Presented as a part of Labyrinth Ontario’s Western and World Symposium, I’ll be playing a 40-minute site-specific drone piece with spacialized audio and a live performance aspect. This one goes out to Catherine Christer-Hennix and Lamonte Young.

The rest of the festival includes talks and performances by great musicians and theorists investigating eurocentrism and decolonial practice in music / music education. Check out more info here.

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Western and World is a symposium that challenges the hegemony of Western musical practices through close attention to non-Western traditions. Through a combination of embodied and conceptual practices, our inaugural symposium will feature presentations on hip-hop cosmology; deep listening of Buddhism’s relation to contemporary drone music; performances of traditional music forms from Finland and Korea; participatory workshops on singing and playing makam music; and much more.

⭐️Headlining performances include an improvised free jazz/poetry set by Fred Moten and Brandon Lopez; Ross Daly’s This Tale of Ours Ensemble; and Kelly Thoma’s music group.⭐️

The symposium asks a number of critical questions:
•How are socio-cultural value systems expressed in musical forms?
•In what ways does music play an integral role in processes of decolonization, social justice, and revolutionary change?
•How might we diversify the musical landscape with other musical materials?
•How can we distribute resources to ensure more equitable funding structures and dismantle the primacy of Western classical music?
•What imaginative realities are possible through attunement to non-Western traditions?