Joyful Joyful / Michael C. Duguay / New Hermitage
Live Collaborative Ensemble Performance
Improvisations & New Compositions
Friday, March 10, 2023
Hotel Wolfe Island
Doors @ 7, Music @ 8
Tickets $12 advance/$15 door
BUY TICKETS
Critically-acclaimed Kingston-based composer Michael C. Duguay, Halifax’s award-winning minimalist chamber-jazz quartet New Hermitage and Toronto/Peterborough’s Polaris Prize-nominated hymn-drone duo Joyful Joyful will be artists in residence at the Hotel Wolfe Island from March 6-10. Over the course of this residency, this 7-piece ensemble will be working on collaboratively composing material for a forthcoming recording project in Halifax in June. Produced by Duguay, this recording will incorporate the group’s broad musical interests, combining their backgrounds in jazz, classical, drone, folk, ambient, improvisational, minimalist and avant-garde music, and will feature more than thirty other musicians from the Nova Scotian creative music community. This residency and recording project has been funded by the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
This project was developed out of a summer ‘22 festival performance at Sappyfest in Sackville, New Brunswick where New Hermitage and Joyful Joyful, meeting for the first time, joined Duguay for an unscripted improvisational performance oriented around his songwriter material. The performance received a standing ovation and the ensemble decided to pursue the project further, with Duguay shifting from principal songwriter to co-composer & producer.
Local audiences are invited to join the ensemble on Friday, March 10th for a collaborative performance of improvised music and new material composed over the course of the group’s residency featuring saxophone, cello, harp, electric guitar, piano, accordion, electronics, and voice.
Michael C. Duguay is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and poet based in central Ontario whose work focuses on site-specific ensemble recording, radical DIY community-building collaborative practices, and genre-fluid and multidisciplinary projects featuring a diverse and revolving cast of contributing members. Known for his profound and literary lyrical style and projects as far-ranging as traditional folk, punk, free jazz, avant-garde drone, and electronic music, his voice finds a home anywhere the work delivers him.
Joyful Joyful are a Peterborough/Toronto-based duo of voice and electronics. From the singular voice of Cormac Culkeen an enveloping world of electro-acoustic soundscapes is woven. Their debut album was listed for the 2022 Polaris Music Prize.
Ambient improvised chamber ensemble, New Hermitage, is based in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia). In their performances, musical dimensions evolve with intentionality and are given shape by the environment as the environment is shaped by the music. Inspired by the ethos of listening practices from Jerry Granelli and Pauline Oliveros that erase sonic hierarchy, New Hermitage dismantles systems of harmony, form, and orchestration through spontaneous composition.
