“Sound work as soul work.” This is how Gary Diggins describes what he does in his chamber of wonders located in the back of Guelph’s ‘venue for adventurous sounds’, Silence. A life-long musician and masterful musical healer, Diggins has worked with individuals and groups around the world using sound to elevate consciousness, promote healing, remind us of our in uterine beginnings, and “listen the world into wholeness.” Hear us discussing his role in Mindfulness Without Borders, his Monday morning improvisations with Big Beat, the use of vocables in shamanic therapeutic practices, helping trained singers meet their edge, Alfred Tomatis, Robert Bly, Mind-Up, and more. This episode that aired originally on CFRU 93.3FM on March 29th, 2016.

Can you make a libretto out of an academic book? This is the question George E. Lewis asked and answered during his visit to the University of Guelph on March 4th, 2016. Drawing from the audio recordings of early AACM organizational meetings where members discussed their motivations for forming the Association, Lewis responds in the affirmative, transforming a chapter of his 2009 book A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music into the Opera Afterword. Hear Herald Kisiedu in conversation with Lewis on this episode! Originally aired on CFRU 93.3FM on March 15, 2016.

Sound It Out airs biweekly on Tuesdays at 5pm on CFRU 93.3FM.

Can you make a libretto out of an academic book? This is the question George E. Lewis asked and answered during his visit to the University of Guelph on March 4th, 2016. Drawing from the audio recordings of early AACM organizational meetings where members discussed their motivations for forming the Association, Lewis responds in the affirmative, transforming a … Continue reading Episode #36: AACM Origins and Apocrypha – George E. Lewis’s Opera ‘Afterword’ →

If improvising is sometimes understood as a form of dialogue, what are we to say about solo improvising? Perhaps it should be understood as a dialogue with oneself, or between performer and audience, or performer and their own instrument, or even the performer’s own sonic memories, of trucks, birds, voices. Maybe it has another sort of meaning all together, a sensory-motor, embodied sort of meaning. Maybe it has no meaning at all, in which case we might wonder how it got so lucky, so pure, so empty in this world of over-signification. This past weekend I attended the Somewhere There creative music festival in Toronto at the Tranzac. On this episode you will hear a roundtable discussion moderated by Joe Sorbara featuring the thoughts and sounds of: Peter Luteck, Germaine Liu, Paul Newman, Kyle Brenders, Ken Aldcroft, and Nicole Rampersaud. This episode originally aired on CFRU 93.3FM on March 8th, 2016.

Sound It Out is hosted by Rachel Elliott who is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Sound It Out is produced in conjunction with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. The show explores whether and how improvised music can serve as a basis for discursive inclusivity, the creation of new forms of shared meaning, and more democratic means of connecting with each other.

Sound It Out airs on CFRU every other Tuesday at 5pm!

The weather affects us. This is never more obvious than in the middle of winter! But what would happen if we began to respond to atmospheric influences artistically, rather than just practically? If instead of cinching up our scarves we responded to the falling snow with a little improvised saxophone? And then paired that musical response with dance or video? Does the weather pattern live on, preserved in these artistic mediums, transforming itself with each performance, affecting us with its motion? These are the topics that I discuss with saxophonist, choreographer, and Montreal-based weather artist Adam Kinner. Adam brings us into a way of seeing the aliveness of our environment as a sort of performance, an affective choreography. Prepare for enchantment! This episode of Sound It Out originally aired on CFRU 93.3FM in Guelph, Ontario, Canada on Tuesday, February 2, 2016.

Sound It Out is hosted by Rachel Elliott who is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Sound It Out is produced in conjunction with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. The show explores whether and how improvised music can serve as a basis for discursive inclusivity, the creation of new forms of shared meaning, and more democratic means of connecting with each other.

Sound It Out airs on Guelph’s campus and community radio station, CFRU 93.3FM, on alternating Tuesdays at 5pm.

Here we consider how local music scenarios influence and are influenced by the styles and genres or other times and places using the ‘idea-picture’ of the rhisome from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980). Scott Henderson of Brock University talks with me about his research into the musicscape of Saint-Étienne France, discussing the influence of geographic contour (the seven hills), community radio (Radio Dio), economic transition, and international networks on the creation of a local music scene. Hear Raymonde Howard (Lætitia Fournier), Angil (MickaëlMottet), and the Hidden Tracks, as we think through the way that musical recipes, or deliberate artistic constraints (Cf. Oulipo Saliva), can foster just the kind of formative interactions that some of us might naïvely reserve for ‘purely improvised’ musical formats. Originally aired on CFRU 93.3FM in February 2015.

Sound It Out is hosted by Rachel Elliott who is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Sound It Out is produced in conjunction with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. The show explores whether and how improvised music can serve as a basis for discursive inclusivity, the creation of new forms of shared meaning, and more democratic means of connecting with each other.

Sound It Out airs on Guelph’s campus and community radio station, CFRU 93.3FM, on alternating Tuesdays at 5pm.

This show is about interspecies communication in the context of musical performance. According to today’s guest, Kimber Sider, horses are a sort of barometer for musical connection, since music is not just about sound but is a conduit to a silent embodied layer of meaning that is the basis for empathetic communication, affective connection, and emotional resonance. When Kimber Sider rode her horse Katrina across Canada, from Nova Scotia to British Columbia, on her own, she had a lot of time to pick up on the subtle bodily communication happening between her and her horse in the various landscapes, rural cultures, and navigational SNAFUs that her extremely brave endeavor endangered. Check out the documentary Chasing Canada that she made about her ride. Now doing research at the University of Guelph, Kimber has set up the most extraordinary sort of ‘laboratory’: she invites improvising musicians to jam with her horses! Check out improvisers David Lee, Dong-Won Kim, and Jesse Stewart. We did the interview over Skype in the very final days of 2015 when I was hiding away in the woods for the holidays, so the internet was cutting in and out. This meant that some of Kimber’s words were glitchy and hard to understand. I decided to just over-dub the distorted words with my own voice: the result is thus a technological/sonic reflection of the collaborative nature of intellectual exchange, and the influence a producer can exert over the presentation of another’s speech! This episode originally aired on Tuesday, January 5th, at 5pm on CFRU 93.3FM.

Sound It Out is hosted by Rachel Elliott who is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Sound It Out is produced in conjunction with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. The show explores whether and how improvised music can serve as a basis for discursive inclusivity, the creation of new forms of shared meaning, and more democratic means of connecting with each other.

Sound It Out airs on Guelph’s campus and community radio station, CFRU 93.3FM, on alternating Tuesdays at 5pm.

The Social Aesthetics Conference that took place at McGill University in 2010, put on by ICASP, the predecessor for the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, was a consideration of how social, cultural, economic and political forces condition the aesthetic practices and values of improvised performance. This is an archived discussion between researchers Georgina Born, Elizabeth Jackson, Eric Lewis, Ingrid Monson, and Jason Stanyek about how collaborative social practices at the same time they are artistic practices, and vice versa. This episode originally aired in December 2015 on CFRU 93.3FM.

Sound It Out is hosted by Rachel Elliott who is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Sound It Out is produced in conjunction with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. The show explores whether and how improvised music can serve as a basis for discursive inclusivity, the creation of new forms of shared meaning, and more democratic means of connecting with each other.

Sound It Out airs on Guelph’s campus and community radio station, CFRU 93.3FM, on alternating Tuesdays at 5pm.

This episode reflects on the exuberance of the Decentralized Dance Party from the point of view of a forest’s quiet clearing. I walk and talk with DDP creator Gary Lachance about the past, present, and future of this unique form of participatory public art. Championing the values of decentralization and inclusivity, the DDP facilitates opportunities for people to meet in public places and interact on a deeper level than mere verbal exchange permits; the DDP highlights a strata of connection often ignored by society: a bodily layer of communication that is accentuated in dancing and gestural expression. Commitment to decentralization, however, can exact personal costs for the organizers of these public celebrations. So here Gary Lachance joins me in tilting an ear toward the mother of all decentralization, the forest floor. This episode originally aired on CFRU 93.3FM on November 24, 2015.

Sound It Out is hosted by Rachel Elliott who is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Sound It Out is produced in conjunction with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. The show explores whether and how improvised music can serve as a basis for discursive inclusivity, the creation of new forms of shared meaning, and more democratic means of connecting with each other.

Sound It Out airs on Guelph’s campus and community radio station, CFRU 93.3FM, on alternating Tuesdays at 5pm.

In this archival conversation from 2007 between Amiri Baraka and William Parker, you will hear about the importance of Curtis Mayfield to Black pride and identity, how commercialism leads to divisions in the Jazz world, the way that mixed genre music can best reflect different aspects of one people, like Duke Ellington making a chronology of Black life in one piece of music. This episode originally aired on CFRU 93.3FM on November 5, 2015.

Sound It Out is hosted by Rachel Elliott who is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Sound It Out is produced in conjunction with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. The show explores whether and how improvised music can serve as a basis for discursive inclusivity, the creation of new forms of shared meaning, and more democratic means of connecting with each other.

Sound It Out airs on Guelph’s campus and community radio station, CFRU 93.3FM, on alternating Tuesdays at 5pm.