Featuring a cast of transgender women speaking, singing, and performing vocal exercises accompanied by a score using conventional and “non-musical” approaches to sound-making, Contralto exists in between the spaces of experimental music and documentary. When a transgender man begins taking testosterone, his vocal cords thicken and his voice drops into the so-called masculine range. However, trans women’s voices are unaffected by increased levels of estrogen in the body. Being a woman with a “male voice” creates prolonged and intensified dysphoria — a situation where their identities are betrayed by their bodies — and brings with it the higher risk of harassment and violence experienced by trans women. Contralto — defined in musical terms as “the lowest female singing voice” — uses the sound of trans women’s voices to explore transfeminine identity from the inside and explores the intimate, peculiar and powerful relationship between gender and sound.

Presented in partnership with Groundswell and the Winnipeg Film Group.

Laminar pt.1is the collaborative effort of Pat Klassen (audio) and Alyssa Bornn (visual). The resulting work is a conversation in process that favours materiality in both sound and image.

Fragments of field recordings, found audio, tape loops, and slowed down instruments are taken to combine many different fidelities, planes of sound. The visual component mirrors this act of compounding. Source input from layers of transparencies is taken from flatbed scans, animated through the desktop, and then transferred from the monitor to 16mm hand processed film.

The piece favours no one input, denying the listener/viewer any easy place of rest.

Lilac Place is a new work by Marie-France Hollier (audio) and Kristiane Church (visual). Their synopsis:

Slipperiness at the periphery. Colder now, mix with both hands:
a voice, two fans, eight bells, a stick.

Fire shadow dizzy waiting
Light passes through one hand, behind the thumb into the palm.
The roof of the car clears into an oval cut-out, a face
Gravel eyes making out a road in the night.

Julia Reidy is an exciting young musician from Sydney, Australia, who is currently based in Berlin. She is a performer, composer, arranger and producer. She is also a guitarist. A ceaseless explorer with a keen ear and an insatiable hunger for investigating her instrument, her music is anything but expected. Reidy’s approach to playing is alive, in the moment, organic and surprising. There is an engrossing immediacy to her work that takes the listener on a journey that is often transcendent and always deeply human. Tonight she will present a piece for acoustic 12-string that aims to navigate unstable harmonic and rhythmic territory.

The evening will conclude with a resonance that you won’t soon shake…

We are very fortunate for an opportunity to witness another side of enigmatic artist Keiji Haino. Turning the volume waaayyyyy up, Haino-san will take us into territory that may at first seem familiar — electric guitar, voice and electronics — but this, my friends, is not like anything you’ve seen before. This music is from an otherworldly realm. It is enthralling and unparalleled. Keiji Haino is a truly eccentric, uncompromising artist who has been making his own kind of music for nearly five decades, and it is an honour to have him here in Winnipeg as our guest.

Feature image and colour photo by Peter Gannushkin