By Matthew Fava

I have been working from home this week (surprise), and have been spending a lot of my time in dialogue with friends and collaborators whose income opportunities are restricted as a result of our collective health precautions. I have also been spending a lot of time this week listening to recorded music. One of the places I visit for my listening is Bandcamp.

Bandcamp has announced a fundraising effort—running on Friday, March 20 from midnight to midnight pacific time—whereby the site is waiving their revenue share on sales. Bandcamp Co-Founder and CEO Ethan Diamond posted a statement on their site with the goal of “rallying the Bandcamp community to put much needed money directly into artists’ pockets.” It is a great call to action.

State-driven relief efforts are part of the way we care for vulnerable workers, and another step is valuing the work and workers directly: acknowledging their ongoing professional expenses, and revelling in the craft, rigour, and imagination of their output.

As an encouragement, I present my CMC-themed Bandcamp wishlist featuring a few of the artists, albums, and labels that I would recommend. Give them a listen, and if you are in a position to purchase the music consider doing that, too—some of these are “name your price” offers.

PHONG TRAN / I met Phong Tran last year during the Toronto Creative Music Lab. There is something direct, inviting, and surprising in his electronic work, and I have been listening to his most recent collection, Kindness, this week—favourite track is Naturalize.

ADAM BASANTA / Staying in a dream-like realm, here is an album that excites the same neural pathways established when I first listened to Ryoji Ikeda in my late teens, while bringing an added warmth. Adam’s restraint on Intricate Connections Formed Without Touch is endearing. The swirling of the tactile and synthetic in this sonic reduction is sumptuous.

YUNJIN CLAIRE LEE / We recently featured Yunjin Claire Lee as part of the CMC Presents series in partnership with Women From Space, and it is amazing to listen to this album—Voluntary Response, featuring pieces recorded by local music hero and ardent Arrayspace attendant Kelley Mitchell—in relation to her set earlier this month. Claire offers rhapsodic piano passages contrasting, colliding, and colluding with sporadic audio samples and electronic processing. It’s a trip.

EVE EGOYAN & LINDA SMITH / Two years ago I was borrowing my parents’ car for a week, and I drove my upstairs neighbours down to Queen St. West to do some grocery shopping. As dusk approached, I was parked and sitting in the car, facing east. The sun began to set, I watched as the sunlight inched along the dashboard, and the sky in the rear view mirror hastened through myriad colour combinations towards a velvet blue. I was listening to Thought and Desire on the car stereo. I heard the faint vocalizations nestled in the soft rhythms of the piano. I felt lucky to be in the same city as two of Canada’s greatest artists, and I marvelled at what a lifetime of collaboration can achieve in sound.

CHERYL DUVALL & ANNA HÖSTMAN / This album is a haven of propulsive, wandering, and at times fragile sounds that Cheryl embodies with such grace. Harbour is a signpost on a path which will be extended and articulated in countless ways as these two artists collaborate further. And why not check out the wider discography available from the label, Redshift!

JASON DOELL / I remember getting yearbooks in high school—some sanitized representation of 10 months of my life when I felt invisible, insecure, and frightened. Jason Doell’s music is the inside cover of my yearbook: adorned with hand crafted notes from friends; messages that summon memories, tragedies, and struggles. This is music that embodies the small moments, those vulnerabilities that exist in the spaces that we share. A reminder that we exist in impossible spaces.

INDIA YESHE GAILEY / India came through Toronto on a tour in February, and I so enjoyed her performance—her album, Lucid, has been on my wish list since then! This is music that drifts across a vast distance and finds you, drawing your attention, recolouring your perceptions. My favourite track is Baikal, but I also must shout out composer Lukas Oickle for contributing the richly layered and dramatic opening track A Gaijin (Foreigner) Walks Between Towering Chords Hundreds of Years Old.

L CON / When I write my sci-fi indie romance story and it invariably gets optioned for a film adaptation I want L CON (Lisa Conway) to write and produce the soundtrack. She works magic in the music on her Whatever EP. Each song has so much character, her vocal performance carries a tangible yearning woven in amongst electronic purrs and punctuations. Too hard to pick a favourite!

PURSUIT GROOVES / Vanese Smith has been boundless in her artistry, and in her late 2019 release, Bess, she bridges time and space in her retelling the story of Bessie Coleman, the first Black American female pilot. Vanese has been a fearless traveller in uncharted sonic spaces. On Bess, the rippling of rhythmic interplay derived from her sensitively orchestrated samples is so satisfying. I already have this album in my collection, but my renewed commitment encompasses listening on a pair of speakers with better bass response.

BRODIE WEST QUINTET / Keeping with rhythmic impulse, you must listen to the Brodie West Quintet. I feel so lucky to have spent the last few months working with Brodie as the band has been recording material for a new album (stay tuned for that). On Clips there is a kind of loose mimetic playing that edges further and further from expectation, anticipating moments of traction that re-contextualize each component part, before fracturing and reforming in one’s ear. These folks play so well together, and these are treasured sounds.

ALLISON CAMERON / c_RL (which features Allison Cameron, Nicole Rampersaud, and Germaine Liu) is a super group. On their 2015 album, Friends, they achieve an unbridled frenzy that draws upon the obscure and untapped sonic potential of every object in their vicinity. They quietly coalesce around fragments of rhythm before galvanic overtures to the sounds themselves. I was shocked to realize this was not yet in my collection. Also! You can find many of Allison’s projects online, including the Allison Cameron Band, and the recordings of her works by Contact Contemporary Music on A Gossamer Bit.

NUKARIIK / This one is special. Featured as part of the Live at the Music Gallery Bandcamp label, this performance from November 2016 was the first time I took my daughter to a Music Gallery show—this one, co-presented by Native Women in the Arts. We were wide eyes and wide ears that night. Nukariik (featuring sisters Karin and Kathy Kettler) were powerful and playful in a performance that showcased the wide traditions of Inuit throat singing, as well as their own virtuosic journeying through forms and techniques. It may be difficult to appreciate the intricacies and interplay without witnessing the physical performance, but listen to Love Song and you’ll begin to appreciate why the crowd in that hall was enthralled.

NICK STORRING / This album, My Magic Dreams Have Lost Their Spell, drops on March 27, but do yourself a favour and pre-order. Ever since Nick released Gardens, I have been sopping up every solo-orchestral piece that he posts on Soundcloud. Now this album arrives with the promise of sonorous, tectonic worlds—there is a uniquely inspired scale to these pieces. You can do yourself another favour and watch the exquisite video directed by Ellie Anglin set to the album’s ultimate/title track.

MUSIC IN THE BARNS / I got to see Music in the Barns perform the pieces from this album twice (2012, and 2013). Here you have a group that is committed to each other and the repertoire. And yes, this recording earned Rose Bolton a JUNO nomination for classical composition of the year for the Coming of Sobs. There is a dread that looms in the droning passages of movement II, which Rose perfectly balances with delicate runs orchestrated across the upper strings—this is but one facet of the three movement work. Tangent on the topic of music as a variable for social cohesion: I met John Mark Sherlock at the 2013 Music in the Barns performance, and that is a happy memory.

CANADIAN ELECTRONIC ENSEMBLE / Originally released in 1977 on Music Gallery Editions (we have a copy of the LP in the CMC archive!), the self-titled release from the CEE had been out of print for quite some time before the band reissued the recording in 2019. Are you listening to the electronic music of John Mills-Cockell, Hugh Le Caine, and Ann Southam? Have you been buying up the reissues on Tenzier, or scouring for the old CAPAC records featuring early Canadian electroacoustics? If so, this is for you. Original CEE members David Grimes, David Jaeger, Larry Lake, and James Montgomery lay down some mystical sounds, with a guest appearance on piano from Canadian music hero Karen Kieser.

JOHN KAMEEL FARAH / On Strands, there are varied moments of dense or filtered ornamentation bracketed by lunging chordal movements. John gives us somber intervallic tensions that resolve and rest before ratcheting into their next exploration. All of this is delivered with his signature technical precision. It is lovely to revisit this album which hints at a deep kinship with John’s visual art practice (I am thinking of some specific line drawings that he has produced).

GABRIEL DHARMOO / Quelques fictions is Dharmoo’s first album—it is devoted to his vocal works, and features his own effusive vocal performances alongside several collaborators. My dear friend Juro Kim Feliz provides some thoughtful commentary that helps situate Gabriel’s practice which I encourage you to read/hear, and I will simply say that Gabriel’s work is a powerful cultural text that extends beyond music. Fundamentally, it makes for great listening.

JOHN OSWALD / I got a somewhat cryptic message from John Oswald yesterday (although, the majority of the messages I get from John Oswald could be characterized as such) plus a link to Bandcamp. So I am listening at 3:00 AM to this curiously intoxicating blend of voice(s) and ensemble, when my roommate Will wanders into the kitchen and asks “will the entirety of the Goldberg variation be performed this way?” but it seems only the aria has been given the John Oswald (à la Glenn Gould?) treatment. This collection is a teaser! A taste of things to come from the artist I most often equate with Q in my Canadian-composer-Star-Trek cross over—I know this reference needs some unpacking… maybe in a future blog post.

EREZ SUSSMAN / I met Erez several years ago. He visited me at the CMC, we had a lovely chat about music making, and he handed me a copy of his 2011 release The Mighty Cedar. Now I come upon a more recent release, Singles, which includes Ballad of the Basement, a track so rich in movement and melody that I can imagine a Miyazaki character pacing and contemplating to the music.

MICHAEL MUCCI / I am reaching my writing limit for the day/night, so here is one of my favourite albums of the last decade from one of my favourite labels of the last two decades. Unadorned, elegiac, beautiful. Thank you Michael Mucci and Arachnidiscs.

CHRISTINE BOUGIE / Oh, but wait! I have one more feast for your ears from a celebrated Torontonian who crafts a lush and loving album entirely from a Gibson Skylark lap steel—the music crackles with life to the point that Andrew Downing made arrangements for Christine and the Queer Songbook Orchestra released separately. Linger in these pieces, my friends.

This list is far from exhaustive! But here I am writing late into the night and feeling exhausted. There are another dozen albums on my list that I simply couldn’t get to, but you don’t need my permission to love and support music. Go forth, and please do share any favourites that you come upon.