Today is the Final Bandcamp Friday of 2020!

HELLO FRIENDS!

TODAY IS THE LAST BANDCAMP DAY OF 2020, WHERE THEIR FEES ARE WAIVED AND ARTISTS EARN MORE!

See below for information about releases by Riparian Media clients, as well as some "curated" suggestions from me personally.

I'll be serving up another newsletter before the end of the year featuring some year-end reflections and more!

stay safe!
~~ NICK STORRING

NEW!
Alex Eddington — A Present from a Small Distant World
(CD/DL out: February 19th on Redshift Records) PRE-ORDER NOW!

Toronto composer Alex Eddington’s unorthodox debut A Present from a Small Distant World is many different things all at once. Sometimes dark, sometimes downright silly, certain moments resemble traditional art song, whereas others unfurl strange synthetic textures. Traversing — and often revisiting — music from the past 18 years, it serves as a portrait of his close collaborative relationship with soprano Kristin Mueller-Heaslip, who plays a number of different protagonists throughout the album. While this timespan accounts for some of the album’s gleeful heterogeneity, that trait can also be attributed to its underlying inspiration, the so-called Golden Record, the phonographic “earth’s greatest hits” disc that was hurled into space in 1977 by the Voyager spacecraft.

Eddington’s restless creativity has led him into collaborations with some of Canada’s most renowned ensembles including Continuum, Quatuor Bozzini, the Toronto Consort, the Talisker Players, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Mujirushi, and junctQín as well as performances across the globe. Winner of a 2004 SOCAN Award Eddington’s eclectic and often playful oeuvre embraces everything from choral music to electroacoustics, from period instruments to steel pan ensemble.

PRE-ORDER & PREVIEW HERE
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A. Hutchie — Potion Shop
(LP/CD/DL out: November 20th on Cosmic Resonance) BRAND NEW!

Potion Shop is a pop record but embraces everything from ethereal folk to esoteric rhymes, from sunburnt soul to lysergic lullabies, all the while showcasing Hamilton's A. Hutchie (aka Aaron Hutchinson) and his distinctive and decidedly psychedelic arrangements. One may know Hutchinson as a member of Haolin Munk, Eschaton or as one of the founders of celebrated venue/label HAVN. He has also collaborated with the likes of Lea Bertucci, JFM, Ellis, Zoon and YlangYlang. Here, his crisp wind arrangements crawl forth from thick synth haze, as 808 drums rain down on choruses of birds, and muffled pianos meander past distended, muck-encrusted drum samples. It's also a vehicle for songs courtesy of a diverse cast of guests, variously featuring Hamiltonian vocal protagonists Sarah Good and Benita Whyte of Persons Crew, Doom Squad's Allie Blumas, pre-eminent MC Emay, Kirk Starkey of classical fusionists Quarteto Gelato, and countless others.

ORDER & LISTEN HERE
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Luciane Cardassi — Going North
(CD/DL out: October 30th on Redshift Records) BRAND NEW!

Award-winning pianist Luciane Cardassi’s Going North vividly unfolds a magic-realist homage to her two homelands with eight piano (+ voice) and electronics pieces from some of Canada and Brazil’s most intriguing composers. These carefully selected pieces collectively inhabit a world that is opaque yet ethereal, introspective but restlessly dynamic. Each one’s electroacoustic elements read as organic, psychedelic extensions of her performance rather than as contrived digital appendages—an impression helped by Cardassi’s enviable precision and exquisite command of the piano’s extended vocabulary. Obladada recently remarked that "it has created its own abstracted zone, a form of mutant jazz or textural electronics as much as a gently fragmenting multi-layered suite. A wildly odd and bristling work, squeezing every thoughtful drop out of seldom grouped and gathered ingredients."

ORDER & LISTEN HERE
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Toronto’s junctQín—comprised of Stephanie Chua, Elaine Lau and Joseph Ferretti—commemorates a decade of intrepid exploration with their long-awaited debut album. Offering a spirited and diverse collection of multi-limbed pieces spanning Maurice Ravel’s 1918 curio Frontispice to works by contemporary music’s leading up-and-comers (including Emily Doolittle, Alex Eddington, and Monica Pearce), reTHINK captures everything from phantom textures summoned from the piano’s inner sanctum to Casio-caressing postmodernism. It’s a buoyant and decidedly celebratory album that sits at the sweet spot between virtuosity and focussed listening, and whose whimsy always remains anchored in profound musical insight.

ORDER & LISTEN HERE
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Piano and Erhu Project — Volume 3
(CD/DL out now on Redshift Records)

The third instalment of Corey Hamm (piano) and Nicole Ge Li's (erhu) remarkable PEP (Piano and Erhu Project) is the culmination of a nine-year exploration of their unique instrumentation including international tours, and award nominations, as well collaborations with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, and many of contemporary music's most brilliant minds. The present volume features noted composers such as Gao Ping, Michael Finnissy, Somei Satoh, Gabriel Prokofiev and more, lovingly sequenced into what the WholeNote's Andrew Timar recently called an "exhilarating program"

ORDER & LISTEN HERE
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New Hermitage — Unearth
(CD/DL out: September 17th — New Hermitage)

Following their Music Nova Scotia Award-winning collaboration with Jeff Reilly, the fifth album by Halifax / Montréal-based improvising quartet New Hermitage, Unearth, unfolds through a series of whispered vignettes, offering the ensemble’s most focussed and cohesive statement to date. Drawing on the spontaneous music practice of leader Andrew MacKelvie’s mentor and collaborator Jerry Granelli, Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening™, and a vocabulary of eco-dystopian imagery (as reflected in their name), the record follows a dream-like logic, superimposing soft timbral impressions and tangled melodic evasions, as though interpreting a half-erased chalk portrait of spiritual free jazz.

ORDER & LISTEN HERE
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NEW FROM REDSHIFT RECORDS!

Vancouver's Redshift Records has no fewer than six excellent new releases joining their fine catalogue later this month. In addition to the innovative keyboard-centric chamber collective junctQín's new disc that came out Friday, and fellow Riparian Media client (see below), pianist Luciane Cardassi (who's putting out two new releases!), there's a disc of intimate chamber works by Vancouver's Jeffrey Ryan, an intriguing multi-composer recording from pianist Julia Den Boer, and an all-new collaboration between the label's head-honcho Jordan Nobles and the ensemble Negative Zed.

Orders and previews for each are now available through Redshift's Bandcamp Page. If you're a curious writer who'd like to review any of these, please reach out to : riparianmedia@gmail.com for a download code!

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Noah Creshevsky — Hyperrealist Music 2011-2015 (EM Foundation)
Just yesterday I received the news that my friend Noah Creshevsky had passed. Noah was a fiercely unique composer of what he dubbed "hyperrealist music," a strange style of electronic music that wove sampled chunks, preset sounds, and session performances into something that resembled, but exceeded the capacity, of instrumental music. He foreshadowed so much of today's electronic music including what's being done today by the likes of Oneohtrix Point Never, Visible Cloaks, and many artists on the Orange Milk Records roster, upon which we ended up being labelmates. Noah was also a composition teacher and learned from the legendary Nadia Boulanger (and her pupil Luciano Berio). In addition to being a brilliant and unique artist, Noah was also remarkably generous and hilarious. I will truly miss our exchanges and his way of listening, and I'm seeing that others in the community are saying the same of him. Rest in peace.

I highly recommend the compilation of his that came out on the EM Foundation.

Bernice — Eau de Bonjourno (Telephone Explosion)
Telephone Explosion has had what the Brits call a "banner year" with brilliant discs from Tony Price, Pantayo, Mariangela, and many others. Looks like they're gonna be kicking off 2021 in style with this new record from one of Toronto's best and most idiosyncratic pop outfits, Bernice. If the first single they're offering with the pre-order is any indication, this recording is going to be amazing.

Ashley Paul — Ray (Slip)
The ever-brilliant Ashley Paul continues to delve deeper into her strange aesthetic world that merges brittle song-craft, misshapen post-punkish textures, free-jazz, and wafting microtonal chamber music gestures.

Martin Arnold — Stain Ballads (Another Timbre)
Martin Arnold is quite simply one of my all-time favourite composers. This is his second effort for Another Timbre and features the UK ensemble Apartment House playing his unclassifiable chamber work.

Susan Alcorn Quintet — Pedernal (Relative Pitch)
Riparian Acoustics has presented Ms. Alcorn twice now, including her first-ever Toronto appearance at Ratio. I've long been a big fan of her languid pedal-steel work and this release sees her augmenting it with four other players that match the fidelity of her playing and listening—the ubiquitous Mary Halvorson (guitar), Mark Feldman (violin), Michael Formanek (double bass), and Ryan Sawyer (drums).

James Lowrie — Boom 4 (Independent)
James Lowrie's work posits a strange blend of classic Toronto amorphousness (cf. the Rat-Drifting discography) and post-vaporwave plunderphonia world. Boom 4 began as a recording of one of his pieces (for guitar quartet that paid homage to the Vengaboys), but soon took its own special path. While that may sound like a joke, and Lowrie is indeed a comedian as well as a composer, this work is as subtle, peculiar, and probing, as it is playful.

Luis Pestana — Rosa Pano (Orange Milk Records)
Luis Pestana's daring debut Rosa Pano offers a startling new twist on the day-glo weirdness so beloved by Orange Milk. I almost regard its sweeping quality as a form of surreal electronic romanticism. Unfolding expansive synthetic vistas, nods to (imagined?) folkloric worlds, blurry snippets of Pestana's childhood, and strident sung passages this collection offers a wild, beautiful, but strangely cohesive journey.

Késia Decoté — Para a frente (Nonclassical)
I've mentioned my friend Késia Decoté here before. A gifted pianist based in Brazil, she's one of the most thoughtful and generous interpreters I've ever encountered. I'm so grateful for what she's done with my long solo piece byland (2015), a work that was commissioned by the amazing Eve Egoyan but that Késia has found her own way into (stay tuned for a studio recording!). This EP Para a frente finds her joining the roster of Gabriel Prokofiev's label Nonclassical with a collection of works for piano, toy piano, and electronics.

For more recommendations, check out my collection (and wishlist) on Bandcamp : https://bandcamp.com/nickstorring