Thursday, February 23, 2023
Doors 8pm
Tickets $15
Silence Presents provides an accessible venue for touring and professional artists to perform for the Guelph community.
Join us for a community concert featuring local and visiting artists aiming to create space for reflection through collectively experiencing soundscapes in music created by Stefan Christoff, Malasuca and Hymns57 who will all present solo sets.
Background on Sounding Worlds
Sounding Worlds is a piano and soundscape project/performance led by musician and community organizer Stefan Christoff.
In the 2021/2022 pandemic context, Christoff collaborated remotely with sound artists internationally to register this historical moment. Sounding Worlds interacts with our global experience of loss and grief driven by the pandemic, offering a unique sonic portrait of this time that aims to speak to collective resilience.
In this live rendition of the Sounding Worlds project you will hear the acoustics of internal city transit, the tones of the métro in Tiohti:áke / Montréal, to winter walks on the snowy streets in the city, particularly from the immigrant working class area of Park Extension where a major struggle against gentrification is taking place right now. There are also sounds walking along the Pacific Ocean in the spring of 2022.
Also you will hear the voice of Bolivian-Canadian poet Alejandro Saravia and the music of the Buffalo Hat Singers performing at a winter protest to call for justice in the cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women. There are also the sounds of a beautiful and vibrant river running through the lands of the T’sou-ke Nation of the Coast Salish peoples.
Finally, to accompany the piano, you will hear two beautiful synth works created by my brother Jordan Christoff with whom I share a duet project called Anarchist Mountains. Our latest album, Fire Waves, is out via Oxtail Recordings.
Sounding Worlds is in essence a contemporary musical project speaking to this moment of global urgency in creative ways.
Stefan has presented Sounding Worlds twice in the summer of 2022 in Sofia, Bulgaria. At a concert hosted by Alarma Punk Jazz, a program of Bulgarian National Radio, for a concert at The Palace of the National Art Gallery. Also at a second concert hosted by the Synaesthesia Collective in Bulgaria at Shroedinger Bar in Sofia. Recently Stefan presented Sounding Worlds at Willem de Zwijgerkerk in Amsterdam at a concert hosted by OCCii which also featured a performance by Andy Moor of The Ex and in Berlin at Morphine Raum at a concert also featuring Lebanese sound artist Nour Sokhon.
Artist bios
Hymns57 (Guelph) is a sound artist (Steven de Taeye) who works in a manner that orchestrates a multivariate sonic landscape. Having lost the ability to perform live for the last few years, the arbiter of ambience is focussing on delivering the 2022 Elm Records released Fuzei / Freiluft in a reimagined context. The double album leans on electroacoustic sounds and subtle synth arrangements, all immersed in textured pads and lofi nostalgia, organically treated with intricate field recordings that bloom into delicately processed mosaics. This is music that is designed to soundtrack the gentle effusions of companionship, emotional displacement and all the while leading your ears astray.
Stefan Spirodon Christoff is a media maker, community activist and artist living in Montréal. Stefan hosts Free City Radio, broadcasting weekly on CKUT 90.3FM, CJLO 1690 AM, CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg, CFRC 101.9FM in Kingston, Ontario, CFUV 101.9FM in Victoria, BC and shared globally as a podcast (Spotify + Apple Podcasts). Stefan coordinates Musicians for Palestine and makes music with many people globally, including Rêves sonores, Sam Shalabi, Lori Goldston, Adriana Camancho and Anarchist Mountains. Stefan is on the board of the Immigrant Workers Centre in Côte-Des-Neiges and works with Cinema Politica Network. Stefan works with the Social Justice Centre and is also a history student at Concordia University.
