Praise for DESCRIBE YOURSELF:
2024 Juno Award for Best Classical Composition: Nicole Lizée’s Don’t Throw Your Head in Your Hands
The Best Contemporary Classical on Bandcamp: June 2023
“…an album that is beaming with adventure, potency, depth and ingenuity.” - Ivana Popovic, The Whole Note
“From period performance to premiering new works, and incorporating technologic practices – Whitley does it all, and it’s evident from the magnitude of this record.” - Yaz Lancaster, Which Sinfonia
“…a fascinating album.” - John Gilks, Opera Ramblings
Canadian violinist and composer Christopher Whitley has already produced several albums featuring his own spellbinding music on beloved imprints such as Patient Sounds and Fluid Audio. However Describe Yourself, for Vancouver's Redshift Records, marks his frst recorded foray as an interpreter. These varied sessions feature him performing on a violin built by fabled luthier Antonio Stradivari's from 1700, and although Whitley also performs music from that same era, his choice of music here is a far cry from standard repertoire.
Instead, the album is something both highly personal and contemporary. The artists involved are all very much living, and also happen to be Canadian, however what's intriguing about his curatorial approach here is how it refects the eclectic, unorthodox, and inquisitive spirit found in his other body of work.
Some of Describe Yourself's cast includes composers who are well-established within the concert music world. Over the past two decades the “breathtakingly inventive” (Sydney Times Herald) Nicole Lizée has been developing an unmistakeable approach that stems from her fascination with outmoded, well-worn technology. She has honed her disorienting soundworld through support from commissioners that include the Kronos Quartet, Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic, the BBC Proms, Eve Egoyan, and Bang On Can. In its unique exploration of technology, her music embraces the sounds that its subject matter produce on purpose as well as their sonic byproducts, both of which she carefully notates and integrates into live performance. She also frequently addresses the cultural dimension of these technologies as well, especially through savvily re-contextualized references to other music. The wondrous results of her technique can be heard here on "Don't Throw Your Head In Your Hands," a 2020 piece where she employs old karaoke tapes manipulated with a Tascam 4-track cassette recorder and an array of unorthodox tactics. “Don’t Throw Your Head in Your Hands” was awarded the 2024 Juno Award for Best Classical Composition.
Vancouver-based Jeffrey Ryan's widely acclaimed body of work has won him several awards, global broadcasts, and given rise to collaborations with celebrated ensembles such as the Cleveland Orchestra, Toronto Symphony, Montreal Symphony, Penderecki Quartet, the Gryphon Trio, Nordic Voices, and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra where he was their Composer-in-Residence from 2002 to 2007 and Composer Laureate from 2008 to 2009. His work "Bellatrix", opens the disc on a bold note and blends cunning virtuosic writing and vocalization on the part of the violinist. Whitley's engaging sleevenotes describe his journey with the piece, particularly his trepidation around its use of voice—something you'd never detect in his extrovert performance of it.
The album's hushed fnal cut comes from Fjóla Evans, a Canadian/Icelandic cellist and composer also residing in the United States. As she amusingly states in her bio: "autocorrect describes her work as a texturing fog" and this strangely evocative phrase is more than applicable to "In Bruniquel Cave", a delicate multitracked work that layers Whitley's whispered violin playing over itself. Winner of the 2017 Robert Fleming Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts, Evans has had her work presented and performed by cellist Maya Fridman, Gaudeamus Music Week, Toronto's Music Gallery, Bearthoven, India Gailey, Le poisson rouge and other notable artists and organizations.
Meanwhile, some of the other contributors to Describe Yourself, have achieved renown in other musical and artistic domains. Leslie Ting's unique practice combines her specialized backgrounds as a classical violinist and former practicing optometrist within a theatrical framework. Her defnitive work, Speculation, fetched multiple award nominations, including the Pauline McGibbon Award for Emerging Theatre Director (2021). Ting's audacious contribution here, the album's titular work, also implicates musical and ocular concerns. This duo piece, made to be played via the Zoom platform, pairs violin material that is that is specifcally designed to interact with Zoom's audio processing algorithm with a spoken element derived from the practice of self-audio description, whereby a person verbally describes their appearance for the beneft of blind or visually-impaired individuals.
Over the past several years Montréal's Kara-Lis Coverdale has garnered considerable recognition for her music which often straddles the line between acoustic instrumentation and electronic abstraction. Said work is occasionally motivated by her various research interests—her Masters thesis explored how "reality" is constructed through sound design and recording technology and her music often examines such concerns. Coverdale's 2017 recording Grafts (Boomkat Editions) was named an album of the year by outlets such as Noisey, Crack, Resident Advisor, and Tiny Mix Tapes. None other than the Guardian has described her as "a composer on the prowl, always questioning herself and others." She is also a frequent collaborator of beloved electronic musician Tim Hecker. "Patterns in High Places," as this album's liner notes reveal, was created specifcally for Whitley as a piece for him to play alone and connect with the violin's fundamental sounds.
Toronto's Evan J. Cartwright actively cultivates a diverse array of music interests. A gifted percussionist, and composer, his reflective LP debut as a singer-songwriter bit by bit was released by Idée Fixe in 2022 to various acclaim. Radio station WJCT said of it that "Cartwright could be our 21st century Chet Baker, replacing romanticized love affairs with realized contemplations on time and the human condition, providing a soothing soundtrack to a midday examination of the space in which you exist." Cartwright has been heard behind the drum kit with a vast range of different projects from Brodie West's exploratory jazz bands Eucalyptus, The Brodie West Quintet and the duo Ways, to the eccentric rock of U.S. Girls and Cola. "Six Tableaus for Solo Violin" is a fascinating set of algorithmic electroacoustic vignettes fuelled by improvisation. They work in series: the playback of a recorded improvisation is manipulated by the contours of the next as it is being recorded.
Artwork by Matthew Ronay