**These were our 2024 artists. Our 2025 artists will be announced in due course.**
REBECCA BRUTON
rebecca bruton is an experimental composer, vocalist, and guitarist based in Calgary, Alberta. Her guiding interests lie in revealing experiences of sensory and psychological alteredness, through which new realities and chronologies can be experienced beyond the realm of discursive or narrative meaning-making. She creates work across several mediums, including chamber music composition, songmaking and experimental poetry, film scores, and free improvisation. She is also an avid collaborator.
For this concert rebecca will perform a solo guitar and voice version of Toronto-based composer Martin Arnold’s chamber work Tam Lin. Tam Lin was originally written for the combined ensemble of Arraymusic with Martin Arnold on melodica and The Draperies (Ryan Driver, Eric Cheanux, and Doug Tielli) in 2003. (Photo by Alexander Slobodian, courtesy of Dancers Studio West.)
FRUITING BODY
We are a group of musicians who get together with some instruments and play and say and sing things on the spot as a way to get to know not knowing what we’re doing while being there for each other. Join us. Join in!
BILL HORIST
Seattle guitarist Bill Horist is an improviser/composer/performer in a wide array of genres including rock, jazz, contemporary chamber, avant-garde, folk, new music and several subgenres within each. He has appeared on over 80 recordings and has performed well over 1000 concerts throughout North and Central America, Europe, and Japan. Over the past two decades, Bill has collaborated with a long list of notable musicians from around the world including John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Wayne Horvitz, Stuart Dempster, KK Null, Matt Chamberlain, Chris Cutler, Damo Suzuki(Can), Vidushi Sumitra Guha, Kawabata Makoto (Acid Mothers Temple), Julie Slick, William Hooker, Secret Chiefs 3, Eugene Chadbourne, Tatsuya Yoshida (Ruins), Shazaad Ismaily, Six Organs of Admittance, Joe Morris, Climax Golden Twins, Haco, Illusion of Safety, Jamie Saft, Amy Denio, Uchihashi Kazuhisa, Steve Fisk, Marron, Reggie Watts, Anla Courtis (Reynols), Eyvind Kang, Paul Rucker, Wally Shoup, and Jessica Lurie as well as members of King Crimson, Pearl Jam, Earth, The Boredoms, Sunn0))).
He has toured and recorded with a number of bands including Master Musicians of Bukkake, Kinski, Nobodaddy, Phineas Gage, Axolotl, UnFolkUs, Zahir, Tablet, Nervewheel, Ghidra, Rollerball and the Paul Rucker Ensemble in addition to extensive solo activity.
Horist has played in just about every type of venue from caves to arenas and his unusual approach to music has found him in equally unusual scenarios – from composing using transatlantic freighters as instruments to appearing on “America’s Got Talent.” Essays on these and other such projects can be found on his website. He also creates music for film, modern dance and video games.
Bill has received critical praise from dozens of both local and international periodicals including The Wire, Guitar Player Magazine and Alternative Press. He has also been the recipient of several local and regional grants for his work. In 2012, Bill was quoted and mentioned in a “short list of…individuals who have made notable contributions” to prepared guitar in the book “Nice Noise: Modifications and Preparations for Guitar” by Bart Hopkin and Yuri Landman. In 2005 and 2006, he was nominated for “Jazz Artist of the Year” and “Guitarist of the Year” respectively by the Seattle Weekly. Bill lives in Ballard and teaches both conventional and unconventional guitar to all ages and levels of experience both privately and in schools from elementary- to college-level.
In addition to extensive solo activity, Bill currently makes periodic appearances with psych/soul seekers Afrocop, and has recently recorded with prog rock juggernaut TROOT, Echotest, Kyoto-based guitarist Marron, George Soler (Breathe, Blow, Burn) and The Wally Shoup Electric Quartet and others released in 2018. He also teaches guitar/music at the Seattle World School and conducts an annual blind youth audio workshop in addition to teaching private guitar lessons.
RACHEL KIYO IWAASA
RACHEL KIYO IWAASA is among Canada’s foremost contemporary music pianists, hailed as a “keyboard virtuoso and avant-garde muse” (Georgia Straight) whose “emotional intensity” transforms music “from notes on a page to a stunning work of art” (Victoria Times Colonist).
Rachel’s reputation for fearless performative risk has drawn many of Canada’s most notable composers to write for her, including Hildegard Westerkamp, Rodney Sharman, Jocelyn Morlock, Nicole Lizée, Farshid Samandari, Emily Doolittle, Jeffrey Ryan, Leslie Uyeda and Jordan Nobles. The Canadian League of Composers recently commissioned Cris Derksen to compose a piece for her, which was chosen as the Official Canadian Selection for ISCM World New Music Days 2023 in Johannesburg. Rachel has performed with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Mark Takeshi McGregor, Judith Forst, the Bozzini Quartet, Heather Pawsey, Gabriel Kahane, Caroline Shaw, and Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire. Rachel’s interdisciplinary adventures include work with visual artists SD Holman, Nettie Wild, Tania Willard, and Camille Georgeson-Usher; playwright/director David Bloom; choreographers Idan Cohen, Jennifer Mascall and Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg; and multi-media provocateur Paul Wong.
Rachel’s debut CD, Cosmophony, has been praised as “brilliant” and “unforgettable” (Vancouver Sun) and for “the passion, intensity and the nuanced playing she’s acclaimed for… she manages to instill a sense of dynamic tension and pull to every note” (The Province). Upcoming albums on earsay music and Redshift Records include monograph recordings of composers Hildegard Westerkamp, Rodney Sharman, and Leslie Uyeda.
Rachel has performed in the Netherlands, Germany, US and across Canada, with engagements including ISCM World New Music Days, Muziekweek Gaudeamus, Music TORONTO, Music on Main, Vancouver New Music, Redshift, Western Front, Vancouver Symphony, Victoria Symphony, Aventa Ensemble (Victoria), CONTACT contemporary music (Toronto), New Works Calgary, Groundswell New Music (Winnipeg), and Vancouver Pro Musica.
Rachel’s musical pedigree traces back to Beethoven via three separate lineages, through Jane Coop, Menahem Pressler, and Robin Wood. She holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of British Columbia, a Master of Music from Indiana University Bloomington, and a Bachelor of Music from the University of Victoria, where she earned the Victoria Medal as the top graduating student in Fine Arts. She was also a two-time recipient of the prestigious Annual Grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) for graduate studies at the Hochschule für Musik “Hanns Eisler” Berlin.
Rachel is a co-founder of the Queer Arts Festival in Vancouver, recognized among the top 2 festivals of its kind worldwide. A second-generation Japanese-Danish settler, Rachel lives on the sovereign territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations. (Photo by SD Holman.)
“The outrageously talented Vancouver pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa … deftly spans an array of atmospheres with impressive mastery and stylistic clarity.”
⎯ Musicworks Magazine
“Pianist Iwaasa quite simply pulls no punches, attacking each composer’s work with passion, intensity and the nuanced playing she’s acclaimed for… she manages to instill a sense of dynamic tension and pull to every note.”
⎯ The Province
MAGAZINIST
Magazinist is an experimental sound art duo whose compositions make use of found sources, visual and sonic collage, and materially-driven processes. Their installations, including Reverse Search (2020) and Hotel Fata Morgana (2019), attempt to make intangible landscapes of media hearable, seeable, and feelable. Combining analog synthesis, digital sampling, and hand-built instrumentation, Magazinist conducts extended sonic studies in the form of immersive installations and multimedia performances. As independent artists, Matthew Tomkinson and Andy Zuliani have presented their work locally and internationally at CBC, VIFF, PuSh, VIDF, New Works, Active/Passive, Dance in Vancouver, Tanzmesse, Vines Art Festival, Active Passive, Dancing on the Edge, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Deep Blue, Lobe Studio, and more. Magazinist operates on the ancestral and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
RODNEY SHARMAN
When composer Rodney Sharman was 21, he swore to himself that he’d never do anything other than music to make a living. He would devote his life to being a creative participant in a world he deeply loves.
For over 40 years, he’s kept that promise.
He began composing at age 10 while growing up in Biggar, a small town in central Saskatchewan surrounded by farmland.
“It was an urge,” he says, “and I followed it.”
As a kid he joined impromptu ensembles – accordion, sax, piano and organ – at family gatherings playing songs of the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. He was a boy soprano in the Anglican Church choir and discovered classical music on CBC TV and CBC Radio.
He taught himself to play recorder, flute and oboe, and took clarinet lessons, encouraged by his parents who were great fans of Acker Bilk.
He was then, and remains now, a self-confessed sound freak.
Rodney experimented with an old cassette machine, recording sound clusters by laying books on the keyboard and strumming the strings inside a piano, then improvising over top. He made a first attempt at writing for orchestra around age 13, but lacking proper score paper he drew his own and copied it at school.
At 15, the Sharmans moved to Victoria and Rodney began taking lessons in composition with Murray Adaskin. He heard his first live orchestral concerts and started to study the flute seriously. He joined the conservatory orchestra and blossomed.
Since then he’s become an internationally celebrated composer with a CV of prizes, awards, commissions and performances that goes on for pages.
He’s accepted applause on the stages of the San Francisco Opera house and the Concertgebouw Big Hall in Amsterdam. His music has been commissioned by orchestras and ensembles around the world and heard on every major radio service. He’s won the Kranichsteiner Prize in Germany, the CBC Young Composers Competition and the Walter Carsen Prize, among many others. He’s been resident composer for the Vancouver Symphony, the Victoria Symphony and the National Youth Orchestra of Canada.
He’s closely collaborated with choreographer James Kudelka and film director Atom Egoyan and has a PhD from the State University of New York. He’s an all-around musical mensch who loves mentoring young composers and supporting the work of his contemporaries.
Rodney’s instrumental music often blurs distinctions between harmony and timbre. He loves to explore historical western music (operas by Wagner and Mozart, works by Schumann and Scarlatti) as a point of departure using layering, fragmentation, distillation and distortion to transform musical artifacts into something new. He writes operas and cabaret songs, framing the words to enhance and illuminate both text and subtext.
Rodney remains totally engaged with the sense of possibility that creating music offers – that transcendental experience when the ego disappears and there’s nothing but the music to let him know what to do. (Photo by SD Holman.)
TENDER LOVE
Tender Love is Naomi Aris Horii – voice, bass guitar, synthesizers and Mark Wickstead – guitar, synthesizers, AM radio. They formed in 2018 to create weird noises for the Spatial Poetics installation as part of the Powell Street Festival . All songs are pop songs… art, noise, repetition, minimalism. Damaged.
DARREN WILLIAMS
Saxophonist and composer Darren Williams pushes the limits of improvisation and extended instrumental technique into regions that are “melodic, dark, dramatic, with a sweep and a grace that is almost classical while firmly grounded in post-Coltrane traditions” (David Keenan, Volcanic Tongue, The Wire).
Darren has toured across Canada, having performed with many internationally celebrated musicians including Juno award winning guitarist Gordon Grdina (Canada), Chris Corsano (USA), Mats Gustafsson (Sweden), and Han Bennink (Netherlands.) For over two decades Williams has enjoyed a semi-regular collaboration with guitarist/banjoist Eugene Chadbourne (USA), being featured on Chadbourne’s 2011 album Stop Snoring. Williams is involved in numerous ensembles and projects, notably as one third of the Branchroot Ensemble which released their debut album Far From the Tree in 2023, as well as co-leading the free jazz quintet Robots On Fire which performed at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival. In 2013 Williams released his critically acclaimed solo album Reed, and a second solo album entitled Musical Idiot on The Infidels Jazz label in early 2024. Both albums are collections of original works by Williams for unaccompanied tenor saxophone; intersecting composition, improvisation, extended instrumental technique, and physical endurance.
Darren holds a BFA in music performance from York University and has studied with Casey Sokol, David Mott, Craig Thomson, George Lewis, and François Houle.