Send + Receive: a festival of sound

Ken Gregory is a truly singular artist and a rare person; a great friend of not just send + receive but all experimental artists. Now is the time to show our love and gratitude and support Ken as he faces increasing difficulties with his health. Donate if you can:

Donate to Artist Ken Gregory is in a health crisis & needs help, organized by Jean Routhier Hi there, I'm launching this fundraiser for Ken Gregory, a renown… Jean Routhier needs your support for Artist Ken Gregory is in a health crisis & needs help

This Wednesday, October 23rd, TakeHome QTBIPOC Arts House and send + receive partner for an intro to Electronic Music gear, setup, and production workshop! The workshop runs from 5-9pm and there are 15 spots available; RSVP here: https://sendandreceive.org/introduction-to-electronic-music-workshop/

Access to electronic music production has never been easier and cheaper, yet it’s still difficult for up and coming BIPOC musicians to forge their path to an electronic music practice. Takehome and s+r welcome you to an absolute beginners introduction to electronic music setup and production. This is a 4 hour workshop (with snacks) and in the following week participants are encouraged to book one on one time with Hassaan and/or Nancy for deeper dives, links to free software as per your needs, for advice on software and/or hardware, and more.

For the first half of this workshop, Hassaan will be demonstrating the construction of basic and complex signal chains for live performance and recording setups. She will be demoing usage and connection of hardware/software synthesizers, effect boxes of different kinds, MIDI controllers, audio interfaces, and mobile devices as music making tools.

For the second half, Nancy will be demonstrating how to navigate GarageBand for beginners, using built-in music loops and samples, and arranging beats to produce a full track.

Hassaan is a Montreal and Winnipeg based self taught experimental musician and producer who has been a music production nerd for almost twenty years and specializes in finding good, accessible and affordable ways to make music. She has played in various bands, famously Satan’s Chewtoys in winnipeg, and also takes great joy in playing metal and hardcore and equally Indian classical and electronic music of different kinds.

Nancy Nguyen is a working freelance graphic artist and traditional East Asian art enthusiast. Nancy has been practicing various forms of art such as sumi-e ink painting, Ikebana (Japanese flower arranging) and more recently, music production, while living in Vancouver where most of her musical influence came from. She started experimenting with GarageBand during quarantine in 2020 and won third place in a beat making competition in her hometown Winnipeg, MB. Her music can be described as experimental, South East Asian, and nasty.

Introduction to Electronic Music Workshop – send+receive Introduction to Electronic Music Workshop October 20, 2024 | By: Director This Wednesday, October 23rd, TakeHome QTBIPOC Arts House and send + receive partner for an intro to Electronic Music gear, setup, and production workshop! The workshop runs from 5-9pm and there are 15 spots available; RSVP he...

This Wednesday, October 23rd, TakeHome QTBIPOC Arts House and send + receive partner for an intro to Electronic Music gear, setup, and production workshop! The workshop runs from 5-9pm and there are 15 spots available; RSVP here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/introduction-to-electronic-music-workshop-at-takehome-qtbipoc-arts-house-tickets-1052442021417

Access to electronic music production has never been easier and cheaper, yet it’s still difficult for up and coming BIPOC musicians to forge their path to an electronic music practice. Takehome and s+r welcome you to an absolute beginners introduction to electronic music setup and production. This is a 4 hour workshop (with snacks) and in the following week participants are encouraged to book one on one time with Hassaan and/or Nancy for deeper dives, links to free software as per your needs, for advice on software and/or hardware, and more.

For the first half of this workshop, Hassaan will be demonstrating the construction of basic and complex signal chains for live performance and recording setups. She will be demoing usage and connection of hardware/software synthesizers, effect boxes of different kinds, MIDI controllers, audio interfaces, and mobile devices as music making tools.

For the second half, Nancy will be demonstrating how to navigate GarageBand for beginners, using built-in music loops and samples, and arranging beats to produce a full track.

Hassaan is a Montreal and Winnipeg based self taught experimental musician and producer who has been a music production nerd for almost twenty years and specializes in finding good, accessible and affordable ways to make music. She has played in various bands, famously Satan's Chewtoys in winnipeg, and also takes great joy in playing metal and hardcore and equally Indian classical and electronic music of different kinds.

Nancy Nguyen is a working freelance graphic artist and traditional East Asian art enthusiast. Nancy has been practicing various forms of art such as sumi-e ink painting, Ikebana (Japanese flower arranging) and more recently, music production, while living in Vancouver where most of her musical influence came from. She started experimenting with GarageBand during quarantine in 2020 and won third place in a beat making competition in her hometown Winnipeg, MB. Her music can be described as experimental, South East Asian, and nasty.

We’re honoured to screen “Wind Waves / Rumble Mumble” (2023), a video by Katherine Liberovskaya with sound by Phill Niblock and Francisco Janes, tonight at the Sudanese Canadian Community Centre, alongside live performances by Rafael Toral and truth in the well. Katherine Liberovskaya describes the work:

“The last project we completed together with Phill in the summer of 2023 at an informal residency in Lithuania at the country residence of artist friends Francisco Janes and Jurate Jarulyte.

A single 22-minute long-sequence shot from a fixed point of the different wave patterns the gusts of wind were making on the surface of the water of a pond, as well as the life of the fauna and flora around it, on a very windy day, accompanied by a collage of sounds captured and mixed by Phill Niblock, assisted by Francisco Janes, in the surrounding area.

The fixed point of view of the video was from the veranda of the house on a pond of Francisco and Jurate in the Lithuanian countryside where Phill and I spent entire long August days with them and their young daughter Carolina. And the soundtrack was derived from audio recorded by Phill during long drives we took along the unpaved gravelly roads through the woods and fields of the environs that Phill and Francisco processed and mixed in Francisco’s studio there.

Originally we were each working on a piece of our own. Phill on a sound piece (Rumble Mumble), me on a video piece (Wind Waves). But when we both finished our pieces we discovered that they were the same length! and when we combined them they fit together so well ! Like some of the Cage / Cunningham collaborations… So this video-audio piece was meant to be: ‘Wind Waves / Rumble Mumble.’”

Tickets are available now! Don’t miss night three of send + receive v26, co-presented by GroundSwell.

Katherine Liberovskaya is a Canadian intermedia artist based in NYC. Involved in experimental video since the 80’s, she has produced numerous single-channel video art pieces, video installations and video performances, as well as works in other media, that have been shown around the world. Since 2001 her work predominantly focuses on the intersection of moving image with sound/music in various both ephemeral and fixed forms (projections, installations, performances), notably through collaborations with many composers and sound artists in improvised live video+sound concert situations where her live visuals seek to create improvisatory “music” for the eyes. For over 22 years she collaborated with composer/intermedia artist Phill Niblock on various live, video and installation projects. Other frequent collaborators include: Dafna Naphtali, Keiko Uenishi, Shelley Hirsch, Barbara Held, Mia Zabelka, Al Margolis (IF,BWANA), David Watson, among many others. In addition to her art work she curates events in experimental video/film, sound/music and A/V performance, notably the yearly Screen Compositions evenings at EI NYC since 2005 and, since 2006 the OptoSonic Tea salons (co-curated with Ursula Scherrer) in NYC and various nomadic locations in North America and Europe as well as on-line during the Covid pandemic. In 2014 she completed a PhD in art practice entitled “Improvisatory Live Visuals: Playing Images Like a Musical Instrument” at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Canada. She is currently the artistic director of Experimental Intermedia NYC.

Phill Niblock (1933-2024) was an intermedia artist using music, film, photography, video and computers. He was born in Indiana in 1933. Since the mid-60’s he was making music and intermedia performances which have been shown at numerous venues around the world. He made thick, loud drones of music, filled with microtones of instrumental timbres generating many other tones in the performance space. He said: “What I am doing with my music is to produce something without rhythm or melody, by using many microtones that cause movements very, very slowly.” Simultaneously, he would present films / videos looking at the movement of people working. Since 1985, he was the director of the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York – www.experimentalintermedia.org – where he had been an artist/member since 1968. He was the producer of Music and Intermedia presentations at EI from 1973 to 2023 and the curator of EI’s XI Records label until 2023. Phill Niblock’s music is available on the XI, Moikai, Mode, Matiere Memoire, Room 40, and Touch labels. DVDs of films and music are available on the Extreme label and Von Archive. Until 1995 he was a professor of film, video and photography at The College of Staten Island, the City University of New York. In 2014, he was the recipient of the prestigious John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Francisco Janes is a Portuguese media artist and film-maker currently based in Lithuania whose activity includes site-specific installations, electro-acoustic composition, performance, photography, film and video. Conceptual in nature yet intricately related to (f)actual reality, his work is strongly grounded in an idea of experience, privileging perception over language. It has been investigating, among other things, notions of montage and duration akin to the preoccupations of contemporary cinema, however taking the indeterminate permutations of phenomena and the observer in time as the key element in the ontological becoming of spaces. He holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles and was a Fellow at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York. His work has shown in galleries, museums and non-institutional spaces in Europe, Asia and the United States.

Night one of v26! The fest continues at the Sudanese Canadian Community Centre tonight with Phew (Japan), Cloud Circuit, and Daniel Majer!

Ashley Au is a Winnipeg-based bassist, composer, sound designer, arranger, and q***r creative. A multifaceted musician, Ashley specializes in the upright and electric basses—performing, touring and recording extensively. As a composer and sound artist, Ashley’s work can be found behind various theatre and dance productions as well as galleries and stages internationally.

With over 10 years of experience as an curator and administrator, Ashley’s work focuses on the presentation of emerging and artists from a range of artistic practices, focusing on cross-disciplinary and cross-genre collaboration; experimentation; and artistic-risk taking while centring artist-forward professional development and strategic career development opportunities through a anti-racist, class conscious, and decolonial lens.

Ashley Au speaks at the Future Festivals Lab on Esplanade Riel this afternoon; full schedule at sendandreceive.org

Brendon Ehinger (he/him, Métis/settler) is a partner, a father, and a sound artist and musician. Since 2016, he has developed a sound-based art practice that blends modular synthesis, acoustic instrumentation, live microphone input, and field recordings to explore the relationship between the natural environment and technology, land-based composition, and his Métis/settler identity. He has performed solo and collaboratively in alternative spaces, galleries, and venues across North America and Europe.

Ehinger has been awarded several arts grants from the Manitoba Arts Council (MAC) and Canada Council for the Arts (CCA). In 2021, he was invited to contribute to the CCA-funded Sonic Dreaming project in collaboration with Tahltan artist Peter Morin and settler musician and educator Dr. Nora Wilson, investigating postcolonial sound-making and composition practices that engage the land and territory as active collaborators.

Established in 2019 by Brendon Ehinger, Prairie Wires is an ongoing experimental electronic and electroacoustic music and sound art event series and festival held on Treaty 2 Territory. Situated in the geographic centre of North America in Brandon, Manitoba—just a short drive from Winnipeg or Regina, and accessible by flights through Calgary International Airport— Prairie Wires’ vision is to become a destination where like-minded artist communities can gather, network, share knowledge, and collaborate. The series features live performances, artist talks, and public workshops, creating opportunities for prairie-based experimental musicians and sound artists to elevate their work across the national landscape (or rather, soundscape).

Brendon Ehinger brings his perspective to the Future Festivals Lab, this afternoon from 12-5pm on Esplanade Riel in the Manitoba Technology Accelerator space. (Full schedule at sendandreceive.org)

At the end, / another /battle, /another /battle, /another /
battle. /There is no /aftermath,/ no after/math, no af/termath. Only /
more, more, more. /

Yes, Sydo explores how poetry and sound can meld into an alternative form, using Homer’s epic Odyssey as its anchor. Yes, Sydo looks to reframe the oldest Western epic, challenge its legacy and ultimately target the pain of navigating today’s tragedies and ideologies. Yes, Sydo stems from over six years of sustaining a relationship through tragedy and comedy; mutual and different expressions of grief and pain. Yes, Sydo asks how pain can serve other purposes. How and what may pain, receiving and delivering, communicate when mobilised in a radically different system? Yes, Sydo prods the paradox of current times, questioning how such an aftermath can exist when the unremitting characteristics of global capitalism rage on to the tune of business as usual.

Do / not let the /olive branch fall /
from his hand. /It’s not com/plicated, /complica/ted, compli/cated. /

Speaking of business, Yes, Sydo received the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Josh Rose has been performing and releasing music for nearly 20 years, incorporating an ever expanding array of tools, tactics, and techniques to his practice, guided by an experimental approach that explores themes of error, malfunction, improvisation and indeterminacy. His work seeks to produce and explore somatic possibilities in synthetic sound textures and conceptually rooted performance. Since 2015 he has produced electronic dance music as Derivatives.

Danielle LaFrance wrote the poetry-research-theory books JUST LIKE I LIKE IT (Talonbooks, 2019), Friendly + Fire (Talonbooks, 2016), species branding (CUE, 2010), and (Talonbooks, 2022). Every book, every poem is a problematic. And now they sing it out. Other poetry and critical writing has appeared in such magazines as ASAP/Journal, The Capilano Review, LESTE, Tripwire, and Organism for Poetic Research.

Medical Museum is Hang and Lulika, long term collaborators and interdependent carers based in Leeds, UK. Both grew up on a diet of rave, jungle, metal, hip hop and breaks, rpg games and a wayward era of internet access. In this new metamorphosis, influenced by dungeon and fantasy synth, Medical Museum conjures med-synth: Alchemical sounds for anyone who has ever been made to feel like an artefact, an experiment or a casualty of the medical industrial complex.

Hang Linton is a self-taught artist and musician from South East London whose work is a rebellion against clean aesthetics. Their solo project EP Demonstrations 24 will be released on November 29th on Come Play With Me Records / EMI North.

Laura Lulika is an artist and cultural worker whose experiences as a q***r disabled neurodivergent parent informs how and what they make. This year they showed audiovisual installation works at Transmediale Berlin and Glasgow International Festival.

Medical Museum’s video performance, with an accompanying translation by Deaf performer , opens the final concert of our 26th edition, presented with the West End Cultural Centre on Sunday, October 20th.

This performance is curated by AO Roberts in conjunction with the release of Plants Properties Equipment. Plants Properties Equipment is a compilation LP with tracks by Chisato Minamimura (UK), Molly Joyce (USA), Johanna Hedva (GER), Andy Slater (USA), VOR (CAD), and Medical Museum (UK). Released as a soundtrack to Field Hospital, a video game developed by Seance Collective and AO Roberts, the album features Deaf and Disabled artists whose sonic works invoke crip pleasure, kink, illegibility, and noise.

Zoë LeBrun’s audio installation ‘The Body is a Score’ opens tonight at Poolside Gallery, on the second floor of Artspace (100 Arthur Street).

The opening reception begins at 7pm, and includes a live performance by Zoë LeBrun starting at 7:30pm. For more information, visit http://sendandreceive.org

Announcing the Future Festivals Lab, on Thursday October 17th from 12:00pm to 5:00pm at the Manitoba Technology Accelerator on Esplanade Riel (50 Provencher Blvd).

We’ll from international speakers by way of a live link to MUTEK.MX in México City, as well as festival makers and artists in Winnipeg and beyond, including Ashley Au of Cluster Festival; Brendon Ehinger of Prairie Wires; Peter Burton from Arts in the Margins; and a special performance and artist intervention by Casey Koyczan.

As the world faces unprecedented environmental, social, and cultural challenges, the Future Festivals Lab emerges as a vital platform for reimagining the role of festivals in shaping resilient and adaptable futures. Situated within two distinct bioregions—Mexico City and Winnipeg—the lab spans the vast geographic, ecological, and cultural diversity of the Americas, offering a unique opportunity to explore how festivals can evolve to meet the needs of their communities and environments.

The Future Festivals Lab will begin with a keynote that virtually bridges the vibrant cultural landscapes of MUTEK.MX and send + receive, setting the stage for a cross-regional exchange of ideas. Through the eyes of artists from Mexico and Canada, we will envision festivals of the future, deeply rooted in their respective bioregions, yet interconnected in their efforts to foster sustainability and cultural vitality.

Expert presentations will provide insights into the current state of festivals and their potential futures, while an interactive session will invite participants to craft their own visions for festivals that are not only celebrations of culture but also resilient, adaptive responses to the unique challenges of their bioregions.

The day will culminate in a panel discussion featuring festival-makers from diverse bioregions, issuing a collective call to action: to build networks of festivals that are not only culturally enriching but also ecologically and socially resilient.

Zoë LeBrun (she/they) is an emerging multidisciplinary artist practicing on Treaty 1 Territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Their process-based practice rests at the intersections of video, installation, and sound art. Through these mediums, LeBrun seeks to better understand the human condition, utilizing materials and processes which embody metaphors of lived experience and bodily function to do so. The works LeBrun creates reveal themselves over time, underscoring themes such as temporality and existentialism and making the physical processes behind them indivisible from the conceptual core of their practice.

LeBrun’s work has been exhibited at aceartinc., Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art, and The School of Art Student Gallery. Their films have been screened at the Dave Barber Cinematheque, the Muriel Richardson Auditorium, the Winnipeg Art Gallery Rooftop, and at Graffiti Art Programming, where she has also performed live in their ongoing space)doxa programming. LeBrun holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the School of Art at the University of Manitoba and her work is held in private collections in Winnipeg, Manitoba and Vienna, Austria.

Zoë LeBrun performs live at The Output (100 Arthur Street) this Friday, October 11th, at the opening reception of ‘The Body is a Score,’ a multi-channel audio installation open at Poolside Gallery from October 11th to November 22nd.

Co-presented with Video Pool Media Arts Centre.

(Artist photo by Ben Robertson.)

Los Angeles-based composer Lucy Liyou synthesizes field recordings, text-to-speech readings, poetry, and elements from Korean folk opera into sonic narratives that explore the implications of Orientalism and Westernization. Combining disparate sonic elements into critically cohesive pieces, the musical world of Lucy Liyou alternates between beautiful serenity and unsettling entropy. Arresting ballads and contemporary classical pieces fragment into decaying shards, voices get warped beyond recognition, and shimmering light makes way for bit-crushed noise. Her latest record, Dog Dreams (개꿈), is a rumination on the double-sidedness of trauma and love, on how one does not undercut the other, but rather how both are interlocked in an affective dialectic. Liyou’s work has earned acclaim from Pitchfork, The Guardian, Bandcamp Daily, The Quietus, Them, Tone Glow, Wire Magazine, Mixmag Asia, The FADER, and NPR Music, among others, and received notable airplay on NTS Radio, KEXP, NPR, and Sonos Radio’s Radio Hour with Thom Yorke. Liyou has shared the stage with artists like L’Rain, claire rousay, Salamanda, Drew McDowall (Coil), Theodore Cale Shafer, HTRK, Liz Harris (Grouper) and performed on stages such as Cafe OTO, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and Rewire Festival.

Lucy Liyou performs at our closing concert on Sunday, October 20th at the West End Cultural Centre, with Yes, Sydo and Medical Museum. Tickets are available now.

truth in the well is the ephemeral experimental project of multidisciplinary artist/musician Leigh Lugosi, featuring a rotating cast of collaborators. truth in the well runs the gamut of genre; it could be called shoegaze, country, trip hop, punk, folk or noise, depending on the time of day and what direction the wind blows. what remains constant is Lugosi’s commitment to exploring the ways in which genre’s soundtrack a cultural moment, a landscape, a social context. popular music is a funhouse of mirrors in which truth in the well stops to ponder their reflection every couple of feet. this is a practice in shapeshifting… nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed.

for send + receive v.26, truth in the well presents subliminal verse party mix 2024: a live mixtape/reimagining of popular music found in youth culture in winnipeg’s north end circa late 1990’s through early 2000’s. for this performance, Lugosi will be joined by Tim Alexander and Emily Sinclair (Virgo Rising).

Tickets are available now for the October 19th performance at the Sudanese Canadian Community Centre, with Rafael Toral and alongside work by Katherine Liberovskaya, Phill Niblock, and Francisco Janes.

Rafael Toral has been deeply involved with rock, ambient, contemporary, electronic, and free jazz music in different periods of his life. In the last 15 years he’s been thinking and practicing an understanding of silence as “space,” with a clear function in music creation but also as a metaphor for social relationships and a statement on information and sensory overload. The resulting music, “melodic without notes, rhythmic with no beat, familiar but strange, meticulous but radically free – riddled with paradox but full of clarity and space,” has been described as “a brand of electronic music far more visceral and emotive than that of his cerebral peers.”

Currently, along the sound of slow motion harmonies over what sounds like an electronic rainforest in Jupiter, Rafael Toral picks up the guitar again to develop a new synthesis between several layers of past and future. An ambitious project beyond ambient, drone and electronic free-jazz, catching Toral’s “third phase” in its early stages. Performing solo or in numerous collaborations (including Jim O’Rourke, Sei Miguel, Chris Corsano, John Edwards, Evan Parker, Tatsuya Nakatani, Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, Christian Marclay, Sonic Youth, Rhys Chatham, Lee Ranaldo, Eiko Ishibashi, and many others), he has been touring throughout Europe, Canada, USA, Mexico, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand and Australia.

Rafael Toral performs on Saturday, October 19th at the Sudanese Canadian Cultural Centre with truth in the well, as well as video work by Katherine Liberovskaya, Phill Niblock, and Francisco Janes.

Co-presented by GroundSwell.

Tonight on Esplanade Riel, percussionist and composer Tatsuya Nakatani joins us for a solo performance, followed by the Nakatani Gong Orchestra with players from Winnipeg’s eXperimental Improv Ensemble (XIE) and the University of Manitoba Percussion Ensemble.

Presented in partnership with GroundSwell.

Tatsuya Nakatani is an avant-garde percussionist, composer, and artist of sound. Active internationally since the 1990s, Nakatani has released over 80 recordings and tours extensively, performing over 150 concerts a year. His primary focus is his solo work and his large ensemble project, the Nakatani Gong Orchestra. He teaches master classes and lectures at universities and music conservatories around the world. Originally from Japan, he makes his home in the desert town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. With his activity in new music, improvisation, and experimental music, Nakatani has a long history of collaboration.

Nakatani’s distinctive music centered around his adapted bowed gong, supported by an array of drums, cymbals, and singing bowls. In consort with his personally hand-carved Kobo Bows, he has spent decades refining and developing his sound as an arrangement of formations of vibrations, incorporated in shimmering layers of silence and texture. Within this contemporary work, one can still recognize the dramatic pacing, formal elegance and space (ma) felt in traditional Japanese music.

This Sunday! Tickets available now, but this will fill up quickly: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/tatsuya-nakatani-nakatani-gong-orchestra-tickets-724280892647

On a bridge overlooking the Red River, our final concert of the year features percussionist and composer Tatsuya Nakatani in a solo performance, followed by a local iteration of his renowned Nakatani Gong Orchestra, with players from Winnipeg’s eXperimental Improv Ensemble (XIE) and the University of Manitoba Percussion Ensemble.

Presented in partnership with GroundSwell.

eXperimental Improv Ensemble (XIE):

Kelsen Hadder
Chanson Lussier
Tamir Moore-Freedman
Phenix Rock
Christopher Woytyshyn
Gordon Fitzell, director

U of M Percussion Ensemble:

Ben Reimer, Victoria Sparks, directors
Abby Woytowich
Brooke Boileau
Cassandra Campbell
Emma Wynne
Nathan Gibbens
Maggie Koreen
Marshall Fehr
Melody Pearson-Munroe
Andy Chiu

(v25 artwork by Skye Callow)