4TheRcrd Mag.

For all you experimental music fans, one of our city’s finest DIY art spaces is hosting the premiere of Andre Cormier’s Piling Sand - Piling Stone II - a new work for viola, cello and live electronics this Saturday night at Blim. The acclaimed duo Suna no onna will start soft and steady playing with a six-minute cumulative tape loop before building the acoustics at Blim into a frenzy.

I caught up with violist Robin Streb after a night of intense rehearsals to put into words how this music will unfold: “The piece begins very quietly and slowly, and gradually builds in intensity as the music becomes more complex and the tape loop creates layers of sound. Because the loop is six minutes long, by the end we will have created a densely layered six-minute recording. The audience will hear the instruments acoustically as well as through the recording.”

The piece explores microtonal tunings - what American composer Charles Ives called “notes between the cracks” on the piano. I can start to wrap my head around that one (Black Flag and Radiohead are two bands who have used this technique in their work). But how does that work with this arrangement of instruments?

“The main challenge for us in this piece,” Streb says, “is the way the composer deals with time, as well as the microtonal pitches we’re required to find and then play!” So, an electronic tape loop continuously feeding and recording itself while the pair explore tiny fractions of sound on their instruments - it’s going to sound stunning.

Vancouver’s Cormier has already premiered the first part a few years back and is preparing Piling Sand - Piling Stone III - an unexpected collaboration between a violist and a painter. Musicians + visual artists. Now that’s a good match. I recall the Winks had a live painter at one of their earlier shows at Video-In. You’d think it wouldn’t work, but it did - musical notes, brushes and paint flying everywhere. Ok, I exaggerate, but it was an inspired partnership.

This weekend’s event is part of New Music in New Places - an annual series showcasing music by living Canadian composers in unique ways. Past shows have been located underground in the Britannia Beach mines, alongside a raging river in North Vancouver and under the canopy of fruit trees at a vineyard in Langley.

This event is free and happens Saturday November 24th, 8pm at Blim (197 East 17th Avenue).

Photo courtesy petetaylor from the gravitational BR Flickr Pool.