Cana­dian Elec­tronic En­sem­ble

The Cana­dian Elec­tronic En­sem­ble was founded in 1971. It is the old­est con­tin­u­ous live-​electronic group in the world.
The CEE first toured Canada in 1975. Their first Eu­ro­pean tour was in 1979. In the years since, the group has toured ex­ten­sively through­out North Amer­ica and Eu­rope. Be­gin­ning in 1974 the CEE has pre­sented Toronto con­certs that have be­come a major venue for new elec­troa­coustic works by artists from every province in Canada, as well as in­ter­na­tional artists from Ar­gentina, Aus­tralia, Aus­tria, Bel­gium, Den­mark, Eng­land, France, Italy, Japan, Mex­ico, New Zealand, Nor­way, Swe­den, and the United States.
Cel­e­brat­ing fifty years of ac­tivism, the CEE is still at the fore­front of live elec­tronic music. Using old (and new) ana­log in­stru­ments, lap­top com­put­ers, stan­dard in­stru­ments, found sound, field record­ings, and in fact any­thing elec­tronic, they con­tinue to cut a sonic swath through the ears of the world.

Rose Bolton: in ad­di­tion to her work with the CEE is an in-​demand scorer for video and film. Her com­po­si­tions for mixed-​media and tra­di­tional in­stru­ments are per­formed across Canada and in­ter­na­tion­ally. She is an ad­vo­cate, hav­ing ini­ti­ated the Women in Elec­tronic Music project with the Cana­dian Music Cen­tre.

David Jaeger: a found­ing mem­ber of the CEE, has had a pro­found ef­fect on the de­vel­op­ment of new music in Canada. His forty-​plus-year ca­reer with the CBC touched on every as­pect of new music mak­ing, from com­mis­sions to per­for­mance to record­ing to broad­cast. He re­mains a highly sought-​after record pro­ducer and con­tin­ues to com­pose across many media.

Jim Mont­gomery: in ad­di­tion to his work with the CEE, has spent time in arts admin (New Music Con­certs, Toronto; Music Gallery, Toronto), arts ad­vo­cacy (CLC/LCC, CNMN/RCMN) and com­poses for mixed media and tra­di­tional in­stru­ments.

Paul Still­well: a CEE mem­ber since 1995, is a com­mu­nity builder with Fre­quency Freaks, a monthly open forum and the Toronto Sound Fes­ti­val.  He is a bit of a poly­math, pro­duc­ing in­no­v­a­tive work in video and audio signal-​processing with his own com­pany, In­tre­pita, and work­ing reg­u­larly as a con­sul­tant in In­ter­net se­cu­rity.

David Suther­rland is the newest mem­ber of the CEE, but has been in­volved with elec­tronic music since the ’70’s. Upon re­tire­ment as an IT ad­min­is­tra­tor at the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto, he acts as a men­tor to the younger com­mu­nity, and con­tin­ues his own mu­si­cal stud­ies with James Lin­der­man. In ad­di­tion to play­ing with the CEE he ex­plores song­writ­ing and new solo elec­tronic music as Sim­ple Sine­man and as Not Your Av­er­age Worker Bees, a project with Paul Still­well.

John Kameel Farah: his work em­braces as­pects of baroque and early music, ex­per­i­men­tal, con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal, im­pro­vi­sa­tion, middle-​eastern music and forms of elec­tronic music. His cur­rent work largely fo­cuses on live solo con­certs, sur­round­ing the piano with syn­the­siz­ers and computer-​assisted pro­cess­ing. His music draws upon an in­ter­est in as­tron­omy, his­tory, mythol­ogy and paint­ing.

You are close to cel­e­brat­ing 50 years of ex­is­tence, would you please trace the his­tory of the En­sem­ble?

JM: OK. 50 years in 5 min­utes. The orig­i­nal 4, Grimes, Jaeger, Lake and Mont­gomery, were all grad stu­dents at the uni­ver­sity of Toronto, work­ing at UTEMS under Gus Cia­maga. After grad­u­a­tion, our first gigs were for high school and col­lege stu­dents, who were ei­ther amazed, puz­zled or dis­grun­tled. We got fund­ing from the On­tario provin­cial gov­ern­ment to set up an an­nual se­ries of con­certs that al­lowed us to in­vite other elec­tronic mu­si­cians to Toronto and do ex­changes. The se­ries ran for 22 years.
In the late ‘70’s and ‘80’s we did a lot of tour­ing. As the ‘80’s be­came the ‘90’s and we ac­quired day jobs, fam­i­lies and new mem­bers, or­ga­niz­ing tours be­came more dif­fi­cult; so ex­cept for res­i­den­cies and record­ing projects, we’ve stayed pretty much in Toronto.

DJ: Trac­ing the his­tory barely does it jus­tice, es­pe­cially when a full vol­ume of CEE his­tory is about to ap­pear, writ­ten by Alexa Woloshyn. How­ever, my trac­ing would in­clude:
-​first ex­per­i­ments and re­hearsals at UTEMS, play­ing with rack-​mounted ana­logue gear (Mod­u­lar, if you will…) – for its time, a sat­is­fy­ing mu­si­cal ex­pe­ri­ence.
-​determining that there ac­tu­ally was some “portable gear” which we re­lo­cated to the out­side world, and con­tin­ued our tri­als and re­hearsals.
-​deciding that we four (David, David, Larry and James) were dri­ven to per­form live and by-​God we were going to do it!
-​doing the leg­work that brought in arts coun­cil fund­ing, which hap­pily, pro­vided op­tions, both prac­ti­cal and artis­tic.
-​composing, com­mis­sion­ing new works, find­ing all man­ner of places (High Schools, col­leges, con­cert halls, tour­ing, etc.) where we could per­form, and be­com­ing ex­pe­ri­enced at con­cert pro­duc­tion and pro­mo­tion.
-​recording our first LPs, and then CDs, get­ting air-​play on radio and TV.
-​writing for and per­suad­ing some great Cana­dian vir­tu­oso mu­si­cians to let us write for them, and then tak­ing the re­sult­ing works out on the “road.”
-​gaining re­spect in the mu­si­cal com­mu­nity, which led to sig­nif­i­cant (al­though never enough) fi­nan­cial sup­port from arts coun­cils.
-​opening our var­i­ous stu­dios in Toronto over the years, and op­er­at­ing like an es­tab­lished en­tity.
-​maturing both as an en­sem­ble and as in­di­vid­ual artists, en­abling us to gain more am­bi­tious as­pi­ra­tions – play­ing with sym­phony or­ches­tras, and tour­ing North Amer­ica and Eu­rope.
-​touring and col­lab­o­rat­ing with ex­ter­nal or­ga­ni­za­tions, in­clud­ing for­eign broad­casts and res­i­den­cies.
-​fragmenting and then re-​configuring as per­son­nel changed, and tak­ing res­i­den­cies in places like the Banff Cen­tre of the Arts with our French alter-​ego: Trio Col­lec­tif. Record­ing and then tour­ing with that whacked-​out French trio.
-​Dropping the per­ma­nent stu­dio and de­camp­ing into our var­i­ous pri­vate stu­dios. And con­tin­u­ing to per­form.
-​Producing a two-​hour on­line album
-​loosing a mem­ber through his pass­ing
-​moving on­ward with fresh part­ners, find­ing new ways to work to­gether, even when some were rarely avail­able in Toronto.
-​residency at Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­sity
-​creating and pro­duc­ing re­motely dur­ing the pan­demic.
-just hangin’ out and mak­ing music.

What have you been work­ing on lately, and do you have any up­com­ing re­leases or per­for­mances?

JM: We’re ramp­ing up for the 50th year. There’s a new record­ing project un­der­way, and we’ll be re­leas­ing an ex­ten­sive ret­ro­spec­tive set of al­bums. In going through the archives we found a ton of re­ally good stuff that was never re­leased.

RB: I just re­leased an EP, called The Lost Clock, in late June. Right now I am work­ing on a string en­sem­ble piece for a Mon­treal en­sem­ble; Col­lec­tif9, and a piece for hurdy gurdy and elec­tron­ics. I just fin­ished an am­bi­ent elec­tronic sound­track for the new hour long CBC tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­tary: Born Bad, di­rected by my part­ner Marc de Guerre.

DJ: Per­son­ally, I’ve com­pleted a work for con­cert ac­cor­dion (Joseph Pet­ric) and elec­tron­ics, and am work­ing on a piece for vi­bra­phone (Bev­er­ley John­ston) and elec­tron­ics. I have also up­dated some older scores, such as Quivi Sospiri and Sara­bande, as there are soloists out there who would like to add these ear­lier pieces to their reper­toire. And the Pass-​the-Track process is con­tin­u­ing. 

I know that when you pro­duce your music you do not use ex­clu­sively Mod­u­lar sys­tems but how were you first ac­quainted to Mod­u­lar Syn­the­sis?
When did that hap­pen and what did you think of it at the time?

JM: I think we’ve al­ways been mod­u­lar. UTEMS, where the orig­i­nal 4 re­ceived our train­ing, was a clas­sic stu­dio that ben­e­fit­ted enor­mously from the in­stru­ments and mod­ules Hugh Le Caine de­vel­oped at the Na­tional Re­search Coun­cil. The patch bay was cen­tral.

DS: Expo 67 in­tro­duced the world to a daz­zling array of bleed­ing end multi media and the music ac­com­pa­ni­ment to this was often some sort of elec­tronic score. I was 14 when it hap­pened. I be­came in­trigued, fell in love with the sounds and wanted to learn how to make it.  At the time the focus was on the music and mod­u­lar synths were just a more con­ve­nient way to make it. Next came Wendy Car­los’s Switched on Bach and Glenn Gould did a 1 hour radio doc­u­men­tary on the music which fur­ther in­trigued me plus there was a pic­ture of a Moog on the album cover so I knew what I was look­ing for.  As I wrote in my Syn­thi piece it was a grad­ual process of get­ting closer over the years until I got to uni­ver­sity in 1972 and got con­nected. First to the Syn­thi and later through my in­volve­ment with Meta­Mu­sic I got into the Elec­tronic Music Stu­dio at McGill Uni­ver­sity. Where I met the Moog mod­u­lar.

DJ: The ear­li­est work at UTEMS was es­sen­tially mod­u­lar, so it rep­re­sents the foun­da­tion of my train­ing in elec­tronic music. And of course, with the Syn­thi A tour­ing ac­tiv­ity, it was also the foun­da­tion of the early years on the road. But as soon as key­board in­stru­ments, and es­pe­cially poly­phonic key­boards, be­came avail­able, I was ready to make the switch. Mind you, even the YAMAHA CS-60 con­tains a cer­tain amount of mod­u­lar de­sign…just not as much as ear­lier in­stru­ments.

How does it marry with your other « com­po­si­tional tricks »?

JM: Ac­tu­ally, it doesn’t. I’ll com­pose with sticks and rocks if that’s what’s needed.

DS: My com­po­si­tional in­ter­est from an early time has been more about sound  than melody or har­mony.

DJ: It all blends to­gether – the out­put sig­nal is what mat­ters.

When did you buy your first sys­tem?

 

JM: 1971. Two Syn­thi A. An En­sem­ble In­vest­ment.

DS: Bought the Syn­thi in 1976. Went through a cou­ple of decades not doing music. I sold my Syn­thi to a friend who sold it back to me when they no longer were in­ter­ested in it. I bought my first eu­ro­rack sys­tem in 2010 

RB: I have al­ways had a com­puter and made/recorded sounds that way. My first com­puter that had an ac­cept­able amount of power was pur­chased in 2006.

DJ: As soon as the CEE could get them (Syn­this) out of Otto Joachim.

What was your first mod­ule or sys­tem?

DS: My idea was to recre­ate the basic ca­pa­bil­i­ties of the EMS at McGill so I bought a Doef­per prepack­aged 6u sys­tem.

RB: Roland SE-02 pur­chased in 2018.

DJ: Dy­na­soar (a DIY gad­get) fol­lowed by the Syn­thi A

PS: My first hard­ware syn­the­sizer sys­tem was a euro rack sys­tem.  How­ever the story goes back fur­ther than that.  I had be­come tired of work­ing on the com­puter all-​the-time.  I was look­ing to get a more tac­tile feel and per­spec­tive on the music I was cre­at­ing and I love the sound of gui­tar.  How­ever, being from more of a key­board back­ground there are a num­ber of as­pects of ac­tu­ally play­ing gui­tar that be­wil­der me.  So I opted for an elec­tric stringed in­stru­ment that can be played more like a key­board – The Chap­man Stick.  Par­don the pun but I stuck with it for a cou­ple of years but that re­ally wasn’t doing it for me ei­ther so I sold that and begun the jour­ney into Eu­ro­rack mod­u­lar syn­the­siz­ers.  My first set of mod­ules con­sisted of an In­tel­ligel Ru­bi­con VCO (Volt­age Con­trolled Os­cil­la­tor), Linux VCA’s (Volt­age Con­trolled Am­pli­fier), Dual ADSR (volt­age con­trolled Attack-​Decay-Sustain-Release En­ve­lope Gen­er­a­tor), and a Syn­the­sis Tech­nol­ogy E440 VCF (Volt­age Con­trolled Fil­ter).  Soon after that I added the Syn­throtech Chaos Nand, MakeNoise Wob­ble­Bug, and MakeNoise Maths.  The term Eu­ro­c­rack def­i­nitely ap­plied for me as I rapidly be­came ad­dicted to this very hands on tech­nique for de­sign­ing sound and mak­ing music.

How long did it take for you to be­come ac­cus­tomed to patch­ing your own syn­the­sizer to­gether out of its com­po­nent parts?

DS: I started learn­ing how to plug things to­gether by help­ing Meta­Mu­sic un­plug the gear after their con­certs. It was how I got in­vited to the band. Since my ac­cess was through the uni­ver­sity, the pro­fes­sor, Kevin Austin, was very thor­ough in train­ing so it didn’t take very long. Plus Alan Strange’s book was very help­ful. Wish I still had my copy.

DJ: It was there in the be­gin­ning – the only way I knew of, at least for a time, and it seemed sec­ond na­ture al­most im­me­di­ately.

What was the ef­fect of that dis­cov­ery on your com­po­si­tional process?

DS: It is how I be­came a com­poser.

RB: It is very dif­fer­ent from the work I do as a com­poser. I use hard­ware synths in the same way that I use the vi­o­lin, more to play than part of the com­po­si­tional work­flow.

DJ: It just made me think clearly and prac­ti­cally.

On your ex­is­tence?

DS: It is how I wasted pre­cious years of my 20’s when I didn’t un­der­stand how to suc­ceed in the music busi­ness nor how to suc­ceed in acad­e­mia. I would be richer now and be able to af­ford the house big enough to hold a big­ger synth col­lec­tion.

DJ: The tech­nol­ogy of elec­tronic music in 1972 was very close to the tech­nol­ogy of broad­cast­ing. So, when I ar­rived at CBC Radio I was al­ready a thor­oughly trained tape ed­i­tor. This bode very well for me in the early days of my broad­cast ca­reer. The CBC en­gi­neers re­spected my train­ing and, even though it was in their ju­ris­dic­tion to do all the edit­ing of our broad­casts, they would just say to me, “You’ll have it done in half the time, so you just take it on and do it.” I had a good 40-year ca­reer in Pub­lic Radio.

I know that each of you tried var­i­ous syn­the­siz­ers and it seems that the AKS was the only con­stant one. Would you ex­plain why it be­came your favourite?

JM: It was the A for me. It still is. It’s an al­most per­fect ana­log per­for­mance and teach­ing tool, and with those crappy lit­tle speak­ers and the ‘scope it’s com­pletely self-​sufficient, given an AC out­let. I never “got” the KS part until I heard Suther­land do won­der­ful things with it around 2015. Old dogs…

DS: The VCS-3 was the first syn­the­sizer I ever saw.  It was part of Stock­hausen’s tour in 1970/71 so it had street cred in spite of the ter­ri­ble re­view the Wendy Car­los gave it in the Whole Earth Cat­a­logue. When I ar­rived at Con­cor­dia Uni­ver­sity in 72 Kevin Austin had his own Syn­thi AKS that we could play with and the school bought a Syn­thi AKS that we could bor­row and take home. I spent many hours in my par­ent’s base­ment with Syn­thi plugged into an old Vox Pathfinder tube amp. In 76 I bought my own Syn­thi.  At the time it didn’t seem that there was re­ally much choice in the mat­ter. I wasn’t a key­board player in a rock band so the Arp 2600 or Min­i­Moog didn’t ap­peal to me even though I had used the 2600 that was in the McGill EMS. Mod­u­lars like the Moog’s or Arp 2500 were priced way be­yond my bud­get. Buchla didn’t re­ally have much of a pres­ence in Mon­treal at the time. DIY sys­tems like the Aries or Serge or roll your own with Elec­troNotes seem be­yond my ca­pa­bil­i­ties. The Cana­dian dis­trib­u­tor for EMS, Otto Joachim, was in Mon­treal so it was the eas­i­est choice to make. Plus, the Syn­thi had a Ring Mod. The big Moog at McGill didn’t have Ring Mod. Be­sides I had 4 years ex­pe­ri­ence play­ing one and it felt re­ally com­fort­able to play and was portable. Many years later while play­ing with Eu­ro­rack sys­tems and get­ting frus­trated by the div­ing be­tween the ca­bles when play­ing I re­al­ized one fea­ture, phys­i­cally sep­a­rat­ing the patch­ing from the knobs was a bril­liant piece of user in­ter­face de­sign. Repatch­ing the Syn­thi mid-​performance is a stan­dard way to play. Par­tic­u­larly when im­pro­vis­ing. It is so easy to take the Syn­thi in a dif­fer­ent di­rec­tion  and not lose the flow of the mo­ment. To sum­ma­rize the ad­van­tages of the Syn­thi in the 1970’s; Price, Playa­bil­ity, Porta­bil­ity. 

DJ: The AKS was not my favourite at all. It was good, and it did a lot of cool stuff, but once the poly­phonic key­boards started ar­riv­ing, I pre­ferred those.

Quite often mod­u­lar­ists are in need for more, their hunger for new mod­ules is never sat­is­fied? How do you ex­plain that?

JM: It’s a dis­ease.

DS: Not much dif­fer­ent than look­ing for a new gui­tar. When our mu­si­cal prac­tice is mostly ex­ter­nal we seek ex­ter­nal input for in­spi­ra­tion. When our prac­tice is in­ter­nal GAS (gear ac­qui­si­tion syn­drome) is less of a fac­tor.

RB: I can cer­tainly re­late to hav­ing GAS, but as a free­lance mu­si­cian and com­poser, I am held back by bud­getary re­straints. But I think that is a good thing. Buy­ing more gear/soft­ware out of de­sire (as op­posed to ac­tual need) does not im­prove my music. It is also im­por­tant for me to keep my stu­dio pared down to the min­i­mum. If I have too much equip­ment around me, my brain starts to suf­fo­cate.

DJ: You al­ways want more toys – mod­u­lar or oth­er­wise. And as new gad­gets be­came avail­able it al­ways brought added di­men­sions to the music, so we would often go with the di­rec­tion sug­gested by the tech­nol­ogy.

In­stru­ment build­ing may ac­tu­ally be quite com­po­si­tional, defin­ing your sonic palette, each new mod­ule en­rich­ing your vo­cab­u­lary. Would you say that your choices and the way you build your sys­tems can be an in­te­gral part of your com­po­si­tional process? Or is this the other way round and you go after a new mod­ule be­cause you want to be able to sound-​design some of your ideas?

DS: I’m more of a new mod­ule that fits into my ex­ist­ing frame­work sort of a guy.

RB: If I was to get into the mod­u­lar world, I would prob­a­bly start with some­thing pre-​made. The Erica Synths Dada Noise Sys­tem for ex­am­ple, or var­i­ous Moog se­tups look amaz­ing and the DIY part would be with the pedal ef­fects– but I don’t want to ig­nite those feel­ings of long­ing.

DJ: I would say it was a bit of each process, but for me, more the lat­ter than the for­mer.

Do you tend to use pure mod­u­lar sys­tems, or do you bring in out­side ef­fect and de­vices when play­ing or record­ing?

DS: Not at all in­ter­ested in mu­si­cal pu­rity. It’s about the user in­ter­face and the sounds for me. Right now for play­ing live every­thing comes into Able­ton Live for pro­cess­ing and mix­ing. One tech­nique I like is record­ing a loop from ei­ther the Syn­thi or Easel and pro­cess­ing the loop. So many mod­ules or ped­als are ba­si­cally com­put­ers with tiny screens. If I’m going to have a com­puter I want it to be a use­ful one.

DJ: In­side or out­side – I don’t have a pol­icy – just get me the groovy voices and let me go crazy with them.

PS: As you can see from the an­swer to the pre­vi­ous ques­tion I have gone down the hard­ware path hard.  I also have a num­ber of hard­ware syn­the­siz­ers now and I tend to use soft­ware only for mix­ing and mas­ter­ing.  For me hard­ware isn’t about ana­logue vs. dig­i­tal.  It is about being hands on and tac­tile with per­for­mance and sound cre­ation.  
The Yamaha CS-40M which has been with the CEE since it was re­leased in 1979 has had a 1979 Korg MS-20, Korg ARP Odyssey re-​issue, Dave Smith Prophet Rev2, and Elek­tron Ana­logue Keys added to the stu­dio.  
All amaz­ing in their own ways.  
Sev­eral hard­ware ef­fects and ped­als have been added as well.

How has your sys­tem been evolv­ing?

DS: I am much more in­ter­ested in play­ing a synth than pro­gram­ming a synth. In­ter­ested in play­ing live in pub­lic spaces so porta­bil­ity is im­por­tant. Also in­ter­ested in stan­dard­ized power re­quire­ments so one can play off grid using bat­ter­ies. This sug­gests that con­trollers and note­book com­put­ers are the way to go using soft­ware like VCVrack or Adu­lus. The patch­a­bil­ity is there while the weight and power re­quire­ments are re­duced.

DJ: I mostly use Reak­tor and my DAW – Wave­lab. This is suf­fi­cient to my needs for the mo­ment.

PS: Down the Rab­bit hole I went!  A small sys­tem be­came a large sys­tem with the ad­di­tion of more util­i­ties, sound gen­er­a­tors and ef­fects.  Then came pedal based ef­fects, and then I dis­cov­ered Ciat-​Lonbarde in­stru­ments which opened a whole other world for ex­per­i­men­ta­tion and chaos.  From there I added a 5U MU (Moog Unit) mod­u­lar sys­tem as well as some Soma in­stru­ments (amaz­ing hand-​built Russ­ian elec­tronic in­stru­ments).

RB: I have been play­ing vi­o­lin with the CEE since 1999. I started out with an acoustic vi­o­lin with a Fish­man pickup, going through an En­soniq Dp4. Then around 2016, a stu­dent of mine had an elec­tric vi­o­lin she no longer wanted be­cause it was too heavy to hold up, and she gave it to me. I did some sim­ple mod­i­fi­ca­tions and it worked great. From then on, I pre­ferred the elec­tric in­stru­ment with the CEE. Bet­ter than hav­ing the acoustic sound in your ear, which is not going through the sys­tem. The elec­tric fid­dle goes though the ef­fects in Able­ton, or the Boss ME-70, and a Boss Loop Sta­tion.

Would you please de­scribe the sys­tem you used to cre­ate the music for us?

Track notes by the col­lec­tive :

Surge
Recorded on Au­gust 19, 1976. Live per­for­mance. Mu­si­cians: David Grimes, David Jaeger, Larry Lake, Jim Mont­gomery.
The record­ing was part of a con­cert pre­sented by Al­ter­nate Galax­ies at St. Lawrence Hall in Toronto. The in­stru­men­ta­tion in­cluded four EMS Synth As, two EMS DK2 key­boards and a Roland mono­phonic syn­the­sizer.
Over the years from 1978 to 2002, the En­sem­ble con­tracted to a trio and then ex­panded to a sex­tet. There were no di­rec­tives about in­stru­men­ta­tion: mem­bers played what­ever they found in­ter­est­ing. As a group we in­ves­ti­gated (and in­vested in) the Roland Music Com­poser (dri­ving a Jupiter 8, which was a cv/g sys­tem) and Yamaha YCAM, a midi sys­tem based on the MSX op­er­at­ing sys­tem and CX5M mk II music com­puter. Paul Still­well, who joined the En­sem­ble in 1998, de­vel­oped ed­i­tors for the Roland Sound Can­vas (a very flex­i­ble sample-​based sys­tem) and sev­eral mem­bers took ad­van­tage of that work. Jim Mont­gomery pur­sued the YRM 504 FM Music Macro II which en­abled pro­gram­ming in MSX Basic. Sev­eral mem­bers thought he was nuts.

Am­bi­ent Ping­ing
Recorded on Feb­ru­ary 2, 2002. Live per­for­mance. Mu­si­cians: Rose Bolton, Mike Dobin­son, David Jaeger, Larry Lake, Jim Mont­gomery, Paul Still­well.
The record­ing was part of a con­cert pre­sented by the Am­bi­ent Ping se­ries at C’est What in Toronto. The in­stru­men­ta­tion in­cluded two EMS Synth As, two Roland Sound Can­vas, Yamaha DX7 and lap­tops.

Back in the Day
Recorded on Feb­ru­ary 2, 2002. Live per­for­mance. Mu­si­cians: Rose Bolton, Mike Dobin­son, David Jaeger, Larry Lake, Jim Mont­gomery, Paul Still­well.
The record­ing was part of the same con­cert pre­sented by the Am­bi­ent Ping se­ries at C’est What Bistro in Toronto. The in­stru­men­ta­tion is also the same.
From 2002 to 2021, the En­sem­ble had a few per­son­nel changes. Mike Dobin­son left and John Kameel Farah be­came a fre­quent guest. Larry Lake died in 2013. David Suther­land helped fill that gap in 2016. In terms of in­stru­men­ta­tion, by the early 2000’s, lap­top com­put­ers began to dom­i­nate – but the Syn­thi A’s never went away. Over the next 10 years, Na­tive In­stru­ments re­ceived a lot of at­ten­tion from mem­bers (in par­tic­u­lar the Reak­tor app which has a very nice em­u­la­tion of a Syn­thi AKS) and Abel­ton Live was adopted by sev­eral mem­bers. For the last seven years or so, mod­u­lar sys­tems have proven at­trac­tive, as well as hy­brid in­stru­ments like the Behringer Neu­tron.

Ca­vatina Redux (for Ace)
Recorded Au­gust 23, 2018. Live Stu­dio ses­sion. Mu­si­cians: David Jaeger, Jim Mont­gomery, Paul Still­well, David Suther­land.
The record­ing took place at the 7Below stu­dio in Toronto. It is a re­sponse to Ca­vatina, a work com­posed by Larry Lake (aka Ace) in 1973, that was based on Shep­ard Tones.

Wind it Up
Recorded Sep­tem­ber 6, 2018. Live stu­dio ses­sion. Mu­si­cians: Rose Bolton, David Jaeger, Jim Mont­gomery, Paul Still­well, David Suther­land.
The record­ing took place at the 7 Below stu­dio in Toronto. It was the last take in the ses­sion

Hồ Đạt
Recorded Sep­tem­ber 6, 2018. Live stu­dio ses­sion. Mu­si­cians: Rose Bolton, David Jaeger, Jim Mont­gomery, Paul Still­well, David Suther­land.
The record­ing took place at the 7 Below stu­dio in Toronto. The Title is Viet­namese. The mean­ing is known only to the Mud­fish.

What do you think that can only be achieved by mod­u­lar syn­the­sis that other forms of elec­tronic music can­not or makes harder to do?

JM: IMHO, the dis­tinc­tion is en­tirely in the hands of the music-​maker; a painter will paint, a sculp­tor will sculpt…

DS: Self in­flicted mu­si­cal joy with­out phys­i­cal dex­ter­ity.

What would be the sys­tem you are dream­ing of?

JM: EMS Syn­thi 100

DS: EMS Syn­thi 100

RB: Cur­rent setup but with way more ef­fects ped­als, and maybe an­other semi mod­u­lar synth or two to com­pli­ment the Roland SE-02.

PS: The one I have built 🙂  My GAS (gear ac­qui­si­tion syn­drome) seems to have passed for the time being and I am very happy in my stu­dio.

Are you feel­ing close to some other con­tem­po­rary Mod­u­lar­ists? 
Which ones?

JM: A Toronto com­mu­nity has grown up around Fre­quency Freaks and the Toronto Sound Fes­ti­val, amaz­ing and in­spir­ing peo­ple.

DS: There are a lot of women doing re­ally cool work these days, Cate­rina Bar­bi­eri, Julia Bon­dar, Sarah Davici, Kait­lyn Au­re­lia Smith and Sarah Belle Reid to name a few who show up in my YouTube feed. There music seems to me to have a more human or sen­si­tive feel to it.

PS: David Suther­land and I have a side project called Not Your Av­er­age Worker Bees, Michael Palumbo (this­patcher), Heidi Chan (Bachelard), and Rob Kruik­shank to name a few. My ad­dic­tion to hard­ware syn­the­siz­ers prompted me to start a “sup­port” group called Fre­quency Freaks. There are monthly work­shops (some­times we take a month off) which are very kindly sup­ported by Ar­ray­Mu­sic. The work­shops are de­signed to give peo­ple who enjoy these in­stru­ments a reg­u­lar out­let for per­for­mance, so­cial­iza­tion, and learn­ing. We en­cour­age peo­ple who are brand-​new to hard­ware syn­the­sis be it mod­u­lar, or other types of hard­ware to join us. We have hosted pre­sen­ta­tions from many man­u­fac­tur­ers and mem­bers of the com­mu­nity often pro­vide tu­to­ri­als and tech­nique demon­stra­tions. We have had many lever­age the sup­port­ive com­mu­nity that has grown around Fre­quency Freaks to do their first live per­for­mance or first live syn­the­sizer per­for­mance (if they are com­ing from other in­stru­ments).

The Cana­dian Elec­tronic En­sem­ble dates back to the Sev­en­ties, how was the scene back then?

JM: Func­tion­ally, pretty much like the scene today with bet­ter er­gonom­ics and elec­tronic com­po­nents; VCO’s stay where you tune them.

DS: The sim­plest things were amaz­ing.

DJ: The scene was pretty open-​ended, es­pe­cially in the elec­tronic music sphere. (As far as the plac­ing of notes on the page, there was still a lot of dog­matic B.S. in the air, but being mostly elec­tronic guys, we pretty much cut through that quite eas­ily and ef­fec­tively.) Once I started work­ing with com­puter sys­tems, it got more di­ver­si­fied, and op­tions for sound gen­er­a­tion began to mul­ti­ply. So the scene just kept get­ting richer for a pretty long pe­riod of time. Of course, my work was heav­ily in­flu­enced by my day job in broad­cast­ing, but this was pos­i­tive, as it gave me an in­ter­na­tional out­look. I also ran a na­tional com­pe­ti­tion for young com­posers, so I had no short­age of “input” (in­tel­lec­tual or oth­er­wise) from emerg­ing tal­ented artists. It was a pos­i­tive, mostly healthy but re­ally crazy time!

Which pi­o­neers in Mod­u­lar­ism in­flu­enced you and why?

 

JM: Cage and Stock­hausen, for ob­vi­ous rea­sons. And Thomas Lehn. Cage told me he thought the Syn­thi A was “lovely”, Stock­hausen et son Gruppe’s per­for­mance in Mon­treal in 1971 changed my life and Lehn’s per­for­mance in Toronto in 1998 blew away some cob­webs.

DS: Cage for the in­tro­duc­tion to Zen. Steve Reich for the loop­ing and sam­ples. Wendy Car­los for the beauty.

RB: Eliane Ra­digue using the ARP 2500. Her hyp­notic long form slow mov­ing music is a mas­sive in­spi­ra­tion to me. The slowly evolv­ing tim­bres are fan­tas­tic.

Any ad­vice you could share for those will­ing to start or de­velop their “Mod­ulisme” ?

 

JM: play with it. It’s sup­posed to be fun.

PS: For some­one who is just be­gin­ning their jour­ney it is often dif­fi­cult to an­swer the first ques­tion any­one asks them at the be­gin­ning when try­ing to help them choose their first mod­ules – what kind of music do you want to make?  For me that ques­tion was very dif­fi­cult as I enjoy mak­ing all kinds of music.  In­stead focus on the ba­sics first.  Get a small sys­tem, learn it, and ex­pand on it S-​L-O-W-L-Y.  None of these things are in­ex­pen­sive and you will al­ways end up try­ing some mod­ules that you just don’t get along with for one rea­son or an­other.  You can save some money by pur­chas­ing used.  There are many ac­tive buy and sell fo­rums on Face­book and in other places to help fa­cil­i­tate your GAS!

https://www.cana­di­an­elec­tron­i­censem­ble.com