Tadpole: MOVING SOUNDS 2

Tadpole’s music and film showcase, Moving Sounds, is back for its second iteration! Come experience an evening of boundary-pushing Canadian music and short films, featuring incredible local music acts paired with forward-thinking directors from past and present. Co-curated by Trond Trondsen, we hope that this blend of sounds and visuals will inspire and entrance you, and bring about a new appreciation for Canadian music and film.

For this evening, Norman McLaren’s Pas De Deux and Robert Varrell’s Cosmic Zoom, will be shown on 16mm film. We would like to thank the National Film Board, the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers, the CineVic Society of Independent Filmmakers and Trond Trondsen for making this possible.

FILM

Norman McLaren (Pas De Deux, 1968, 16mm)

Scottish by birth and training, McLaren came to Ottawa in 1941 at the invitation of National Film Board (NFB) director John Grierson (1898–1972), himself considered a giant in Canadian film history.  McLaren became the head of Studio A, the animation department at NFB, in 1943, and he recruited a generation of future filmmakers, including René Jodoin (1920–2015), George Dunning (1920–1979), Jim McKay (1916–2002), Grant Munro (1923–2017), and Evelyn Lambart (1914–1999). He put Canada on the global map for his animated and live-action shorts, as he experimented with combining film and sound, in drawing directly on film stock, and with stop-motion and animation innovations of every kind. His Oscar for Neighbours and his Cannes Film Festival prize in 1955 for Blinkity Blank (1955) demonstrate the respect paid to his work. McLaren was also an artist and printmaker, and he was interested in dance, which was central to his films Pas de Deux (1968) and Narcissus (1983).

We will be showing McLaren’s Pas De Deux on 16mm film.

Robert Varell (Cosmic Zoom, 1968, 16mm)

Robert Verrall was a Canadian animator, director and film producer who worked for the National Film Board of Canada from 1945 to 1987, and one of the first to join the NFB as an animator under Norman McLaren. Over the course of his career, his films garnered a BAFTA Award, prizes at the Cannes Film Festival and Venice Film Festival, and six Academy Award nominations.

We will be showing Varrell’s Cosmic Zoom on 16mm film. All the drawings in Cosmic Zoom were drawn by Eva Szasz.

Lisa Berg & Durell Smith (The Onus, 2023)

Lisa Berg and Durell Smith are Edmonton-based filmmakers. Berg comes from a background in journalism and editing, while Smith is a poet and musician. Married in 2023, they took their love for film and set out to write and direct their own work.

Made with zero budget, Berg and Smith utilized DIY techniques and the talents of various friends and family. Mustafa Rafiq, who plays the film's main character, is a collaborator of Smith's in the experimental music world. Nikki Wiart, who is a close friend of Berg's, provided the backdrop to some of the film's dreamier scenes at her flower farm. Kevin Wunderlich, a long-time bandmate of Smith's, provided the design and stature of the film's foreboding entity. The Onus is their first film.

 

MUSIC

Hermitess

Hermitess is the project of an aging and slightly reclusive witch, dreaming simultaneously in music and images. Sonically, layered orchestral textures, harmonic voices, and pedal driven magic, all conjure a fleeting fever dream.

Cam Buie

Cam Buie is a keyboardist from Calgary, Alberta who draws from a multitude of diverse musical interests. Studying Classical piano at the University of Ottawa, Cam returned to Calgary and started producing and working as a session musician, and has played all across Canada, and in the UK. He was also the 2024 Calgary Public Library Musician in Residence.

Cam exhibits his work in many ways, most commonly in improvised live performances. Cam is most inspired by tactile musical hardware, and how each unique interface can inspire different timbers and sounds. His most recent projects include the experimental hip-hop and Instagram page @reboundbeats, and his debut album What I Woudn’t Do. The album was self-written, recorded, produced, mixed, and performed.

Inspired by the writing of Walter Benjamin, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Roland Barthes, Cam likes to play with context, and signifiers through hypnotic repetition to transport listeners to new places with familiar sounds.

Hospice

Hospice is a new collaboration between Dylann Golbeck (Vesela, Deathlettuce, Wyand) and Isaac Szeto (Mythmaking, Redress, Tys and the Annihilators, Easy Idiot, Deathlettuce). The two friends have been making dynamic improvised and composed music together for a decade, at the continuums of ambient, folk, and doom with a variety of instrumentation including voice, guitar, synthesizer, and an assortment of noisemakers and toys. Hospice is a musical shelter in which Golbeck and Szeto meditate together on societal grief, ecological collapse, and joyful resistance through communal caretaking.