Stir Cheat Sheet: 3 acts to catch at this weekend's PROPULSION 2024 fest

The Vancouver New Music festival features a diverse lineup of sound artists

By Gail Johnson

Markus Floats. Photo by Stacy Lee

THE VANCOUVER NEW Music Festival is back for 2024 with PROPULSION, a co-presentation with VIVO Media Arts Centre from October 17 to 19. This year’s diverse lineup explores themes of futurism. Here’s a glimpse at three of the acts to catch.

#1

Markus Floats

Markus Floats is the name of the solo experimental project of Markus Lake, a multidisciplinary artist, musician, and composer based in Montreal. Having created synthetic audio works over the past decade—while also playing bass in a vast range of punk, post-punk, experimental, and Afro-futurist outfits—Lake has been an active force in the Montreal’s DIY music community since 2008. Lake is a graduate of the electroacoustic studies program at Concordia University. With a background in jazz performance, he explores themes of attention, obscurity, visibility, and repetition in his live shows through several different digital instruments. “These electronic works are often jazz-inflected in their measured exploration of formal/tonal dissonance and through-composed with abrupt dynamic shifts in a spirit that references both musique concrète and free jazz,” according to his label, Constellation Records. He includes readings from the Black literary canon in his live performance.

Bret Parenteau, aka B.P. or Wasauksing Sniper.

#2

Wasauksing Sniper

Wasauksing Sniper, the moniker of noise artist Bret Parenteau, aka B.P., is an homage to Francis Pegahmagabow, the most highly decorated Indigenous soldier in Canadian military history, and allegedly the most effective sniper of the First World War. B.P. has been focusing on film scores lately, using his trademark layers of ambient and harsh textural sounds to echo the flow of battle and the ceaseless rumble of artillery.

DJ Zygote.

#3

DJ Zygote

DJ Zygote, aka Simon Grefiel, is deeply immersed in “budots”, an electronic music genre and dance style originating from Davao City, Philippines, and profoundly influenced by the Indigenous Sama-Bajau. Hailing from Tacloban City, Philippines, and now based in Vancouver, Grefiel explores ancient and precolonial stories and practices from throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific region in his music. His work, which also includes sculpture, found objects, drawings, and plant life, has been exhibited at Vancouver Art Gallery, Gallery Gachet, WAAP, Libby Leshgold Gallery, and beyond. Check out a more in-depth interview with the artist on page 77 of our Stir Fall Arts Guide here.

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