Thursday, February 20, 2014

Weavings and Mendings / Ann Southam

















Slightly warmer today... time for new music! A friend introduced me to Ann Southam recently. So good! Southam was a Canadian experimental music maker who penned a lot of works for modern dance in the Toronto area in the 70s and afterwards. "In the very workings of music," she said, "there's a reflection of the work women traditionally do, like weaving and mending and washing dishes -- the kind of work you have to do over again." You can hear it happen in these slowly unraveling threads of sound -- something for fans of Laurie Spiegel and Maggi Payne and other minimal new age fire. I also like that she composed a piece about Ontario's "good witch of plum hollow" and improvised background bloops and bleeps for Sean O'Huigin's experimental poetry. Beautiful weavings and mendings, check it out.

6 comments:

  1. thanks a lot b. her records are longtime wantlist staples but quite hard to find

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  2. Thank you for this. I'm not at all familiar, but I look forward to listening and discovering more- chuck

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  3. thanks for checking this out, folks. this is really just a sampler. most of these pieces are at least 20 minutes long so I just cherry-picked the passages I liked. there is a whole other side to southam's work involving more machine-like cacaphonic sounds. so one could make a totally different ann southam mix. but these mellower PINA abstractions were what caught my ear.

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