Jason will be presenting the Yevgenia Song Cycle Live Re-Cycle Experience. Special guests are rumoured, and can probably be relied upon, though how special, well, who's to say? Jason - “interested very much" in the "potential holistic-medicinal properties of honey roasted peanuts and jalapeño-stuffed olives" - has also been completing a novel and a micro-feature film of sixty-five minutes. While all this productivity and muddying of the larger point can no doubt be attributed to both the pandemic and what we might just call the "process of life," Jason is liable to loudly and quite rudely demand of us answer to these questions or riddles: which century's pandemic, exactly? and whose process? Is this somebody's sad and undernourished notion of some kind of F. Scott Fitzgerald crack-up? Or is it Tennessee Williams sitting on a fence, drunk on his namesake, having him a bit of a sulphurous & wistful laff.

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We are beyond pleased to finally have a Ron de Jong-based project grace the Bug Incision stages. Ron’s work in the Edmonton music scene predated any BI activities, and quite frankly helped inspire not only the BI label (his Arrival Records was a big touchstone, and also released albums by and with Derek Bailey and Eddie Prevost) but also to continue presenting live music after Nach Hause, a series de Jong was often affiliated with, ended. Indeed one of the first free improv shows BI head Chris Dadge ever saw was a raucous trio of de Jong, Cody Oliver, and Darren Williams peeling paint off the walls at the Art Gallery of Calgary in the early ‘00s. 

His current project, John Charles Tactic, will be joined by another core Bug Incision player, Jonathon Wilcke:

Edmonton based guitar and drums improvised music duo John Charles Tactic has been active since 2001. Creating a raucous, ridiculous, reticent, and often revenant music that has received accolades to complete obliviousness from its listeners. This performance should be no different. Come none, come one, come all! This evening’s concert will be the first collaboration with John Charles Tactic and the matchless Calgary based alto saxophone wunderkind, Jonathon Wilcke.

Jason Lee Scott - Loud since birth. The guitarist has been plying his trade since the aughts in “Weirdo Rock” two-piece NATL, with multiple releases, off and on, over the past 20 years. Also, one half of improvised music duo John Charles Tactic, freaking out grandmothers from Vancouver to New York. Frequent collaborator with Avant vets Vertrek Ensemble and now a freshly minted addition and recording partner on the 2019 release ‘Palace of Darkened Windows’. Stay tuned for more from Vertrek Ensemble as 3io!

Ron de Jong – The Edmonton, Alberta born, and based drummer has had the kismet of creating music through free improvisation, jazz, and music beyond for the better part of his fifty years. As the founder of the improvised music unit Vertrek Ensemble, he has had the personal delectation of making music alongside Vadim Budman since 1997. Collaborating with so many outstanding musicians, near and far, the group has created music with such resplendent originators as Jason Lee Scott, Darren Williams, Ian Birse, John Butcher, Phil Durrant, Luc Houtkamp, Eugene Chadbourne, and the late inimitable, virtuosic, and peerless, Derek Bailey.

Independently, de Jong has created music on record and in concert with, among others, Jason Lee Scott (John Charles Tactic), Marilyn Crispell, Damo Suzuki, Chris Dadge, Darren Williams, Jonathon Wilcke, Cody Oliver, and the late Edmonton guitar maestro, Brian Schultz.

Jonathon Wilcke (they/them) plays tenor and soprano saxophones, along with a selection of tubes, pipes, whistiles, and modified horns called "ludic instruments". Wilcke's music ranges through free improvisation and free jazz, jazzy-jazz, big band jazz, and noise. Their current musical situations include Eating Speed, a trio with Eric Hamelin (drums) and Rob Oxoby (bass), and Quailbait, a solo soprano saxophone and song project. They have appeared in groups including Robots on Fire, ffffffft!, Mechanics Who Can Drive, The Real Featuring the Unreal, and The West Winds Jazz Orchestra and have also appeared (at least once lol) with Peggy Lee, Han Bennink, Eugene Chadbourne and Mats Gustafsson. In Vancouver between 2004-2011, Wilcke appeared regularly with musicians including Dave Chokroun (bass), Olive Shakur (bass), Darren Williams (sax), Kevin Romain (drums) and Shane Krause (sax/clar.)  Their solo recordings include All Errors Included and Torn from the Akashic Record (UnCanadian Activities 2013). They also appear on Rural Optimism with Chris Dadge and Joe Morris (Bug Incision, 2018). 

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Whenever the writing crew here at Bug Incision starts to have a hard time summing up an artist, or finding economical ways to describe their music, it’s a good sign that we’re in for a treat. We’ve found that the most interesting, and often most enduring artists working within the realm of “experimental” music are delightfully difficult to pigeonhole, and this double bill is a perfect example of this very favourable dilemma. New Works Calgary and Bug Incision are beyond pleased to present the killer double bill of crys cole and Oren Ambarchi, at High Line Brewing, on Monday, October 24.

Describing the sonic world of sound artist crys cole might be about as tough as it gets in this regard. Her work deals with the reappropriation of small, simple, everyday sounds and sonic environments, recombined and refocused to present them in a new and distinct light. At times seeming like a sort of auditory sleight of hand, the listener could find themselves wholly engaged in a combination of sounds containing elements that seem experientially familiar - that is, registering a sound they may have heard before, but not necessarily in a musical context - and slowly, effortlessly, it becomes something wholly other. cole’s first solo album Beside Myself was described by Freeform Freakout as “a sort of hazy dream logic with vaguely recognizable sound sources derived from live performances, studio sessions, and field recordings breezing by and in-and-out of focus.” 

cole, who originally hails from Manitoba, has worked with Annea Lockwood, Keith Rowe, Graham Lambkin, David Behrman, Tim Olive, and will appear on the upcoming Autumn Fair LP on Sean McCann’s Recital label. Anyone familiar with those names, as disparate as they are, may glean a further little glimpse as to what cole’s music offers. Aside from her continually expanding body of solo work her most prolific guise is that of Ora Clementi, a duo with Australian composer-performer James Rushford, and her ongoing duo project with Ambarchi. Ora Clementi has issued LPs on great labels such as Ambarchi’s Black Truffle, Penultimate Press, and London venue Cafe Oto’s OTORoku imprint. The Hub blog called her duo with Ambarchi “a continuing exploration of their musical and romantic relationship, marked by the subtlety of investigation which has defined both of their careers,” and those albums make up a significant part of her discography as well. Her website, which also documents her extensive works in the realm of site-specific installations, is well worth a good perusal.

Multi-instrumentalist, producer, improvisor, composer, label runner, and prolific in all of these areas, Oren Ambarchi is one of the foremost individuals working in the realm of “experimental” music these days, and he’s been doing it for the last 25+ years. Hailing from Australia, and still frequently based there, he got his start early in his home country, playing music (originally as a drummer) and organizing gigs, festivals (see What Is Music), and generally making great efforts to heat up his surrounding community while beginning to assert his own musical priorities through a variety of early projects. A trip to New York allowed him to witness the thriving “downtown” scene of the late 80s/early 90s, and a fortuitous meeting with avant-lynchpin John Zorn led to some early releases and exposure for his nascent projects.

It wasn’t until the late 90s, however, that things really got rolling, and he started to develop his identity as a guitarist. But, in a typically idiosyncratic stroke, it was through his complete re-imagining of how that instrument could speak that made him so unique. Ambarchi’s use of the Leslie rotating speaker (usually found paired with a Hammond B-3 organ) in conjunction with his guitar lends the six-string instrument a wholly new sonic aspect, and combined with his excellent sense of pacing and balance, this has been one of the cornerstones of his sound. He presents a cool, placid environment for his guitar work and subtle arrangements that is as beautiful as it is utterly beguiling. 

He worked frequently around this time with artists involved in the so-called “lowercase” scene (Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura, Christian Fennesz, Tetuzi Akiyama) and also established working relationships with masters like tabletop guitar innovator Keith Rowe (AMM) and electro-acoustic pioneer Günter Müller. Ambarchi also has a long, rich working relationship with Jim O’Rourke, and while the two have released a handful of excellent duo recordings, his trio with O’Rourke and legendary Japanese musician Keiji Haino is one of the juiciest areas of his discography. Across a spate of near-yearly releases, the trio explore different instrumental combinations on every record, ranging anywhere from free rock explosions to quasi-New Age meditations to sections much more difficult to describe, and all the more worth hearing for that very reason.

Finally, one would be remiss to exclude his solo (that is, under his name only) recordings that have also been steadily slipping out over the years on a variety of labels like Editions Mego, Touch, and more recently Drag City. While these albums are solo in name, they’re often rounded out with contributions from a huge range of guest players (including crys cole on many occasions), are focused on slowly evolving rhythmic ideas, and really foreground Ambarchi’s skills as a producer, editor, and curator of disparate voices expertly woven into highly listenable instrumental music.