Photo of FITNESSS in performance
VNM Festival 2024: PROPULSION
October 17-19, 2024 | 8pm
Artist Talks 7:15pm on Oct 18+19
VIVO Media Arts Centre (2625 Kaslo St, Vancouver, BC)
Co-presented with VIVO Media Arts Centre
Tickets $25 General | $20 Student/Senior | $65 Festival Pass (plus tax + fees)
Limited tickets available at the door by donation (first come, first served)
Tickets on sale now at newmusic.org/vnm-festival/2024
The annual VNM Festival returns this year with PROPULSION (Oct 17-19), a co-presentation with VIVO Media Arts Centre. Vancouver New Music has invited three local guest curators to each program an evening that centres emerging artists with visionary sonic and musical expressions. Exploring themes of futurism, the artists move forward towards developing and advancing their art forms and the contexts they work in: How do we build our future and propel ourselves as an artistic community and a general society to build something new?
Featuring local and visiting artists doing a wide range of exciting work: Hot Snack, Jane Harms + Donna Allen (Montreal), Markus Floats (Montreal), baptized.in.prison, El Ángel Exterminador, Wasauksing Sniper (Winnipeg), FITNESSS (LA), DJ Zygote with dancers Josh Ongcol, Rae and ADAM. Curators are Kendra Place, Anju Singh and Reylinn.
Artist talks on Oct 18 and 19 at 7:15pm. Performances start at 8pm each night.
Schedule and details can be found on our website at newmusic.org
THU 17 OCT
Curated by KENDRA PLACE
Kendra Place is an artist, writer, and curator. She has worked with various art centres and collectives, most recently Gallery Gachet and VIVO Media Arts Centre on the stolen and sacred lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaɬ people. She is interested in accidental art, oneiric architectures, psychic knots, and thinking about pharmakon.
HOT SNACK (Vancouver)
Hot Snack is a modular synthesizer/vocal duo created by Sol Chiniquay and Ryan Clough-Carroll. Drawing from the repetitive phasing of Steve Reich and Suicide, Hot Snack embraces technical obstruction and lyrical prostration as a means of piloted improvisation.
JANE HARMS and DONNA ALLEN (Montreal)
Jane Harms' interest in propulsive songwriting is interpreted via her obsessive orchestral guitar-synthesizer and sample-sequenced arrangements. Donna Allen's four-finger guitar and melodic proficiency are expanded by her training in post-Cagean art music and experimentation. Together they arrive somewhere between alter-futurist chamber folk and celestial Big Music, actualizing their mutual interest in Olivia Records, the Canterbury sound and music as a marker on a road to utopia.
MARKUS FLOATS (Montreal)
Markus Lake is a Montréal/Tiotia’ke based musician and composer. Lake’s albums, live shows and soundtrack work explore themes of attention, obscurity, visibility and repetition through the use of a constantly expanding palette of digital instruments and samples. He released his Juno-nominated fourth LP, Fourth Album, on Constellation Records in October 2023. Markus will be joined on stage by James Goddard.
FRI 18 OCT
Curated by ANJU SINGH
Anju Singh is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, noise/sound artist and video/media artist who has curated and directed the Vancouver Noise Festival for 9 editions, curated Fake Jazz Wednesdays, and has participated in a co-curating committee for the MAC Media Arts Committee Sound Art program since 2011.
baptized.in.prison (Vancouver)
Within her project baptized.in.prison, Toni-Leah C. Yake (European; Kanien’kehá:ka, Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, Turtle Clan) engages with Haudenosaunee creation mythology through sound as an element of ceremony. By exploring sound's liminal and portalistic qualities she participates in world-building and sonic ritual.
EL ÁNGEL EXTERMINADOR (Vancouver)
The primary artist behind this project, Max Ammo, is a non-binary latinx multidisciplinary artist from Mexico City who currently lives and works on the unceded and traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. They work primarily on illustration, animation and graphic design but in recent years have taken on producing music and DJing under the aliases “Goo” and “El Ángel Exterminador”.
WASAUKSING SNIPER (Winnipeg)
Wasauksing Sniper is a moniker of noise artist B.P., and an homage to Francis Pegahmagabow, the most highly decorated Indigenous soldier in Canadian military history and the most effective sniper of the First World War. Under the initials B.P., Bret Parenteau has been making his formula of noise, field recording, and tape manipulation, exploring the distorted line between harsh noise and ambience.
SAT 19 OCT
Curated by REYLINN
Reylinn is a Vancouver based audio/visual artist, DJ, and radio host. They’re a founding member of Acceleration Radio, an open format FM radio, live stream and events collective with a focus on audio/visual experimentation. Attracted to the contrasting aesthetics of the natural and synthetic, their live performances recontextualize audio and video recordings captured in daily life for spaces of catharsis.
DJ ZYGOTE (Vancouver)
Simon Grefiel (aka DJ Zygote) is an artist whose work engages with ancient and pre-colonial histories and practices from Southeast Asia and around the Pacific. Grefiel is currently exploring "Budots," an electronic music genre and dance style originating from Davao City, Philippines and heavily influenced by the indigenous Sama-Bajau. He DJs as a way to explore electronic music in Southeast Asia and the Global South. His performance will include GOGO dancers Josh Ongcol, Rae and ADAM.
FITNESSS (LA) emerges as a composite of wires and veins coursing with the distilled rage and sorrow of a decimated Los Angeles prosthetic electronics trigger angelic pulsations flowing through nervous pathways to communicate the primordial choreography of our Holy Ancestors
Vancouver New Music engages communities in the exploration, creation, and experience of progressive and outstanding new music. VNM regularly commissions and premieres new works by Canadian composers, presents leading and emerging electroacoustic and electronic music artists, international composers and performers, sound installations and music theatre. VNM presents an annual festival that focuses each year on a theme within the new music landscape, and explores the interaction of contemporary music with other disciplines such as theatre, installation and media arts. Other activities include lectures and workshops with visiting artists, ensemble workshops and presentations open to the community, and other sound art and new music related community events. newmusic.org
VIVO Media Arts Centre is a steward of critical history and an agent for emergent experimental media arts practices. Our programs foster formal and critical approaches to media arts, and reflect the diversity of contemporary technologies and communities that coalesce around new forms of knowledge and creativity. VIVO builds an engaged audience through workshops, production support, distribution, artist residencies, performances and exhibitions as well as curatorial and archival research. We’re also the caretakers of a significant and substantial repository of media art history. vivomediaarts.com