Vancouver New Music presents Vox Organi festival, October 19 to 21

Three-day lineup features unusual and unexpected music for pipe organ

SPONSORED POST BY Vancouver New Music

Sandra Boss.

gamut inc. Photo by Christophe Voy

Vancouver New Music’s 50th season kicks off with Vox Organi, the latest edition of its annual three-day festival, from October 19 to 21 at Pacific Spirit United Church. Artist chats are at 7:15 pm each night, with festival events beginning at 8 pm.

From expansive dronescapes to novel sounds coaxed through uniquely crafted digital augmentation, an exciting mix of Canadian and international artists will approach Vancouver’s largest pipe organ, each with their own voice and vision.

Festival highlights include a series of new and previously composed-but-unperformed works for solo organ by Sarah Davachi on October 21, and a fresh long-form work for organ and electronics by loscil and Lawrence English on October 20, based on their collaborative album Colours of Air. On October 22, English will also host a free workshop, The Listener’s Listening, co-presented by Vancouver New Music and Publik Secrets.

Davachi’s work is concerned with the close intricacies of timbral and temporal space. Playing pieces from her 2020 album Cantus, Descant, she utilizes extended durations and harmonic structures that emphasize variations in texture, psychoacoustic phenomena, and intonation.

Lawrence English and loscil.

Loscil is the electronic music project of Canadian composer and multimedia artist Scott Morgan. For over 20 years, Morgan has built a robust catalogue of work under the loscil moniker, loosely spanning the genres of ambient, classical, and electroacoustic music.

His collaborator, English, is a composer, artist, and curator based in Australia. Working across an eclectic array of aesthetic investigations, English’s work prompts questions of field, perception, and memory. Together, Morgan and English mix computer- and human-controlled acoustic pipe organ sounds with real-time processing. The duo revisits the spirit of their studio album which featured recordings of the pipe organ at the Old Museum in Brisbane, Australia.

Other performances on the lineup include composer Sandra Boss, and Blake Hargreaves’s Altar Ego, both on October 19; a multidisciplinary collaboration between artists Elisa Ferrari, John Brennan, and Bárbara Lázara with costume design by Shizen Jambor on October 20, along with Giulio Tosti’s Man-chine; and electro-acoustic ensemble gamut inc’s AGGREGATE #11 on October 21.

The full schedule of events and details can be found at newmusic.org.

Post sponsored by Vancouver New Music.

Sarah Davachi. Photo by Sean McCann