* Audience advisory: this performance uses strobe lights and water-based haze.

Artist Talks: 7:15 PM

Vancouver New Music’s annual festival returns this year with PROPULSION, October 17-19, 2024, at VIVO Media Arts Centre. We have invited three local guest curators to each program a night of the festival that centers emerging artists with visionary sonic and musical expressions. Curators are artist, writer and curator, Kendra Place; composer, multi instrumentalist, sound and media artist, Anju Singh; and audio-visual artist, DJ and radio host, Reylinn. The festival will feature a mix of local and visiting artists doing a wide range of exciting work.

Purchase your festival pass here.

Day 2: Curated by Anju Singh

baptized.in.prison (Vancouver)

Atsi’tsaká (Sky Woman)

The story of Atsi’tsaká (Sky Woman) begins in a world of perfect balance, Karonhiá (Sky World). Karonhiá "was the most peaceful and beautiful place in the universe. It looked very similar to the natural world we live in today. There were trees, plants, mountains, and valleys, and all sorts of animals, both four-legged and winged. In the middle of Sky World grew a great celestial tree. The sacred tree shone so brightly it lit up the entire Sky World" (Smith, 2015). One day, Atsi’tsaká finds herself at a portal between two worlds created by the uprooted sacred tree. The "underworld was covered with a thick blanket of clouds, an endless sea, and complete darkness" (Smith, 2015). Some say the world cried out with tears of loneliness for Atsi’tsaká to join it. It is said that she chose to accept its call and began a great descent into the oceanic dimension. In this process, she became the catalyst and carrier of all future life on Earth. Here, she remained not as a deity of hierarchical arrangement but within the essence of every life form.

Within her project baptized.in.prison, Toni-Leah C. Yake (European; Kanien’kehá:ka, Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, Turtle Clan) engages with Haudenosaunee creation mythology through sound as an element of ceremony. In her new fixed-media and improvised electronic work, Atsi’tsaká, Yake calls to the permeability of dimensional barriers and relationships with  Kanien’kehá:ka archetypes.  By exploring sound's liminal and portalistic qualities she participates in world-building and sonic ritual.

Reference: Smith, C. (2015, March 2). "Skywoman: A Story Before Time." 

baptized.in.prison (Toni-Leah C. Yake) (European; Kanyen'kehà:ka, Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, Turtle Clan) is a composer-performer residing on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ territories.

Her work extends to explore the land, memories, world-building and embodied response. Informed by dream interpretation and Kanyen'kehà:ka epistemology Yake submerges into liminality through performances illuminated by archival recordings, synthesis, and noise.

El Ángel Exterminador (Vancouver)

“La Sangre que Corre No Se Seca"

Sound mutations and explorations of popular sounds and genres from Mexico and Latin America taken to a realm where they surface as spectral visitations, are broken down by noise and taken to the extreme.

"El Ángel Exterminador” was born in 2021 as a response to the lack of bookings of Latinx artists in so-called “Vancouver". Expect haunting cumbias, crunchy perreo and sleazy tracks that might prevent you from leaving the room.

The primary artist behind this project, Max Ammo (they/them), is a non-binary latinx multidisciplinary artist from Mexico City who currently lives and works on the unceded and traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. They work primarily on illustration, animation and graphic design but in recent years have taken on producing music and DJing under the alias “Goo” and most recently under the moniker “El Ángel Exterminador”. In 2023 they opened Slime Studio, their freelance audiovisual studio, as well as online & pop up shop.

Wasauksing Sniper (Winnipeg)

Wasauksing Sniper explores the distorted line between harsh noise and ambience. Channeling sounds of war and static with heavy industrial and field recordings manipulated from the Western Front. A constant hypotonic hum of artillery. Chaos and battle near it's end, but at what cost?

Wasauksing Sniper is a moniker of noise artist B.P., and an homage to Francis Pegahmagabow, the most highly decorated Indigenous soldier in Canadian military history and the most effective sniper of the First World War. Layers of ambient and harsh textures echo the flow of battle and the incessant rumble of artillery.

About the Curator: Anju Singh 

Anju Singh is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, noise/sound artist and video/media artist exposing and interrogating texture using methods of deconstruction and reanimation to repurpose and contextualize materials in new compositional environments and to bring contrasting themes and dynamics into shared spaces.

Anju has curated and directed the Vancouver Noise Festival for 9 editions, curated Fake Jazz Wednesdays, and she has participated in a co-curating committee for the MAC Media Arts Committee Sound Art program since 2011.

Co-presented with:

Banner Credits: baptized.in.prison (Toni-Leah C. Yake)