Chapel Sound and Notebook showcase experimental electronic music from around the world
Participating artists bring together everything from martial arts and opera to club music and Arabic melodies
Veron Xio. Photo by Katrin Braga
Animalistic Beliefs
As part of Notebook Season 2025, Notebook in partnership with the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre present Animistic Beliefs and Gulod Tanawin at the Roundhouse on November 22 at 8 pm; at the Annex on November 26 at 7:30 pm, Notebook in partnership with IndieFest present Future Mythologies with 8ULENTINA & Embaci joined by MIIIA and Melt
ON PAPER, UNDERGROUND club music from the Netherlands might not seem to have that much in common with traditional Arabic instrumentation and Southeast Asian martial arts. To Veron Xio, however, it all hangs together, and in some ways it’s the differences that make it work.
Xio, a Vancouver-based music producer, is the founder of Notebook Platform, an electronic-music and artist-development initiative. In collaboration with other likeminded creatives (including Nancy Lee of Chapel Sound Art Foundation and Mada Phiri of Made By We), Xio curates Notebook Season, which they describe as “a miniature festival of artist talks, workshops, and experimental music performances”.
While the prospect of “experimental music” might seem daunting to some potential audience members, Notebook Season’s mission is not to alienate anyone.
“I think we see experimental as a very loose term in the sense of just, how do we stretch things that we know in ways that we’ve haven’t seen before?” Xio tells Stir in a video call. “So, we might be looking at electronic music, or a certain genre like club music, for instance. Where can we change it and make it different, do something that’s not expected?”
For its second year, Notebook Season brings together boundary-pushing artists from all over the world. On November 22, for example, the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre plays host to Animistic Beliefs, the Rotterdam-based duo of Linh Luu and Marvin Lalihatu. When the pair started out, they forged a sound rooted in techno, electro, gabber, and punk, but over time they came to incorporate tones and rhythms drawn from their individual Asian heritages—Moluccan in Lalihatu’s case and Vietnamese-Chinese in Luu’s.
On the same bill will be Gulod Tanawin, a local Filipinx act that blurs the lines between a dub sound system and a performance-art collective while also welding together dance and traditional martial arts.
“I usually look for artists who combine multidisciplinary practices while stretching the concept of what electronic music could be,” Xio says. “So it ranges. I guess our theme for Notebook is we’re unbound by genre. So I love to see things that are genre-fluid, for instance; you know, it just takes on different things and kind of creates something new within it.”
That fluidity will also be on display at the Annex on November 26, as an event titled Future Mythologies showcases works in development from New York’s 8ULENTINA, whose music juxtaposes haunting Middle Eastern melodies with breakbeats, and Brooklyn-based Embaci, who brings classical training and an operatic contralto voice to her unconventional soundscapes.
Opener MIIIA—a veteran of the Shanghai techno scene—will present a performance called Ashes of Time (named after the Wong Kar-wai film of the same title), with visuals by Vancouver DJ and VJ Melt.
Notebook Platform does more than just put on shows; it also runs what Xio calls an “incubator” for emerging artists. Part of that involves teaching participants how to use the digital audio workstation Ableton Live to produce electronic music. Xio is an experienced producer and artist in their own right, with a number of releases under the name x/o. Their 2022 album Chaos Butterfly won acclaim for its artful merging of such disparate elements as trip-hop, nu-metal, dubstep, and video-game soundtracks.
“Since 2019 I’ve been mentoring, one-on-one, artists—various women, queer artists, nonbinary artists—through the Creative BC Demo Recording program,” Xio says. “And last year was the first time I ever taught, like, eight people.”
Just as the COVID-19 pandemic provided some of us with the luxury to delve into hitherto-unexplored interests—baking the perfect sourdough loaf comes to mind—Xio posits that all that enforced downtime gave many others the opportunity to develop an even stronger affinity for music.
“I feel like a lot of people spent a lot of time during COVID just on their computers, listening to so many different types of things,” Xio says. “So now everyone is more actively participating in music, and a lot of times that is as a DJ. A lot of these artists have never made music yet, and so I’m also trying to push them towards producing their own music. Vancouver not only has so many DJs, but all those DJs can become music producers as well.”
And, who knows, maybe some of those newly minted producers will be headliners at future editions of Notebook Season. In the meantime, Xio is looking forward to seeing some of them present their music live for the first time.
“We’ve had so many incredible artists partake in our program, and I’m excited to see that this year’s cohort will be performing what they’ve made on December 14 at the Roundhouse,” Xio says. “It’s definitely a very exciting time.” 
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