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Six Turntables

Workshop and Performance
Presented by The Music Gallery
Part of X Avant Festival - October 3-11 2023

Tickets for the performance event can be purchased here.
Please see the call for workshop participants (closing September 17).

Six Turntables is the culmination of a series of experimental music and sound-art workshops organized by Christopher Willes, and in collaboration with Akash Bansal, and hosted at the Toronto Public Library and The Music Gallery between 2017-2023. In each session, a group of young artists are brought together to listen to, reflect on and remix recordings of 1970s “Canadian” avant-garde music found in vinyl record collections of the Toronto Reference Library’s, Music Gallery Editions, and the Canadian Music Centre. Through a facilitated process that blends somatic practice, and group sound-making and listening exercises, reflection and dialog, the workshops invite participants to explore practices of collective listening that treat records not as commodity objects but as shared experiences.

Using flexi-discs as their raw materials–– cheap plastic records on which excerpts from the collection have been pressed––participants develops ways of physically transforming fragments of the collection into new sonic compositions together. In the concluding event, the group stages a performance/installation following a listening score that shares aspects of their process, using six turntables to collectively build a new sonic composition together in real-time.

For more information on this project see this document.

Credits

Project by Christopher Willes, created in collaboration with Akash Bansal (dramaturge). Workshop co-facilitated by Akash Bansal and Christopher Willes. Photo by Kendra Epik.

Music Gallery workshop participants/performers: Aliyah Aziz, Jada Fleming, Julianna Angheloni, Ky Gray, Nikki Gilani and Will Carriere. Toronto Public Library workshop participants 2017-2023: Gian Caracciolo, Gianluca Occhipinti, James Wells, Jason Li, Lucas McCarten, Maria Patricia Abuel, Taggart Quinn, Ximuna Diego, and Nanthini Namasti.

Very special thank yous to Beau Levitt, Bill Vrantsidis, Radha Shilash, Liz Hysen, Claudia Tamayo-Segura, and Raymond Bai of the Toronto Public Library, Sanjeet Takhar and Matthew Fava of the Music Gallery, and Erika Hennebury for helping us to develop this project.

Developed with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Toronto Arts Council - Artists in the Library Program (2017-23). Produced by Christopher Willes, in partnership with Public Recordings.