Sandra Boss.

ATEM

In ATEM, Sandra Boss stages a dialogue between human and machine. The MIDI-technology of the church organ is taken into play, not only to explore the super-human powers it has to offer, but moreover to expose its sonic possibilities where rhythmic patterns appear as structural and timbral effects. Suppression, exhaustment, excitation and release all coexist in this piece.

Sandra Boss (DK) is a composer who manifests the familiar in new and surprising ways. She works with home-built extensions and expansions of the classical instruments, and the organ has especially taken on a distinctive role in her practice. She has made works for church organs, reed organs, electronic organs and for home-built MIDI-controlled organs. What these works have in common is that they bend a musical reality in ways that were not thought possible. Her tightly shaped works are not easy to categorize, but arise as particularly attractive and distinctive musical sound universes. 

Sandra Boss has a background in classical music and later studied electronic music at The Royal Academy of Music in Denmark. In 2019 she finished an artistic-based PhD on sound art from The University of Aarhus, Denmark. She has performed at numerous international venues including KRAAK Festival (Be), Detritus Festival (GR), Super Deluxe (JP), Klangkunst Festival (DE) and LAK – Festival for Nordic Sound Art (DK).

Blake Hargreaves.

Altar Ego 

Since the early 1990s Blake Hargreaves has explored the sonic and expressive possibilities of the pipe organ through experimentation and improvisation. Recently this practice has expanded to deliberate encounters with unfamiliar instruments, excavating new creations at each novel interaction. Hargreaves has documented such actions with nearly 100 pipe organs across the Americas and Europe. Bringing this practice to the context of a live happening with the massive Casavant at Pacific Spirit is an honour and privilege for Hargreaves, to explore the realities of the present through the complex lens of the organ’s construction, community and land.

Since 2016, Blake Hargreaves has been recording improvisations on the world’s pipe organs and composing original works for them. The project seeks to find new sonic and conceptual/spiritual approaches to the instrument and is depicted in an upcoming film. His album Improvisations on the Pipe Organs of Europe, released on Ultra Eczema in 2019, was reviewed in Boomkat as “Among the most enchanting recordings of organ music we’ve heard (…) timeless and haunting”.

In 2020–2022 Hargreaves hosted the FutureStops Podcast, exploring the organ in the 21st century. He was the curator of the FutureStops Festival at Roy Thomson Hall and other venues in 2022. He directs the Fluorescent Friends label in Montreal, and has been the Co-Producer of the annual Cool Fest concert series since its inception in 2007. His other projects include releases on labels like Ecstatic Peace!, Olde English Spelling Bee, American Tapes, and InYrDisk, and he has been featured in publications like The Vice Photo Book and The Routledge Research Companion to Electronic Music.

Elisa Ferrari, Bárbara Lázara and John Brennan.

Ferrari / Brennan / Lázara will present a performance for pipe organ, voice, percussion, synthesizer, and for the neo-gothic stone building that houses the Pacific Spirit United Church. This collaboration draws from a shared interest in the acoustics of space, in buildings as bodies as instruments, and in offering modes of listening that puncture the hierarchy between audience, performers and religious architecture. It combines elements from their individual practices with voice (Lázara), percussion (Brennan), amplification & audio feedback (Ferrari), with collective sonic interventions and micro-choreographies for lungs and fingers recalling a time when the pipe organ relied on the labor of more than one organist to produce its sounds. Costume design by Shizen Jambor.

Elisa Ferrari is an artist who works with sound, performance, and writing. Her practice and collaborations are concerned with memory formations, idleness, sonic sediments, translingual ecologies, somatic inquiries, and the infrasonic. She hosts aux-sends—a quarterly radio series about experimental music, sound, and poetics—on Vancouver co-op radio. Ferrari’s recent solo and collaborative work has been presented at Nanaimo Art Gallery, British Columbia; Kamias Triennial, Quezon City; Vancouver Art Gallery; Western Front, Vancouver; Q-O2, Brussels; and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. She lives as an uninvited guest on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh territories and in Brescia, Italy, where she grew up.

Bárbara Lázara is an artist whose work is dedicated to amplifying subjugated languages, archives of the body, and stolen memories. Her work spans across various media, including performance, music, writing, and video, and has been exhibited in solo and group shows in Mexico, the US, and the EU. She is a member of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm 2022/23 and belonged to the Sistema de Creadores de Arte de México from 2019 to 2022. Lázara is currently working on archival materials for the exhibition Sonora en el Silencio, which will showcase the artistic legacy of her great-grandmother, writer Olivia Zuñiga, and take place at the Museo Cabañas in 2023.

John Brennan is an improviser, sound artist and drummer living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, Vancouver. His sound work includes installations and sonic sculptures that consider the relationship between the sonic memory of musical instruments, performance, and improvisation–The Temporal Drum Set (2018), Things Resounding Things (2019), and Rudiments for Hexidrome (2020).  At the core of Brennan’s practice is collaboration. Among his current projects, Plan Your Future with Greg Saunier; PHYSIC  with John Dieterich;  dashes, a sound performance collaboration with Elisa Ferrari; Kamikaze Nurse with Casey Wei, Sonya Kim and Ethan Reyes; Bull Brennan Bull, an improvised performance trio with Hank Bull & Arthur Bull; Mo-Dale, an improvised performance duo with Justin Patterson, and Earth Ball, an improvised experimental ensemble with core members Izzy Ford and Jeremy Van Wyck and invited guests.

Shizen Jambor is an artist and writer who lives and works on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations. Her work utilizes camp and theatricality to explore shifting relationships between bodily-inhabitation, identity, and societal mores around labour. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. 

This performance was developed from a series of improvisations, and sound interventions Ferrari, Lázara and Brennan performed in the Fall 2022 in different catholic churches in Brescia, Italy as part of Ferrari’s project in increments of 13 – a sound library of graphic scores, field recordings, and sonic fictions drawing from popular medicine, and oral histories of the valley where she grew up in northern Italy.

loscil and Lawrence English.

Lawrence English and loscil present a new, long form work for organ and electronics informed by their 2023 collaborative album, Colours of Air. Using computer and human controlled acoustic pipe organ sounds mixed with real time processing, the duo revisit the spirit of their studio album which featured recordings of the pipe organ at the Old Museum in Brisbane, Australia.

loscil is the electronic music project of Canadian composer and multimedia artist Scott Morgan. For over 20 years, Morgan has built a robust catalogue of work under the LOSCIL moniker, loosely spanning the genres of ambient, classical and electroacoustic music.  Alongside numerous albums released on the esteemed American label, Kranky, Morgan has also produced special projects, remixes and collaborations with other musicians including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Murcof/Vanessa Wagner, bvdub, Sarah Neufeld, Daniel Bejar, Rachel Grimes and Lawrence English.

Morgan’s music can be found supporting film, television, theatre and contemporary dance productions including notable work with choreographers Damien Jalet from Belgium and Vanessa Goodman from Vancouver.  Morgan has also created bespoke music for games and interactive multimedia projects including Hundreds, Osmos, Lifelike and his own generative music application ADRIFT released in 2015. 

As a touring entity, Morgan has brought his live audio-visual performances to festivals worldwide such as Mutek, Le Guess Who, LEV, Gamma Fest, Sled Island, Today’s Art, WOS, Open Frame and Big Ears. 

Lawrence English is a composer, artist and curator based in Australia. Working across an eclectic array of aesthetic investigations, English’s work prompts questions of field, perception and memory. He investigates the politics of perception, through live performance and installation, to create works that ponder subtle transformations of space and ask audiences to become aware of that which exists at the edge of perception.

Giulio Tosti.

Man-chine

What really happens when humans interface with a machine? Which of these two elements is really in control? Is it the human who dominates…or is it the machine itself that secretly drives the human in their choices? Who is playing who?

These ancient questions will be explored by the organist Giulio Tosti within his performance, which will be set as a long acoustic improvisation, exploring the auxiliary electronic elements of the Casavant organ –  its Piston Sequencer, Crescendo Pedals….with the aim of recreating a machine-like language, but adding the uncertainty and organicity of a human body playing.

Giulio Tosti studied organ at the Conservatorio San Pietro a Majella in Naples under Roberto Canali. In 2017 he obtained his Diplome, with the 10/10 summa cum laude and congratulations from the jury. He studied under Theo Flury at the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music in Rome and by Sophie Rétaux at the ESMD (École Supérieure Musique et Danse Nord de France). In 2017 he served as professeur d’orgue in the School of Music of Comines (Lille, France) and between 2018-2021 worked at the Central Institute for Sound and Audiovisual Patrimony. He has won numerous prizes and has given recitals at numerous festivals. 

Alongside the organ repertoire, Giulio actively reevaluates and rethinks his instrument, with individual and collective projects. In 2019 he created Nebula, a solo project of extemporary composition that explores unconventional soundscapes of pipe organ, using extended techniques, aiming to create a true acoustic sound machine out of the organ. Nebula was also included in BBC Radio 3’s New Music Shows. In 2023 he created Rupestre, a project conceived for movable hand-organs, with the aim to recreate ancestral and futuristic soundscapes.

In addition to the concert activity with this project, Giulio also leads Masterclasses and theoretical/practical workshops related to this new conception of the organ, addressed to organists, composers, electronic and jazz musicians.

He composes music for organ solo, organ and other instruments, music for image and for theatre.

gamut inc photo by Cristophe Voy.

AGGREGATE #11 

gamut inc will perform AGGREGATE #11, a piece created in 2022 during an artist residency of the Goethe Institute in the Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto. Here, electronic music processes such as pulse width modulation are used on the organ, arranged into dense textures that interweave with algorithmically generated harmonic and rhythmic material to create larger forms. A kaleidoscope of processual forms of expression that reconcile the mechanical and the organic.

An interdisciplinary ensemble featuring computer musician, graphic artist and composer Marion Wörle and composer and guitarist Maciej Sledzieck, gamut inc is dedicated to electro-acoustic music, innovative music theatre and automated pipe organs. Founded in Berlin in 2013, the ensemble sets thematic priorities with its own productions, stages music theatre and organizes concerts and festivals. Since 2019, they have been directing the worldwide touring concert series and festival AGGREGATE, which is dedicated to computer-controlled pipe organs in churches and concert halls. The annual festival makes guest appearances at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, the Auenkirche and the Chapel of Reconciliation Berlin. In 2022, the two held scholarships at Villa Kamogawa Kyoto and explored the organ scene in Japan. A double CD with a selection of works from their festival AGGREGATE will be released on WERGO in 2023. In September 2023, their music theatre ZEROTH LAW, a collaboration with the prestigious RIAS Chamber Choir and the LOGOS robot orchestera will premiere at Deutsche Oper Berlin. Intensive, scenic-musical performances negotiate mechanisation in a social context. Their new album SUM TO INFINITY with new works for gamut inc’s music machines and synthesizers was released on MORPHINE Records in 2023.

Sarah Davachi photo by Sean McCann.

Sarah Davachi is a composer and performer whose work is concerned with the close intricacies of timbral and temporal space, utilizing extended durations and considered harmonic structures that emphasize gradual variations in texture, overtone complexity, psychoacoustic phenomena, and tuning and intonation.  Her compositions span solo, chamber ensemble, and acousmatic formats, incorporating a wide range of acoustic and electronic instrumentation.  Similarly informed by minimalist and longform tenets, early music concepts of form, affect, and intervallic harmony, as well as experimental production practices of the studio environment, in her sound is an intimate and patient experience that lessens perceptions of the familiar and the distant. Davachi offers a program of new pieces for solo pipe organ as well as previously unperformed organ pieces from Davachi’s 2020 album Cantus, Descant.

In addition to her acclaimed recorded output, Sarah Davachi has toured extensively alongside artists such as Ellen Arkbro, Oren Ambarchi, Grouper, William Basinski, Catherine Lamb, Aaron Dilloway, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Michael Pisaro, Loren Connors, Tashi Wada, David Rosenboom, Charlemagne Palestine, Arnold Dreyblatt, and filmmaker Dicky Bahto.  Commissioned projects include large-scale works for Quatuor Bozzini, London Contemporary Orchestra, Yarn/Wire, Apartment House, Wild Up, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Radio France, Contemporaneous Ensemble, Cello Octet Amsterdam, Bonner Kunstverein, Canadian International Organ Competition, and Western Front New Music.  Her work has been presented internationally by Southbank Centre (London UK), Barbican Centre (London UK), Kontraklang (Berlin DE), Ina GRM (Paris FR), Issue Project Room (New York USA), Lampo (Chicago USA), among others. In 2020 she founded Late Music, an imprint within the partner labels division of Warp Records.

Between 2007 and 2017, Davachi had the unique opportunity to work for the National Music Centre in Canada as an interpreter and content developer of their collection of acoustic and electronic keyboard instruments.  She has held artist residencies with The Banff Centre for the Arts, Quatuor Bozzini’s Composer’s Kitchen, STEIM, Elektronmusikstudion, OBORO Montréal, the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio, the National Music Centre, and the Swiss Museum & Center for Electronic Music Instruments, and holds a master’s degree in electronic music and recording media from Mills College in Oakland, California. Davachi is currently a doctoral candidate in musicology at UCLA, focusing on timbre, phenomenology, and critical organology, and is based in Los Angeles, California.