Jason Doell LP Release + New Hermitage + meimei

Event Details

Event type: All Ages / Licensed

JASON DOELL (Bandcamp)

Drifting across aesthetic, poetic, and political dimensions, Jason’s musical practice is a type of experimentalism, where to experiment operates as reverie—dreaming through potentials and lingering on what emerges amidst a kaleidoscope of diversions, discrepancies, references, reflections, shadows, spirits, translations, & transformations. Jason engages with experimentation as a wildly inclusive and pluralized collection of practices, often with interdisciplinary collaborators - allowing for unpredictable potentials that can meander, intermingle, and circulate without being codified.
 
 
NEW HERMITAGE (Bandcamp)

Ambient chamber ensemble New Hermitage is comprised of Andrew MacKelvie on woodwinds, Ellen Gibling on harp, India Gailey on cello, and Ross Burns on guitar. Their improvisations evolve with intentionality, given shape by the environment as the environment is shaped by the music. Inspired by the ethos of listening practices from their collective teacher Jerry Granelli and sonic pioneer Pauline Oliveros, New Hermitage dismantles hierarchical systems of harmony, form, and orchestration within their music. The result is an indiscernible sound, the aggregate, constantly moving forward.  

Based in Kjipuktuk, the unceded ancestral home and territory of the Mi’kma’ki people (Halifax, Nova Scotia), New Hermitage has been an active member of the improvised music community on Canada’s East Coast since 2016. New Hermitage has shared bills with artists such as Angel Bat Dawid, chik white, Joyful Joyful, Michael C Duguay, and i d m theft able. Among their live recordings are two performances with renowned bass clarinetist Jeff Reilly, one of which won Music Nova Scotia’s “Classical Recording of the Year'' award. New Hermitage’s first studio album, Unearth, was released in 2020 to critical acclaim. 

MEIMEI (Ananya Ganesh & Amirtha Kidambi)

meimei (மெய்மெய்) is a misspelled Tamil doublet that evokes manifold meanings of consonance, truth, soul, and coming into corporeality. The duo of vocalist Amirtha Kidambi and pianist Ananya Ganesh sonically realizes this concept of embodied becoming, through unfurling emergent forms. Their initial collaboration began through mutual aid organizing around the Covid crisis in South Asia, within a community of diaspora artists in New York City. From this wellspring of political work, Ganesh and Kidambi eventually explored their musical connection through free improvisation, finding a unique common connection in their shared mother tongue of Tamil. 

Using seeds from Ganesh’s solo work and Kidambi’s unrealized duo compositions, they shared and cultivated a set of music which was first presented in Kochi and Kolkata, India. The modular and fluid permeable structures of these ecological song forms allow for organic unfolding and growth in shifting environments. Their dual voices weave melodies and textures in timbral contrast, between lyricism and abstract expression, conveying micro and macro levels of personal and systemic loss. The resulting body of work dynamically navigates freeness and sculpture, manifesting as rhythmic complexity, polyphony, and open ended exploration.

While there may not be obvious musical antecedents, the ethos of voice and piano explorations by elders Jeanne Lee and Ran Blake, experimental song forms of Erykah Badu and Annette Peacock, and the formative aesthetics and form of Carnatic music from their upbringing are points of departure. This duo is a unique collaboration for Kidambi who works regularly with musicians including Mary Halvorson, Darius Jones, Luke Stewart, William Parker and others, in addition to leading her incendiary punk free jazz outfit Elder Ones. Ganesh’s solo work, simultaneously improvised voice/piano, grew from their study with John McDonald and Warren Senders. This duo is a new singular outgrowth of that and is set apart from their improvised double piano duo Mme Sand and cello duo Zeitoon.

TONE is made possible through the support of the Toronto Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, Long & McQuade, and Burdock Brewery.

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