Exquisite Departures

The Music Gallery presents
Exquisite Departures
part of the Departures Series
curated by Tad Michalak

Webcast/premiere: November 20, 2020, 7PM
www.musicgallery.org/live
Bandcamp Release: December 4, 2020
www.musicgallery.bandcamp.com 

At a time when live concerts have come to a halt The Departures Series, which typically presents off site concerts featuring touring acts, has re-imagined it’s approach to musical collaboration. In an aim to spur the kind of creative interactions improvisers & video artists often manifest in the live realm in a safe and engaging way, The Departures Series has embarked on a new adaptation of an age old game, Exquisite Corpse.

Pioneered and popularized by French surrealists in the 20’s & 30’s, the game typically involves either illustration or text. One artist starts an image and passes it along to a second, who only seeing a small portion of the previous collaborator’s contribution continues the illustration, then passes it on to a third artist, so on and so forth.

For Exquisite Departures we’ve invited 15 Toronto based improvisers and 6 video artists to play an audio / visual version of this game over 15 recorded tracks. Each musician was only able to listen to 10-15 seconds of the previous recording before adding their contribution to this collective improvisation. Similarly visual artists were only able to view a small snippet of video before jumping into the process. With a small taste in which to catch the essence, vibe and feel of any particular track musicians and artists relied on their improvisational intuition, a muscle often flexed in the live arena, to contribute to these evolving compositions. These free flowing surrealist music videos capture a playfully collaborative snapshot of Toronto’s creative music & video scene in a time of physical distance.

This project will be webcast on November 20 at 7PM at www.musicgallery.org/live

The audio will be released on our Live At The Music Gallery platform on the final Bandcamp Friday of 2020, December 4, 2020 www.musicgallery.bandcamp.com 

Exquisite Departures features contributions by:

Germaine Liu – percussion
Allison Cameron – electronics / toys / ukulele
Colin Fisher – electric guitar
Araz Salek – tar
Adam Hanrahan – electric bass / oscillator
Mira Martin-Gray – no input mixer
Amahl Arulanandam – cello
Yunjin Claire Lee – piano / synthesizer / electronics
Cheldon Paterson aka Slowpitchsound – turntables / electronics
Andrew Zukerman – electronics
Heather Saumer – trombone / voice / objects / piano
Alia O’Brien – flute
Mike Smith – six string electric bass
Karen Ng – saxophone / clarinet
Mani Mazinani – synthesizer / harmonica

Jesi Jordan – video
Kadrah Mensah – video
Peter Rahul – video
Julie Reich – video
Vanese Smith – video
Jamie Whitecrow – video

Paul Hodge – Recording Engineer, Mixing & Mastering