September 19th 2025, 8PM
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Doors 7:30PM
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St. Stephen's Anglican Church
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1121 14th Ave SW
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September 19th 2025, 8PM • Doors 7:30PM • St. Stephen's Anglican Church • 1121 14th Ave SW •
Strophe
Rocket
Freesound plays
the Music of Martin Arnold
+ Chris Dadge Solo Drums
$30 general • $20 accessible
Strophe Rocket
Freesound plays the Music of Martin Arnold
+ Chris Dadge Solo Drums
September 19th 2025
8PM | Doors 7:30PM
St. Stephen's Anglican Church
1121 14th Ave SW
$30 general
$20 accessible
Toronto-based collective Freesound is one of a number of young groups of musicians representing the future of Canadian contemporary and experimental art music through innovative and compelling programming. Freesound operates as a non-hierarchical collective composed of nine members: Matthew Antal, Amahl Arulanandam, Michael Murphy, Émilie Fortin, Paolo Griffin, Aysel Taghi-Zada, Matti Pulkki, Wesley Shen, Tristan Durie.
For this special performance for New Works Calgary, Freesound will perform Strophe Rocket (2025), a new very long work by Alberta-born, Peterborough-based iconoclast composer, teacher, and psychedelic ultra-lounge guitarist Martin Arnold.
Strophe Rocket will be performed by:
Émilie Fortin: trumpet (live and on the gated recording)
Wesley Shen: melodica (harpsichord on the gated recording)
Aysel Taghi-Zada: violin (pizzicato violin on the gated recording)
Martin Arnold: melodica (gating a recording)
Opening the evening we’ll experience a rare solo drumkit performance by Calgary drummer and Bug Incision founder Chris Dadge.
MARTIN
ARNOLD
Martin Arnold is a musician and teacher based in Peterborough, ON. As a composer of notated music, his pieces have been performed nationally and internationally by many acclaimed artists including the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Quatuor Bozzini, pianist Eve Egoyan, violinist Mira Benjamin, and cellist Anton Lukoszevieze. As a performer, he is a member of a number of marginal free improvisation, experimental pop, psychedelic ultralounge, and weird folk communities, playing (very idiosyncratically) melodica, electric guitar, tenor banjo and garage electronics. With Eric Chenaux, he co-founded the influential rat-drifting records. Martin is an Associate Professor in the Cultural Studies Department of Trent University.
Arnold’s pieces are characterized by a sense of dislocation and discontinuity, effects which are created using atonal melodies and novel combinations of instruments and timbres. It is generally slow-paced and characterised by a drifting, directionless quality, which he terms "slack". Within Canadian experimental music and beyond, it has been said of Martin Arnold that ‘A lot of the people whose work probably matters the most to you are Martin’s students as well as his friends’ (Kurt Newman for Sound American, 2020).
Like Mark Ellestad, whose piece ‘In the Mirror of This Night’ we presented in Spring 2025, Martin Arnold and his compositions are closely connected to a group of aesthetically distinct Canadian experimental composers who studied under Czech composer Rudolf Komorous at the University of Victoria, during a particularly rich period of creative exchange between the mid-1970s and 80s. These include not only Ellestad and Arnold, but also Jon Abram, Linda Catlin Smith, Allison Cameron, Stephen Parkinson, Christopher Butterfield, Owen Underhill, and others. While each of these composers creates distinct work, there is an ‘aesthetic of the wonderful’, a reverence for meaningful experimental pathways and willingness to break conventional form that threads them together.
FREESOUND COLLECTIVE
Toronto-based collective Freesound is one of a number of young groups of musicians representing the future of Canadian contemporary and experimental art music through innovative and compelling programming. Freesound operates as a non-hierarchical collective composed of nine members – eight performers and one administrative lead.
Freesound is: Matthew Antal, Amahl Arulanandam, Michael Murphy, Émilie Fortin, Paolo Griffin, Aysel Taghi-Zada, Matti Pulkki, Wesley Shen, Tristan Durie.
The collective’s diverse cultural composition fosters a wide variety of musical interpretations, enabling Freesound to explore a wide array of contemporary and experimental chamber music. Freesound’s members are among Canada’s top musicians specializing in contemporary and experimental music, each bringing unique perspectives, collaborative approaches, and artistic strengths to the collective. Each member of Freesound actively participates in programming decisions, commissioning new works, and producing concerts.
Founded in its current format in 2021 through an agreement by its nine members, Freesound’s concerts combine commissions, performances of existing works, and revivals of landmark works from the 21st and late 20th centuries. Since 2021, commissions have included Laure M. Hiendl (DE), Martin Arnold (CA), Maria Eduarda Martins (CA/BZ), Alex Jang (CA), Haotian Yu (CA/CN), Christina Volpini (CA), Andrew Hulse (CA/US), Christopher Fox (UK), Wesley Shen (CA), and a growing list of composers from Canada and around the world.
Freesound has performed at festivals such as Suoni Il Popolo Festival (Montreal) and Women from Space (Toronto) and since 2023, has been ensemble-in-residence at the Arraymusic in Toronto.
Freesound has appeared on albums of music by Georgia Denham (2024, Sawyer Editions) and Andrew Hulse (2024, Self-published).
Freesound, its commissions, and performances are generously funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Toronto Arts Council, the SOCAN Foundation, Lorna & Roger Smith, and the contributions of its various private donors.
Émilie
Fortin
Émilie Fortin's artistic practice revolves around three axes: the creation of new repertoire through close collaboration between performer and composer, the exploration of new sounds through improvisation, and teaching.
Constantly seeking to enrich the trumpet repertoire, she has participated in the creation of over forty works. Her future and present collaborations explore physicality connection with training in body mime, dance and theater. In 2018, she created the soloist collective Bakarlari and serves as its artistic director. Dedicated to solo contemporary and creative music by offering concert experiences outside the traditional framework, Bakarlari is supported by Le Vivier Group.
She is a member of the Toronto-based ensemble Freesound, a collective of artist-creators dedicated to commissioning and presenting contemporary music in all its forms.
As an improviser, Émilie is known for her rigorous approach to noise music. Her collaborations include recordings and performances with, among others, Éric Normand, the Ratchet Orchestra and GGRIL. Émilie has participated in the soundSCAPE Festival (Italy), Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance and Practice (Boston), Oh My Ears Festival (Arizona), Re:Sound (Cleveland) and Northwestern New Music Conference (Chicago). She has worked with members of the International Contemporary Ensemble (Banff Centre for the Arts), Ensemble Musikfabrik (Bauwerke Brass Academy), Ensemble Modern (Klangspuren Schwaz) and Vinko Globokar (Laboratorium), and has studied with Marco Blaauw and Peter Evans. In Montreal, she has performed with Productions SuperMusique (PSM) and the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (NEM).
As an ardent defender of the representativeness of brass instruments and the democratization of contemporary music, Émilie advocates for these issues as a presenter for organizations and conferences such as IRCAM Forum 2021, UQAM (Gender Differences and Inequalities in Music in Quebec), the Vivier Interuniversitaire and at the Canadian League of Composers. She is also a founding member of the Burning Brass Band, an ensemble that aims to increase the place of women, trans, non-binary and queer people in the Montreal brass band scene.
Originally from Abitibi-Témiscamingue, she studied at the Conservatoire de musique de Val-d'Or in the class of Frédéric Demers; she then studied classical performance with Lise Bouchard at the Université de Montréal. In 2017, she completed her Master of Music at McGill University under the tutelage of Russell DeVuyst.
Émilie has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Montreal Arts Council.
Aysel
Taghi-Zada
Aysel Taghi-Zada is a passionate violinist 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, Chris Paul Harman, Kevin Lau, Mark Fewer, Pierre Leroux, David Geringas and Pascale Beaudin. She is frequently invited to perform with contemporary ensembles such as Tapestry Opera, New Music Concerts, Thin Edge New Music Collective and Soundstreams Canada, and she recently participated in Continuum Contemporary Music’s Hatch Summer Performance program as an emerging artist. She is a founding member of Freesound as well as the Vaso String Quartet, which performs around North America and participated in the 2019 Scotia Festival of Music in Halifax. As a recording artist, she can be heard on Jason Doell’s 2018 album … Amid the Cannon’s Roar, and Catherine Daniel’s Sacred Christmas.
She is a graduate of the Artist Diploma Program at the Glenn Gould School where she studied with Barry Shiffman. While studying at McGill University with Jonathan Crow, she co-founded Ensemble Paramirabo, a group that specializes in showcasing music written by Canadian composers, and she performed on their first album Autoportrait. She is currently a violin instructor with the Columbus Cultural Centre, where her studio includes students of all ages.
Wesley
Shen
Wesley Shen is a Toronto-based keyboardist, specializing in contemporary music on piano and harpsichord. He completed a Master's Degree at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam in contemporary harpsichord with Goska Isphording.
He has played regularly with many Toronto ensembles including the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Esprit Orchestra, Soundstreams, New Music Concerts, and Continuum Contemporary Music. He also recently became a core member of the Freesound Performance Collective, and is a member of Ugly Pug, an Amsterdam-based trio playing new music on early instruments. He has received generous funding from the Canada Council of the Arts in order to commission a number of new works for harpsichord and piano. An ongoing goal of his is to help continue to develop and expand the contemporary harpsichord repertoire.
CHRIS
DADGE
Chris Dadge lives in Calgary, Alberta, where he works as a producer/engineer, percussionist, composer, multi-instrumentalist, record label operator, and concert organizer.
As a musician & performer, the bulk of Dadge’s output occurs in two main fields. In the realm of free improvisation, Dadge has spent the bulk of his years playing percussion, developing a voice based on an increasingly open-ended variety of sound-generating objects, integrating found items, extreme tunings, and re-purposed strings. Massimo Ricci writes, “the almost perfect balance between skin, wood and metal-derived timbres is definitely cherished,” and David Keenan (The Wire magazine) noted, “Dadge has a fleet, needling style that would transpose Milford Grave’s multi-pulse work to a looser, more thought-paced setting, working in bursts of propulsion and single emphatic sound events.” This underlying quest for a personalized vocabulary led to the broadening of the instrumental palette, adding violin, broken electronics, crude sampling, and various other small instruments to the list, which The Wire's Byron Coley called "a splendid, low-bore Improv racket in the classic pots-and-pans style."
He maintains an active duo with saxophonist Jonathon Wilcke (the two also released Rural Optimism, a trio recording with guitarist Joe Morris), and has additionally, in mostly ad hoc, one-off settings, worked with Peter Evans, Jason Kahn, Tim Olive, Eugene Chadbourne, Jack Wright, Chris Riggs, Eric Chenaux, Mats Gustafsson, Christian Munthe, Ellwood Epps, Bill Horist, John Oswald, and Colin Fisher. In 2005, he founded Bug Incision, one of Calgary's longest-running experimental music-focused DIY organization.
Dadge also maintains a busy life in the world of pop music. He plays in Sub Pop recording artist Chad VanGaalen’s backing band, The Bleach Wipes, and appears on all of the studio albums by Toronto-based indie pop darlings Alvvays, including their last two albums Antisocialites and Blue Rev, which took home Juno Awards in 2018 and 2023 for Alternative Album of the Year. Dadge also plays drums for and co-produces records with Samantha Savage Smith and for more than a decade he led Lab Coast, a critically acclaimed bedroom pop combo.
As a producer and engineer, he runs Child Stone Studios out of his basement in Mount Pleasant, and has worked on releases by Hermitess, Eye of Newt, Victrix, Stucco, Starpainter, Ryan Bourne, Jom Comyn, and Oranje, to name but a few.