Event Category: music

Ellise Barbara means to create a “black space” free from physical or mental racialization. While Barbara’s earlier work ranged across synth, pop, R&B and funk, her new band project, fittingly called Elle’s Black Space Mission: An Afrodiasporic Odyssey, features solely musicians of Sub-Saharan African descent. *Elle’s Black Space Mission: An Afrodiasporic Odyssey*_ hearkens back to Afrofuturism, a movement pioneered by Sun Ra in the 1950s that wove together Black culture with futuristic or sci-fi themes.

Barbara’s music is rooted in her experience as a queer, transgender person of colour. She has toured, recorded and made music for the past eight years, with several releases notably Sexe Machin / Sex Machine (Fixture Records).

Dynasty, created by Hua Li (a.k.a. Peggy Hogan), is a live multimedia experience accompanying her debut studio album of the same name. Supported by video projections by Tyler Reekie, Dynasty tells of Hua Li’s journey as a first-generation Chinese-Canadian and deals with topics like deceitful love, family power dynamics, and serious booty-shaking.

Hogan took on the nom de guerre Hua Li in response to pressures to conform to traditional gender roles as a woman in jazz, allowing her to express her femininity, sexuality and politics. Well-known for her feminist hip-hop, Hua Li, has released The Bound Feat, a 2013 mixtape, and the 2015 EP Za Zhong.

Elysia Crampton’s unrestrained electronic music is the flashpoint of a myriad influences opening upon the complexity and multifacetedness of Aymara becoming. Underscored by radical and queer politics, Crampton’s experimental work gives sonorous form to contemporary expressions of Aymara resistance and survival: a project of “becoming-with,” in the shades given this term by Donna Haraway via prison abolitionist Che Gossett.

Her album Demon City, composed in honour of the revolutionary Bartolina Sisa, was deemed a “masterwork” by Rolling Stone and was one of Pitchfork’s 20 best experimental albums of 2016. Her latest release, Spots y Escupitajo, leads the listener into “a dizzying, hyper-conceptual collection of miniatures.”

Voyage from Rio de la Plata to The Altiplano… is an invitation to discover contemporary music from Argentina and Bolivia, offering a repertoire rooted in the history of these two South American countries, which have been shaped by dictatorships and rich indigenous traditions. This musical journey is performed by three instrumentalists – the Wapiti ensemble (Geneviève Liboiron on violin, and Daniel Áñez Garcia on piano) and Émilie Girard‐Charest (cello) – with Andrés Salas’s video installations lighting up the ambulatory experience.

Wapiti’s work has been presented, notably, at the Centro Nacional de las Artes in Mexico and, in Montréal, at the Société de Musique Contemporaine du Québec’s Montreal/New Musics Festival.

Sous le nom de scène de Hazy Montagne Mystique, Chittakone Baccam livre des performances surprenantes et plonge l’auditeur dans des ambiances lunaires, méditatives et bruitistes. Avec Tu ne te retourneras pas, l’artiste sonore explore ses racines laotiennes et la pratique expérimentale qu’il a développée au Québec. À la faveur de distorsions, transformations et échantillonnages, la performance audiovisuelle puise dans les archives familiales : cassettes enregistrées par ses grands-parents et compilations de musique molam traditionnelle. Tu ne te retourneras pas,évoque les souvenirs du pays laissé derrière soi, dont les images finissent inévitablement par se brouiller au fil du temps.

Cofondateur de l’étiquette Jeunesse cosmique Baccam est très actif sur la scène musicale expérimentale avec plus d’une centaine de productions.

Kiran Gandhi, who performs as Madame Gandhi, is an electronic musician and activist based in Los Angeles. Having gained recognition as the former drummer for M.I.A., Thievery Corporation and Kehlani as well as the viral free-bleeding runner at the 2015 London Marathon, Madame Gandhi now produces music that elevates and celebrates the female voice.

Madame Gandhi’s song “The Future is Female” climbed to #8 on the Viral US Top 50 Spotify Charts following the 2017 Women’s March and her EP, Voices, has received critical acclaim from outlets like FADER, Paper Mag, and Milk. She is currently working on her debut album.

In Algonquin, Wàsakozi (pronounced “wah-suh-koh-sheh”) means “lustre,” a reflection of light. Mich Cota’s Wàsakozi takes the shape of an opera and follows the life of Odjìshìngwe – an ungendered being born of light and darkness – from birth to death, and through rebirth. The piece invites dialogue, complicates issues of identity, and foregrounds Indigenous self-determination as well as the importance of queer and trans visibility.

Mich Cota is a Two-Spirit Algonquin-mixed woman working across community lines and disciplines. Her work is focused on celebrating queerness, trans visibility, and the spectrum of Indigeneity. Cota recently won an award for most significant musical work in an alternative format at the Indigenous Voices Awards 2018.