Silence CALendar

Buy tickets

Get ready for our closing event for the Reclaiming Wild Womxn Art Exhibit. Join us in a Conversation Café, where we will have captivating and engaging discussions about gender, politics, & spiritual awakening practices; generated via the art & creativity, which has been inspired by the myths and stories told in “Women Who Run With the Wolves” by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés. Celebrate the strength, resilience, and beauty of all femmes, and womxn everywhere. Also enjoy an opportunity to bid on some very cool art pieces with our Silent Auction, raffle draws on gorgeous works and items, art making and more fun community connections.

Join us at SILENCE, here in Guelph, for this in-person event. Experience an inspiring collection of art aimed at empowering and healing through creative expression by female-identifying artists/creators.

This is a PWYC community event, all donations will be going to support
GWWIC (Guelph-Wellington Women in Crisis) & NWAC (Native Women’s Association of Canada)

All genders welcome... this is a brave space for all folxs.

Unleash your inner wildness. Embrace your untamed spirit. Reclaim your power. Honour your uniqueness. Connect with like-minded individuals.
“If you have yet to be called
an incorrigible, defiant woman,

don’t worry,
there is still time.” ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Let’s howl together and reclaim our Wild! Mature content.

Artists/creators include:

Visual artists: Barb Ann La Marre, Beverley Hawksley, Be Nadine, Christine McCormack, Colleen Telford, Erin Perry, Elspeth Wood, Heather Caruso, Grayce Perry, Goldie Sherman, Jenni Garvie, Julia Masci, Sue Eagle, Supria Karmakar, Verushka Samarkina, Vicky Force, Noella Upitis, the Wild Girlz of Drayton Heights Student Art ...and many more.

Doors: 7:30 PM
Show: 8:00PM
$20/PWYC - BUY TICKETS

Josh Cole‘s Kind Mind is yet another imaginative outfit to emerge from Toronto’s vibrant and curious-minded jazz scene. Playing Silence May 4th in support of Josh's new album "Kind Mind" - the trio will feature Cole (of the Brodie West Quintet, October Trio, and Sandro Perri’s band) on bass and electronics, acclaimed saxophonist/ clarinettist Ted Crosby and the dexterous Michael Davidson on vibraphone and electronics. Their music is a finespun hybrid of their leader’s warm compositional signatures and the ensemble’s improvisational perspicacity, peppered with delicate electronic treatments and environmental recordings. Their vinyl debut sees the band continually walking the borders between chamber music and jazz, building gentle, compact forms with generous amounts of space, graceful melodic figures, and ear-catching textural details.

music: https://cassiarrecords.bandcamp.com/album/kind-mind
web: joshcolebass.com

“Cole can be coolly lyrical, he can write a controlled “classical” counterpoint,
he can drop in some funk, and he can also let the improvisers loose in the stratosphere.”
– Popmatters.com

“The effect is both lyric and timeless, almost ambient,
made by instrumental sounds as engaging as you might hear.”
–Stuart Broomer, The Whole Note

“If you’re a fan of this instrumental palette,
Kind Mind is a uniformly gorgeous collection of compositions speckled with
field recordings, electronics, and passages of improvisation.”
– Jesse Locke, Aquarium Drunkard

Event details

Join Up and Running on May 5, 2024, for our newest event Bands Together, featuring live music and an online silent auction. Engage in an unforgettable musical experience at Silence and enjoy the perfect fusion of music, ambiance, and community. Tickets $20 per person. Children under 10 are free.

Comedy Sketch Town Presents is a sketch and improv series. Each month, new scenes with a new theme. This May we explore... GROWTH!

Comedy Sketch Town features members from The Phlegmies, The Making-Box Brigade, Second City Touring Company and Bad Dog Rep Players. This month’s cast: Tom Brown, Emma Currie, Rob Lewin, Jay Reid and Emily Vance.

Venue: Silence Sounds. 46 Essex St. Guelph, ON

Doors: 7:30 PM / Show: 8:00 PM

Dates:

• Saturday, March 23rd
• Saturday, April 13th
• Saturday, May 11th
• Saturday, June 8th

Price: $15 online or $20 at the door - BUY TICKETS

Accessibility Info: The Main Space at Silence is wheelchair-accessible (34 clearance on doors) however there are no automatic doors. There is an accessible all-gender single-stall bathroom, with a round knob on the door. The show may make use of flashing lights or loud noises.

Doors 8pm
$10 advance / $15 door - BUY TICKETS
19+

Come and celebrate great indie alternative with touring bands Cupid's Heart fresh out of Saskatchewan, and Toronto's wicked and wild duo, Queen's & Kings.

See you at Silence for an incredible night of music.

Cupid's Heart:
A combination of the unruly and the refined- Cupid’s Heart uses cello, electric guitar, drum machine, and low female vocals in an exploration of alt-rock. Moody and dynamic, they weave together an energizing, entrancing atmosphere. Previously described as “Chrissie Hynde Pretenders vibes with a pinch of Nirvana”, alternative rock fits them like a baggy sweater. Lyrically poetic, Cupid’s Heart expresses some of the complexities that go along with love and life, and does so from a queer female perspective. The pair are currently based in Prince Albert, SK. Their debut EP, Atrium, was released July 2023, a year that also saw the pair nominated for a SaskMusic Award.

Queens & Kings:
Queens & Kings started as an act of defiance, a refusal to accept limitations, and the rebellion of never giving up. With Alissa's role primarily as drummer / vocalist and Brendan's role as primarily guitarist / vocalist, the two find ways to sound like far more than two people, swapping or playing multiple instruments at once and finding inventive ways to increase their range of dynamics and movement. A must-see unique performance of unhindered self-expression.

Special Guests: TBA

Doors 7:30pm
Show 8pm
$20 in advance / $25 at the door - BUY TICKETS

Born in Toronto, ON, on March 24th, 1972, Greek-Jewish Canadian musician Ilios Steryannis started drumming at the age of 12. Inspired by the power and artistry of Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, he pounded on a practice pad and an old set of bongo drums until his father lovingly presented him with a brand new Tama Royalstar drumset, with Paiste cymbals, for his 13th birthday. Since then, Ilios and the drums have been inseparable.

Copies of Ilios’ newest release Babylonia Suite will be available at the show. One reviewer said of the album, “Babylonia Suite is an emotionally-rich and finely-calibrated release that straddles multiple genres and brings together a plethora of musical talent and conceptual collaborations. The highly visual and deftly-produced compositions take the listener to far flung corners and evoke sensory bliss that is at times stratospheric and transcendent. A seductive and exceptional release!” Marty Delia, the Jazz Music Blog.

Ilios’ latest project, the Babylonia Ensemble, pays tribute to his Iraqi Jewish and Greek roots with a six part suite of Middle Eastern jazz. The instrumentation is an entrancing mix of clarinet, violin, piano, bass and drums. A variety of moods and rhythms are explored, and there is traditional Iraqi Jewish music in the mix as well, composed by the legendary Al-Kuwaity brothers of Baghdad. The Babylonia Ensemble features Paul Pacanowski on woodwinds, Tania Gill on piano, Natalie Wong on violin, Henry Heillig on bass and Ilios on drums.

More information can be found at www.iliosjazz.ca

Details to come

Doors 7:30pm

Show 8pm

$20/PWYC

Temporary Ensembles Night
featuring Walter Gershon

Nim Agalawatte . electronics
Connor Bennett . saxophones
Emma Bortolon-Vettor . guitar
Brandon Davis . bass
jashen edwards . trumpet
Walter Gershon . saxophones
Aaron Hutchinson . trumpet, electronics
Jonathan Kay . saxophones, esraj
Nicole Marchesseau . piano
Joe Sorbara . drums, percussion
Emjay Wright . objects, voice

Walter S. Gershon (Ph.D.) is an Afro-Caribbean percussionist, saxophonist, and educator. As a musician, Walter has played with a wide variety of musicians and musical traditions including Mansour (Persian pop), Roberto Miranda, Rod Poole, Dana Reason, Badal Roy, and poets Quincy Troupe and EintouSpringer. With Renee Coloumbe and Mark Graham, Walter formed free/grove collective Erroneous Funk and is currently working with a Norwegian free collective (Sunniva Hovde, Tor Einar Bekken), modern expressions of traditional Malawian folk musics (Hovde, Rosha Vole), and a new trio, Os Dualistas. Walter is also Associate Professor, Critical Foundations of Education at Rowan University (NJ, USA) where he currently serves as coordinator for their Masters in Equity, Access, and Success in Education. His scholarship focuses on questions of sensemaking and sensibilities for disenfranchised youth, often using sonic methodologies to better understand young people’s ways of beingknowingdoing within and outside of schooling.

Temporary Ensembles are born, live short and potentially magical musical lives, and then sublimate into thin air. Their births involve a balanced merging of black arts as strange dice are selected and rolled and initiates are invited to make random selections with life-altering consequences. Their lives are intense, contingent, dripping with joyous risk and ugly beauty. They conclude with a sudden intake of breath that always already tastes of the moment after an end that already is. And then there is another.

7pm
$10 - BUY TICKETS

with Static Safari, Bluff & Geöff

Door 6:30pm

Show 7pm

$20/PWYC - BUY TICKETS

Gentleman Reg

https://www.instagram.com/gentleman_reg/
https://gentlemanreg.bandcamp.com/

Kelly McMichael is an artist and producer based in St. John’s, Newfoundland, originally from Peterborough Ontario. A versatile multi-instrumentalist who can sling a guitar, serenade on piano and program beats in equal measure, McMichael has toured North America and Europe and offered backing to The Burning Hell, Gentleman Reg, Tim Baker and Sarah Harmer. Kelly’s early songwriting career was established through DIY electronic projects Renders and Rouge during her time in Ontario. Her musical interests cover a broad range of pop /rock production styles combining retro and futuristic sounds in service of well-crafted songwriting. Her debut LP Waves was a breakthrough release of 2021, garnering a spot on the Polaris Prize shortlist, three Music NL Awards, and the ECMA for Best Rock Recording. 

Kelly’s sophomore album is a genreless expansion on the classic sound of her debut. Music that sits in the comfort of its core ideas while being utterly unafraid to try new things. It plays exactly how its maker intended. “I write and record in a way that you’re just giving the song what it needs,” says McMichael. “Why limit the creativity? I don’t want limitations.”

After The Sting Of It arrives September 2024.

Website

Instagram

Bandcamp

Doors 7:30pm
Show 8pm
$20/PWYC - BUY TICKETS

Bilal Nasser is an award-winning, Palestinian-Canadian guitarist and composer from Windsor, Ontario. Known for his ability to blend his classical guitar background with his passion for more experimental genres such as post-rock, shoegaze, and drone. Through his unique output he challenges assumptions as to what classical guitar music can be, result-ing in a signature sound described as “Post-Classical.” Since the age of 10 Nasser has held a classical guitar in his hands. He went on to study the craft under the tutelage and mentorship of the esteemed Canadian guitarist and composer William Beauvais at York University.

While his technique is informed by his classical background, Nasser’s music occurs as a frenetic juxtaposition of musical influences not typically associated with classical guitar. Nasser is deliberate through his immersion in underground musical cultures existing outside the boundaries established by the classical music world. Through his work, Nasser rejects the sterility and rigidity of institutional convention, bridging seemingly antithetical genres to cultivate new capacities for candid innovation - consequently realizing a distinct musical voice, coloured by his liminal exploration of both canonical and underground realms. In 2021 Nasser set a new precedent for classical composition with the release of his first full-length solo album Where the Orange Groves Grow, consisting of works for solo classical guitar, voice and electronics. Orange Groves traverses a broad aesthetic range from sprawling, long-form solo guitar pieces depicting tales from the Palestinian diaspora of loss and memory, to frenzies of looped noise and violence. His use of electronics, effects pedals, home-made skateboard drone machines, and singing and screaming into his amplified guitar make his live performances a spectacle unlike any other solo-guitarist.

Nasser continues to defy academic expectations with his artistic choices including introducing classical guitar into the popular music scene, DIY venue spaces like skate- parks, warehouses, and being the first known classical guitarist to have a mosh-pit at his shows. Since his debut release, Nasser has developed his sound and toured extensively across Canada. With the support of Ontario Arts Council and Windsor ACHF grant funding he recorded his sophomore album, How Can We Say Nothing, in 2023. This album reveals a more mature, intentional Nasser, unfolding as a single work of music for voice, guitar, string quartet, electronics and home video samples. In the fall of 2023 Nasser released two sin- gles in advance of this project’s release in 2024, On the Surface, and ...So That Flies Drop Dead Mid-Air, both of which a hint at Nasser’s new artistic direction.