Temporary Ensembles ft. Matt Rogalsky (Kingston, ON)

featuring Matt Rogalsky (Kingston, ON) . live electronics

Matt Endahl . piano

Dan Loughrin . guitar

Christine Mills . guitar

Joe Sorbara . drums, percussion

Tyler Wagler . bass

Ted Warren . drums

Claire Whitehead . violin

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.

Matt Rogalsky is a settler-identifying Canadian, living in Kingston Ontario Canada, also known as Katarokwi, on territories of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee. His academic background includes undergraduate studies in experimental music at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver with Martin Bartlett, Barry Truax, Pauline Oliveros and George E Lewis from 1985-1991; MA studies 1993-95 in the Department of Music at Wesleyan University with Ron Kuivila, Alvin Lucier, Anthony Braxton and many others; and a PhD (1999-2006) from City University London focusing on the history of David Tudor’s Rainforest, supervised by Simon Emmerson. Rogalsky is a performing member of Composers Inside Electronics, with presentations of Rainforest and other David Tudor works since 1998, and co-created Rainforest V, which was acquired in 2017 by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for its permanent collection. Rogalsky teaches at Queen’s University (Canada) as Professor in the departments of Drama and Music, Film and Media, and the Cultural Studies Graduate Program. He is Director of the Sonic Arts Studio, originally named Queen’s Electroacoustic Music Studio, founded by David Keane in the 1970s and later directed by Kristi Allik. Rogalsky is currently collaborating with Geographer Dr Laura Jean Cameron on an experimental monograph and radio documentary series about Canadian field recordist William WH Gunn. In 2024 he will begin publishing electronic compositions from a series entitled ‘Revisitations’, with a new release on the late Phill Niblock’s XI Records entitled ‘Visitations and Revisitations’. These pieces began as studies on the work of other composers, and exist as works which pay hommage to their continuing resonances, including Niblock’s.