Flashback

Stephanie Orlando (she/her) is a composer based in Toronto with an eclectic creative practice that ventures into concert music, sound installations, and performance art. Her catalogue contains works for standard ensembles to less common performing forces—orchestra, scrap metal, and everything in between. She has recieved commissioned by ensembles across the country including Symphony Nova Scotia (2024) and Esprit Orchestra (2023)  and had her music recorded on albums by Yang Chen (longing for…, 2022) and Daniel Ramjattan (Inspirations, 2022). Her installation Sonic Bikes was presented as part of Toronto’s Nuit Blanche 2023, Intersection Festival at Sankofa Square in 2025.

Naoko Tsujita, M.Mus., is a percussionist and carillonist whose diverse career spans performances internationally. She won the University of Toronto Symphony Orchestra Concerto Competition and was a finalist in the South Japan Music Competition. She formed Duo Rosewood with Daniel Ramjattan (guitar and marimba) in 2018 and premiered over a dozen compositions written for them. Her broad experience as a percussionist includes orchestras, Labyrinth Ontario, Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan, and recording projects with JUNO Award-winning artists. Naoko has built an active career as a carillonneur and composer, serving as an inaugural carillonist at Yorkminster Park Baptist Church in Toronto.

Colin Cudmore is a Toronto-based percussionist and improviser. Operating on the edge of precarity with the objects and spaces around him, he represents one half of the experimental music label/concert organizer Ministry of Phonic Services, and the electroacoustic duo Wilderness Adventure Ride, both alongside Owen Kurtz.

Yang is a percussionist/drummer who enjoys collaboration and hanging out. Recent highlights include the release of Madness Belongs to the People, an ambient album support of a full-length poetry book by Jody Chan. Find Yang playing with various groups across Toronto including their chamber pop band Tiger Balme and Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan while studying to become a paramedic.

Bilal Nasser is a Palestinian-Canadian guitarist, composer, activist, and harm reduction worker from Windsor On. Raised in a family of primarily Palestinian refugees, he has been a participant in the Palestinian solidarity movement since childhood. His political and musical upbringings developed in tandem through his discovery of punk rock around the time of the 2008 Gaza wars and the later Arab spring uprisings. To Nasser, there is no separation between art and politics, while at the same time he maintains that art itself is not resistance itself devoid of collective political action.

Bilal was trained as a classical guitarist from a young age, and went on to win awards in composition and performance. While his technique is informed by his classical guitar background, Nasser’s music occurs as a frenetic juxtaposition of musical influences mainly rooted in a DIY ethos, namely in post-rock, shoegaze, hardcore, and drone. Nasser is deliberate through his immersion in underground musical cultures existing outside the boundaries established by the classical music world. Through his work, Nasser actively rejects the sterility and rigidity of institutional convention, bridging seemingly antithetical genres to cultivate new capacities for candid innovation- consequently realizing a distinct musical voice, coloured by his liminal exploration of both canonical and underground realms. 

His use of electronics, effects pedals, home-made skateboard drone machines, tape loops and singing and screaming into his amplified guitar firmly situate his practice outside of the tradition of solo-guitar performance. He is the first known classical guitarist to have a mosh-pit at a concert. His performances often take place in unconventional settings like skateparks, dive bars, book stores, and warehouses. This is as much a class-conscious as an aesthetic choice, situating his practice in community while prioritizing access over formality.

In 2021 Nasser set a new precedent for classical composition with the release of his first full-length solo album Where the Orange Groves Grow, consisting of works for solo classical guitar, voice, and electronics. Orange Groves traverses a broad aesthetic range from sprawling, long-form solo guitar pieces depicting tales from the Palestinian diaspora of loss and memory, to frenzies of looped noise and violence. 

In 2023 Bilal recorded his sophomore record, How Can We Say Nothing. Written and recorded before the ongoing genocide of Gaza and south Lebanon by the zionsist entity in 2023, it was not meant to be an overtly political project. The title, How Can We Say Nothing, was a personal rather than a political statement, which was accompanied by a photo of his late grandparents in Mecca as the cover. Upon it’s release in 2024, the album took a new meaning as an urgent outcry for mobilization- asking audiences to interrogate their own inaction in a time of forever wars and genocide. 

Nasser toured extensively across Canada in support of How Can We Say Nothing, playing alongside acts including OBMIGIIZI, Atsuko Chiba, Horse Jumper of Love, Efrim Menuck, and One Leg One Eye, and at festivals including River and Sky, and Intersection. His work has been featured in Musicworks, Dominionated, CBC, NPR, and on Bell Fibe.

Nasser’s practice interrogates the inherent contradictions within the diaspora experience. He grapples with what he views as the inescapable hypocrisy of making political art from the imperial core, while those on the front lines of what Mohammed Abdou describes as the “end-times wars” engage in direct resistance. Whether “resistance art” is futile in a time of genocide is still a tension that remains ever-present in Nasser’s work. At the same time, he recognizes the utility of art as a communal, spiritual, and organizational tool towards ends of liberation as embodied by Ghassan Kanafani, Marcel Khalife, and Mohammed El Kurd.

Nate Blackton is a musician and producer from Windsor Ontario. He releases music with his group Meandergreen, which he records, mixes and masters himself. He has worked with several artists in Windsor on mixing and recording projects.

I have been dragging horsehair across strings on small wooden boxes for over 30 years. Since I bought my first delay pedal at age 15, dull moments have been in short supply.

My artistic practice traverses a peculiar vista of heavy metal (Völur), folk styles (The Boxcar Boys), and classical music. Although I struggled to complete my jazz degree, these dark years emboldened my advocacy for free-range jazz and my vision of a world where instruments can graze freely beyond the confines of western harmony.

I have rendered services for: Astronaut Chris Hadfield, Jason Momoa, Gowan, Sook-Yin Lee, iskwē, and The Strumbellas and I once met Kendrick Lamar in line at a hot dog stand. I will happily play your garden party or compose a score for your horror film. www.lauracbates.com

Aysel Taghi-Zada is a passionate violinist/violist devoted to the performance of classical and contemporary music. She has collaborated with some of the most distinguished composers and musicians from North America and Europe such as Philip Glass, Brian Current, Salvatore Sciarrino, Kevin Lau, Pierre Leroux, David Geringas, Gidon Kremer and Pascale Beaudin. She is frequently invited to perform with contemporary ensembles such as Tapestry Opera, New Music Concerts, Freesound Ensemble, Thin Edge New Music Collective, Soundstreams Canada, and Continuum Contemporary Music. As a recording artist, she can be heard on albums by Jason Doell, Catherine Daniel, Sophie Dupuis and Thin Edge new Music Collective’s latest album featuring composer Linda Catlin Smith.

A native of Toronto, violist Clara Nguyen-Tran is a versatile performer of a wide range of genres that include classical, contemporary, baroque, tango and pop.

As an orchestral musician, she regularly performs with orchestras including the Canadian Opera Company, Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, National Ballet of Canada and Esprit Orchestra.

Clara completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto under the tutelage of Eric Nowlin and Teng Li. She also holds an Artist Diploma from the Glenn Gould School, where she studied with Steven Dann.

With interests from baroque to metal, Juno-nominated cellist Amahl Arulanandam is known for his musical versatility and ability to adapt to many genres. At home in studios, clubs, and halls, Amahl hopes to convey that musical expression is beyond labels.  Amahl has wholly embraced the bizarre sounds the cello has to offer and takes special pleasure in playing on areas of the instrument other than the strings.

JUNO-nominated artist, Tara Kannangara is a second-generation, Sri Lankan-Canadian force of nature, giving you music that isdeeply personal, genre-bending and culture blending. All this, encompassed by wild trumpet melodies, searing guitar lines, lush synths, and piercing lyricism will make you turn your head and listen.

Originally from Chilliwack, BC, Tara eventually ended up at the University of Toronto studying music. After years of studying institutionalized art, Tara was compelled to break the veneer built around her experience of music-making. She began to write about being a dreamer, an outsider, and a woman longing to be Seen.

Tara’s music has been featured in the Toronto Star, Canadian Beats, CBC Radio One, CFMU “I Heart Hamilton,” CKUA, Dominionated, Erin Radio, Exclaim, FYI Music News/Billboard, Julian Taylor’s Jukebox, Northern Wish with Stephen Stanley, SlowCity, The PR Press, and more.

She also performed on Lido’s Grammy nominated record, Miss Colombia. She has had the privilege to work with extraordinary homegrown artists such as Jeremy Dutcher, Charlotte Cornfield, and Witch Prophet. Her own work has been presented at major festivals across North America.

Mark Zurawinski is a percussionist, improviser and sound designer with an eclectic palette, and fondness for left field music which takes him to interesting and diverse sonic places – from contemplative chamber music to free-jazz freakouts, minimalist groove to digital noise.  Mark is inspired by the tangibility of sound and has a keen interest in exploring the fluidity of texture and time, and the space where composition and improvisation meet.   He is a regular collaborator,  sometimes band-leader, and can be found performing with Agnes, Scallions, Kindhorse, the Imaginary Percussion Ensemble, and many others in Toronto and Guelph.