lyrical themes include: political paranoia, inclusion/exclusion, alter egos and alternate realities. A funny and blunt celebration of the best and worst of the modern American landscape.
RETIRED
Toronto free form punk-jazz wanderers Retired bring dark eerie forbidding sonic meanderings to life with percussive movements that cruise seamlessly through ominous bass tones. Guitar growls unhinged, as saxophone splutters a bitter syrup. Like a junkyard creation slowly breaking apart as it races towards impending destruction that will never come. Becoming more haunting & mangled as it evolves from one form to another. The swing of jazz emanates from what is more like some lost kraut jam.
AVRHA
Avrha is a collaboration between Alaska B and Brendan Swanson (Yamantaka // Sonic Titan). Hypnotic drums and percussion meld with dynamic keys in a bittersweet nightmare of new-age heavy prog.
NULL POINT ENSEMBLE
Null Point is an initiative for experimental music and sound in Buffalo, NY founded in 2014. A flexible collective of artists working at junctures between music, performance, media art, and social practice, Null Point programs context-sensitive, embodied, participatory, and durational sound work. Past projects include new place-based sound works in vacant Buffalo grain silos, concerts emphasizing limited situations of performance and audition, and participatory events in community spaces. For their performance at Yonge Dundas Square, they will present the Canadian premieres of Sarah Hennies’ “Everything Else” and David Dunn’s “PLACE”, part 10.
THE VELVET CRYSTALS
The Velvet Crystals are from a distant universe where the sky is holographic, the ocean is made up of unicorn tears and the ground below glitters. These fiery human beings take in the world around them and turn it into sound. A collective of music-making rebels that are playing everything and anything that is wacky, weird, and wild. The collective is made up of core members Emilie Gelinas-Noble, Austin Lamarche, Olivia Shortt, and Katherine Watson.
LORDE AWESOME
Lorde Awesome is an improvisational music collective centred around Avery Strok and James Bailey. Founded with Richard Vainio in 2008 with the express purpose of “creating new sounds”, their works run the gamut from white noise and free jazz, to heady, celestial trip-outs. The current group lineup is essentially a synthesizer army with percussion and saxophone, all with a singular mind for sonic exploration. They’re pleased to have with them, as always: Bob Vespaziani, Heloise Simone George, Matt Wyner, Colin Reid, and Charles Hackbarth. Lorde Awesome begets a new ice age, the sound of glaciers carving the earth while the dying mastodon screams its last scream.
DAY 4: SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2019
MORTON SUBOTNICK plays Silver Apples of The Moon Revisited
special guest
LEUCROCUTA
8:30 pm @ The Jam Factory (2 Matilda St.)
The Music Gallery and Intersection team up again to present vintage sounds from the future over Labour Day weekend.
MORTON SUBTOTNICK
Electronic pioneer Morton Subotnick has been creating innovative compositional works with electronics, computers, and alternative media for over 50 years. His large scale electronic composition “Silver Apples of the Moon” commissioned by Nonesuch Records was the first of it’s kind and inspired decades of composers & performers to utilize electronic instruments in modern chamber music. Since then it has become a landmark recording & has been entered into the National Register of Recorded Works at the Library of Congress, of which only 300 recordings throughout the entire history of recorded music have been chosen. Subotnick continues to create boundary pushing music for both electronics & classical instruments. For this rare concert Subotnick will perform “Silver Apples of the Moon Revisited”.
LEUCROCUTA
Laura Dickens’ (Slutcode) solo project Leucrocuta sees her venture into dark electronic territory drawing on influence from industrial, ambient and outsider synth pop. Hard drum machines rhythms skitter & flow under layers of her vocals. Swaying like the winds, they coat her sonic landscape as they cut through with sharp hums. Vocal shadows scurry like insects. Leucrocuta feels like a dream often on fast forward, the distorted world seems almost surreal as it melts & shifts. Dickens’ vocals become the only spirits that can inhabit the mutating forest she’s created.
