Today’s Sounds: Hafez Modirzadeh

by LAWRENCE JOSEPH

Not every free-improvisation recording comes with a scholarly guide to the music’s modus operandi. There are thousands of books about classical, jazz and rock, but with a few notable exceptions (Braxton’s Tri-Axium writings, Tom Nunn’s Wisdom of the Impulse and Joe Morris’s Perpetual Frontier: The Properties of Free Music), not many have attempted to explain the various implementations of free music.
Hafez Modirzadeh not only provides some technical details about his systems, but ties them in with their historical and spiritual origins — indivisible parts of the whole.

Crystal Castles: redundant but confident

by Erik Leijon

My original plan here was to provide insight into the new songs I presumed the duo would be introducing at Sunday’s show at Metropolis. Alas, besides the two singles from their upcoming third record that are already circulating online — “Wrath of God” and “Plague” — Crystal Castles delivered largely the same set as they did on their last few visits, albeit with a more elaborate set-up of seizure-inducing strobe lights and a new purple do for lead singer Alice Glass.

Q&A with Janet Biggs

by EMILY RAINE

Cult MTL talks to extreme-seeking video artist Janet Biggs about danger, extreme weather and how to make those into art.

Black power

by Johnson Cummins

Hitting bookshelves this week is What Are You Doing Here? A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal (Bazillion Points, 192 pp, $16.95) by Toronto author, cultural critic and blogger Laina Dawes. Dawes blurs lines and blows up misconceptions from a perspective of being a woman of colour entrenched in the white-male-dominated world of […]

Jonathan Bergeron Shines Faint Light

by TRACEY LINDEMAN

The post-apocalyptic world according to Jonathan Bergeron is a crumbling wasteland almost entirely void of human existence — and that’s the good news. Lueurs, his new solo show at Yves Laroche, translates directly to “a faint light” — a ray of hope, perhaps, “but not necessarily for us,” Bergeron says.

Wet the Fuck

by SASHA

This week, Sasha, our sex columnist, answers your questions about female ejaculation and genital piercings at an advanced age.

Review: Jonathan Goldstein’s New Memoir

by JEFF MILLER

In his humorous new memoir I’ll Seize the Day Tomorrow, Jonathan Goldstein suggests that adulthood is something that we stumble into blindly, the result of living one chaotic day after another.

Tuesday Night Movie: Holy Motors

by MALCOLM FRASER

Leos Carax, the French filmmaker who hasn’t made a feature since 1999’s Pola X, makes quite a return to the screen with Holy Motors. Swerving wildly between high melodrama, goofy comedy and violent surrealism, it’s a totally original film with no easy points of reference (the closest equivalent would be a slightly less anarchic Buñuel or Jodorowsky).

Quebec, Ink — Corruption at the core

by PETER WHEELAND

Whether the mayors are unindicted co-conspirators or unconscious morons does not change the fact that the political party system — essentially imposed on larger Quebec municipalities since the ‘70s — ensures that corruption continues unabated.

Tuesday, Oct. 9

by Cult MTL

* Jonathan Goldstein launches I’ll Seize the Day Tomorrow
* Catch festival circuit hit Bonsai
* Beat Market launch Red Magic at Divan Orange
* Regina Spektor plays Metropolis

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