Greetings, everyone!

It's been a while since I've sent anything in the way of newsletters out. As such, I have an exciting array of things to share below that I hope you'll investigate, from new and forthcoming recordings from various gifted publicity clients of mine to the absolutely jaw-dropping line-up of next weekend's FutureStops Festival.  I've also included a little update about my own recent release, Music From Wéi 成为 on Orange Milk Records.

Pretty soon you'll be hearing from me about a brand new season of CMC Presents at the Canadian Music Centre as well as a new composition of my own for string quartet, accordion and fortepiano!

I hope that you're all doing well these days! 

Sending my best,
Nick Storring

UPCOMING EVENTS

FUTURESTOPS FESTIVAL
September 29th — October 1st, various Toronto Venues

It woudn't not be exaggeration at all to say that the FutureStops Festival is like no other event that's taken place in Toronto within recent memory.  Featuring some of the most important figures in exploratory music today—jazz innovator Amina Claudine Myers, Pulitzer-prize winning composer Raven Chacon, eccentric minimalist Charlemagne Palestine, as well as Sarah Davachi, Kara-Lis Coverdale, and Kali Malone, to name just a few—the festival celebrates the unique sonic capabilities of the pipe organ in some of the city's most beautiful venues: Roy Thomson Hall, Cathedral of St James, and Metropolitan United Church. 

For more information about and tickets to this amazing and unprecedented event... 

CLICK HERE (NOW)

 

RECENT RELEASES BY R~M ARTISTS

Colin Fisher / Mike Gennaro —
Tactile Stories
(CD/ CS / DL out now on Cacophonous Revival Recordings)

Having both cut their teeth in Toronto underground venues from the long-gone Idler Pub to the legendary Music Gallery—Colin Fisher (reeds/ guitar) and Mike Gennaro (drums) first came together as a duo in 2014. That same year yielded Sine Qua Non, a limited edition live recording from Toronto’s now-defunct Arachnidiscs imprint. On Tactile Stories, their second release, the pair have refined their potent, energetic synergy, crafting a collective sound that manages to capture the vibrant urgency of classic free jazz while also alluding to both players’ roots in extensions of punk rock. Tactile Stories‘ four extended pieces are often delivered with a certain ferocity, yet the paialso convey great sensitivity through their exchanges, mutually discovering passages of meditative focus.

LISTEN & PURCHASE HERE

Joseph Petric — SEEN
(CD/ DL out now on Redshift Records)

Revered Canadian accordionist Joseph Petric returns with his first new full-length in 12 years. SEEN offers a glimpse into both Petric’s virtuosity and sensitivity through an immaculately curated series of solo compositions (with and without electronics), all but one of which was commissioned by him.  These pieces span gorgeous lyricism to rousing fragmentation, and even include a work where Petric’s role transcends the interpretative.

The past four decades have seen Joseph Petric commissioning over 350 pieces (including 20 concertos) and performing work by living composers worldwide, establishing him as one of the most important proponents of his instrument and crucial advocate for contemporary music (especially by Canadians) in the global arena.

LISTEN & PURCHASE HERE

                                                             

Parisa Sabet — A Cup of Sins
(CD/ DL out now on Redshift Records)

 Toronto-based Iranian-Canadian composer Parisa Sabet‘s debut juxtaposes chamber and vocal settings that highlight her deeply personal sonic amalgam.  Sabet possesses a remarkably bold ear for arrangement and draws variously from minimalism, modernism, romanticism, as well as the ornate melodic gestures of Iranian traditional musics. A Cup Of Sins is colourful but contemplative, and thoroughly evocative. 

LISTEN & PURCHASE HERE

 

FORTHCOMING RELEASES

Monica Pearce —Textile Fantasies
(CD/ DL out October 14th on Centrediscs)

Texas-based Canadian composer Monica Pearce's debut full-length release presents a series of keyboard and percussion-driven chamber works each paying homage to the form and feel of a specific textile.   Though she employs smaller instrumental forces throughout it, Textile Fantasies manages to showcase Pearce's uncanny ability to produce striking and evocative sonorities that seem to maximize her resources and impart an undeniable atmosphere to each composition.  In addition to Pearce's abilities, this recording also features performances by leading Canadian musicians such as keyboardists Cheryl Duvall, Wesley Chen, Barbara Pritchard, and Joseph Ferretti, tabla player Shawn Mativetsky, as well as renowned ensembles TorQ Percussion and SHHH!! Ensemble.  

PREVIEW / PRE-ORDER HERE


                                                             

Marina Hasselberg — Red
(LP/ DL out October 21st on Redshift Records)

The full-length debut of award-winning Vancouver-based cellist Marina Hasselberg, Red is an ambitious and unconventional proposition built on the foundation of Hasselberg's diverse musical experience and boundless inquisitiveness.  Over the past decade, she's traveled a distinctive route, part of which is revealed over the course of the album. She's worked in early music, free improvisation, on the fringes of pop songcraft, electronic music, contemporary chamber music, as well as an array of interdisciplinary collaborations that resist classification. 

Red takes works by composers Domenico Gabrielli, Linda Catlin Smith, Martin Reisle, and Craig Aalders and folds them into a series of colourful ensemble improvisations. Hasselberg's approach as an improviser demonstrates a thorough and personal understanding of her instrument and just how to travel through its extensive palette. She is heard here alongside John Zorn collaborator and Tzadik alumnus Aram Bajakian (guitar) and Kenton Loewen (Dan Mangan, Gordon Grdina), revered multi-hyphenate Giorgio Magnanensi (providing a blend of custom-made hardware electronics and Max/MSP). Jesse Zubot (Tania Tagaq, Gordon Grdina, Fond of Tigers) performs on violin and also produced, mixed and mastered the disc.

PREVIEW / PRE-ORDER AVAILABLE SOON HERE

                                                             

Jairus Sharif — Water & Tools
(LP/ DL out October 21st on Telephone Explosion Records)

Since early 2020, Calgary-based improvisor Jairus Sharif  has been generating a steady stream of passionate and unclassifiable homespun solo recordings that forge unprecedented connections between hip-hop abstraction, cosmic skronk, outsider jazz, and staunch post-punk DIY ethos. Water & Tools, his strange and stirring debut for Toronto's Telephone Explosion Records (home to full-lengths from the likes of Brodie West's Eucalyptus, Mas Aya, and Joseph Shabason), offers a glimpse into this ongoing hermetic journey. It's a dense, contradictory statement with a blustery surface that shelters a soulful heart. It's generous music, exuding profound vulnerability—grappling with the loss of one his mothers, Lisa—all the while brimming with electric wide-eyed wonder. 

PREVIEW / PRE-ORDER HERE

                                                             

Bekah Simms — Bestiaries
(CD/ LP/ DL out October 28th on Centrediscs)

The third release from fêted Scotland-based Canadian composer Bekah Simms, Bestiaries—her vinyl debut—presents the detailed disquiet of her musical universe on a much larger canvas than ever before. These three large-ensemble works (two of which enlist chamber orchestra-sized forces, soloists and electronics) feature performances by acclaimed artists and ensembles such as ECM+, cellist Amahl Arulanandam, and vocalist Charlotte Mundy.

Each of these pieces deploy a bold and visceral language rooted in spectralist colour and modernist vivacity,  while seamlessly integrating elements of experimental metal, ethereal pop, electroacoustics, and the unhinged spirit of improvisation. Simms has a remarkable gift for crafting music that is simultaneously accessible and brusquely uncompromising and Bestiaries serves a concise and dynamic introduction to her evocative body of work.

PREVIEW / PRE-ORDER HERE

 

... FROM NICK STORRING



As you may recall from my previous newsletter, I have just released a brand-new album of my own on the wonderful Orange Milk Records, who have been super supportive of my work over the past decade. The album, entitled Music From 'Wéi 成为' comprises of music I created for Yvonne Ng's dance work Wéi 成为, which was recently premiered. The work is made exclusively on pianos but employs my usual tactic of excessive generous multi-tracking.  The release is available digitally, on LP, and CD from Orange Milk (via my Bandcamp). Within Toronto, there are copies at She Said Boom (Roncesvalles Location) and I can work out getting copies to folks directly. Kitchener's Encore Records also has stock.

Here's what some of the reviews have been saying about it thus far.
"Music from Wéi 成为 is an affirmation of Nick Storring’s status as one of the most creative and exciting experimental artists working today." — Chris Ingalls, PopMatters

"Admirers of the piano’s traditional languages will revel in their spacious appearances, while those in search of the more radical need only wait until the next transition. The album’s beauty is forced to roar in and out of focus as often as it reflects. The music itself brims with the fluid energy of rapid-fire discovery still maintaining time to breathe. Through it all runs the obvious and infectious joy of creation, spontaneity and considered craft in gloriously recorded tandem." — Marc Medwin, Dusted

"I’ve never quite had a feeling like this about music, where I’ve had so much I’ve wanted to say and yet felt so incapable of how to say it." — Daniel Field, DOMINIONATED

Also, if it interests you at all, I've been featured not just ONCE but TWICE on the ever-wonderful interview site 15 Questions since the release of this record (stay tuned for the third instalment!)

LISTEN / PURCHASE HERE