'Vapours' Live Performance Series

Event Announcement: Please join us on Thursday, November 24 at 8:00pm for the Fall 2016 performance in our Vapours New Music Series. Performing Objects features musicians who use appliances, food and toys in their performances; it is simultaneously playful, absurd, beautiful and disturbing.

The three performances that comprise this event explore non-traditional musical instruments as symbolic props. This event is a co-presentation of Modern Fuel’s Vapours New Music series, Queen’s New Media Artist and Speaker series, and the Tone Deaf Festival of Experimental Music.

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November 24 @ 8:00pm

$10 General / $5 Students and Modern Fuel members

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Domestique is a musical that operates within a staged makeshift household in which digitally processed sounds of blenders and vacuum cleaners contribute to a humorous, choreographed scene. ​

Andrea Pensado performs with “Andrieta”, a ventriloquist dummy whose “voice” is processed live, playing on the musicality of speech patterns. ​

Pachamama by Alexandra Rodriguez incorporates gestural and musical storytelling rituals using vegetables as acoustic and electronic instruments.

Event Announcement: Modern Fuel, with support from CFRC, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Community Foundation of Kingston and Area, presents the latest installment in its Vapours series of experimental music, a concert featuring Old Haunt (Kingston, On) Sam Shalabi (Montreal, QC) and Reena Katz (Toronto, ON) on Thursday, July 28th, at 8pm.

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Old Haunt features Lucas Huang, Matt Rogalsky and Chris Trimmer. Their music explores the
intersection of folk/pop songwriting and electronic atmospherics, incorporating elements of North American roots music, sampling, digital signal processing, and drone. This is their third performance, ever.

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Sam Shalabi is a prolific and longtime fixture of that city’s free improv and experimental post-rock scenes. He plays guitar and oud, with regular appearances in numerous jazz and free improv ensembles, maintains membership in a kaleidoscope of avant rock bands, and is at the compositional helm of various musical assemblages large and small, including Shalabi Effect and Land of Kush. His Kingston performance will present an “Oud Concerto,” featuring electro-acoustic audio collage and digital effects.

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Reena Katz works at the intersection of sound, space and social engagement. Her installation, composition and performance work has been exhibited publicly in galleries and on radio across North America and Europe. Her “Yiddish Record Collection: Illegitimate Tour” features songs from a variety of Yiddish traditions: protest, longing, desire and hybridity. Katz plays her favourite tunes on a vintage turntable, and offers casual annotated translations for under-Yiddished listeners. Her quirky political window onto this dying musical form recalls the good ol’ days, before Zionism defined the vast terrain that is Jewish cultural experience.

Event Announcement: Modern Fuel, with support from CFRC and the Canada Council for the Arts, presents the latest installment in its Vapours series of experimental music, a concert featuring Alcrete (Kingston, ON), Dreamcatcher (Montreal, QC) and Disguises (Toronto, ON) on Saturday, November 5th, at 8pm. 

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Alcrete performs brooding dark jams about rusty assembly lines and broken dreams. This is not your grandfather’s “Darkness On The Edge Of Town.”

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Dreamcatcher have been pounding analog drum synth music through their pile of amps, composing unusual songs and disorganized dance music, for seven years. Leads come courtesy of the rumble pack, an analog synth made of thriftstore junk. A variety of tape/vinyl textures provide gently moving backgrounds for maximum carsick effect. Their songs are about the mind, the heart, the body, the society, the snakes and ladders of fickle fortune, the double helix of creation and destruction, equal parts hugs and doom. Think rhythms of deep-breathing and undersea physics, textures of sonic fractals and electron pressure, with lyrics about oracle versus highwayman morality.

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Disguises are scum and splooge surfers of Toronto’s noise/avant D.I.Y. underground. A volcanic blast of rushing blood & damaged ear drums, Disguises seamlessly blurs the lines between avant/psych creep, free-jazz improvisation, mechanized industrial groove, and total punk attack.
Total “rock action” abuse, strings shredded, fried speakers and hours upon hours of VHS tape eaten for samples (Carpenter, Dr. Who, David Koresh, and classic Godzilla movies…they’re all in there) create a gonzo movie buffs auditory wet dream come to life. The end result is 21st Century punk rock crafted by a band too difficult to pigeonhole in to one specific genre, a band burning the heat of now.

 Event Announcement: Sponsored by and in association with the Kingston Multicultural Arts Festival, Modern Fuel, with support from CFRC, presents the latest installment in its Vapours series of experimental music, a concert featuring YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN (Toronto, On / Montreal, QC) and Pop Talk (Kingston, ON / Montreal, QC) on Friday, September 16, at 8pm.

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Pop Talk is a noise rock performance piece. Pop Talk is an off-kilter mumble-core sketch comedy duo. Pop Talk is committed to independent music and DIY culture. Heavily influenced by community radio they weave together talking bits with ‘musical’ bits. They have performed live and released 2 cassettes, the most recent a split with local socio-critical noise rocker Alcrete. Pop Talk is composed of Neven Lochead and James Goddard as well as other collaborators.

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YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN are an Asian Diasporic psychedelic noh-wave opera group fusing noise, metal, pop and folk music into a multidisciplinary hyper-orientalist cesspool of ‘eastern’ culture in giant monochrome paper sets. Blending Noh, Peking Opera, Buddhist Ritual Punk, Taiko Shows, Tokusatsu, Performance Art, Rock Opera & their own mangaesque cardboard ‘NEVERFLAT’ style of 2.5D set design, their bizarre form of music//altheater have awked and shawed audiences in Montreal for several years.

Founded in early 2008 by performance artists alaskaB and Ruby Kato Attwood, from the ashes of ‘Yellow Peril’, YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN functions as a mutating and constantly evolving art cult that brings together individuals of Diasporic and Indigenous identity to perform/create as a collective. Working in multiple mediums including Installation, Theater, Music and Design, YT//ST negotiate cultural clashes between dominant cultures and those whose traditions are oppressed, erased or being eclipsed. YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN continues to operate now between Montreal & Toronto.

Event Announcement: Modern Fuel, with support from CFRC 101.9 FM and the 2012 National Campus and Community Radio Conference, presents the latest installment in its Vapours series of experimental music, a concert featuring AJ Cornell (Montreal, QC), Gambletron (Montreal, QC), and Holzkopf (Vancouver, BC) on Thursday, June 14th, at 8pm.

This concert is one of an array of stimulating workshops, provocative speakers and mind-blowing music performances organized for the 2012 NCRC conference (visit the CFRC website for more information).

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Andrea Jane Cornell is manipulator of gleaned sounds who likens the sonorities of the every day to an assemblage of musical instruments randomly orchestrated by its inhabitants. She engages in the practice of listening as a creative act. Cornell has a background in campus and community radio and electroacoustic composition and a holds a master’s degree in Media Studies from Concordia University.

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Gambletron is a DIY Montreal-based experimental electronic improvisational noise artist. A circuit bender and musician, she is the innovator of “Noise Karaoke.” Her solo project is a mish mash of glitch toys and cheap little synth stuff. Her music is entertaining, electronic improv, that sounds like saturated, super glitch-fuzz, kind of dance-NOISE. In her head she is referencing pop music. Gambletron works extensively with constellation records on projects such as Matana Roberts, Carla Bozulich’s Evangelista, Hrsta, and Clues. She is also in a Greenlandic pop band.

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Holzkopf is the alias of Vancouver-based musician and DJ Jake Hardy. Since 2001, Holzkopf has been developing a style of hypnotic and frenetic dance music made from a mishmash of homemade tape collages, blown out drum machine beats and grabbed found sounds. The sound is reminiscent of proto-industrial, disco, hip-hop, global psychedelia, gospel and breakcore synthesized into a complete unique whole. A Holzkopf performance is always a spontaneous, raw and one of a kind experience.

Event Announcement: Modern Fuel, with support from CFRC and the Canada Council for the Arts, presents the latest installment in its Vapours series of experimental music, a concert of experimental sounds performed through an 8-speaker diffusion system that will feature works by Hector Centeno (Toronto, ON), Andrea Jane Cornell (Montreal, QC) and Matt Rogalsky (Kingston, ON) on Saturday, February 25th, at 8pm.

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Hector Centeno is a music composer, sound artist and digital media designer originally from Mexico and currently living in Toronto Canada. For his performance at Modern Fuel, Centeno will be improvising an acoustic journey through an imaginative landscape. To recreate the sense of space, sounds will be diffused through a multichannel system surrounding the audience. His improvisational procedure is inspired by Zen Buddhist art. Sound textures will gradually change and give place to new ones in an abstract soundscape journey that seeks to mirror the way the constant change and flow of reality is perceived through deep listening of our acoustic environment.

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Andrea Jane Cornell is manipulator of gleaned sounds who likens the sonorities of the every day to an assemblage of musical instruments randomly orchestrated by its inhabitants. She engages in the practice of listening as a creative act. Cornell has a background in campus and community radio and electroacoustic composition and a holds a master’s degree in Media Studies from Concordia University.

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Matt Rogalsky works in the areas of live electroacoustic music and sound installation. In addition to playing electric guitar with The Gertrudes, and recording and producing releases for Kingston bands like Madam Raz, Sleuth Bears and PS I Love You, Rogalsky’s recent activity includes solo electronic music performances in Canada, Cuba, the USA, Scotland and England, and group installation/performance work with Composers Inside Electronics in Mexico and New York.

Event Announcement: “Craig Leonard’s ‘Sun Ra to Sunn O))) – A Blasted History of Noise’ is an hour-long audio performance presenting over 100 significant noise albums from 1965 to the present. Leonard will masterfully create a flow of 30-second samples from alternating records continuously intersecting across two turntables, working his way chronologically through albums such as Sun Ra’s “The Magic City” (1965) to Dave Phillips “They Live” (2009). This idiosyncratic compilation and presentation of noise benchmarks is culled from the artist’s own collection, set at an upper limit of 100 that is daunting but by no means exhaustive. The general criterion is that the records explore sound experimentation, and specifically noise: dissonance, volume, distortion, unpredictability and chaos.”

Sun Ra to Sunn O))) was first presented in May at the experimental music festival in Halifax called Obey Convention, and it was featured in June as part of an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia called “Sometimes Always,” which explored the fleeting nature of audio technologies. Leonard’s performance will be followed by SOLID GOLD, a disco-themed dance party featuring DJ’s LK, Sealegs, and Helen at 10pm. Tickets for the night are $8 in advance, and $10 at the door.

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Craig Leonard‘s art practice is based in research and the recovery of lost histories, often involving meticulous musical archival: His project Gift for the Screamers (2007) involved finding the original members of LA punk band The Screamers to give them handmade vinyl records (the legendary band never released an official album); his installation Amusicology at Mercer Union (2009) meticulously documented connections and crossovers between various bands and their members. Leonard currently teaches Intermedia and Video at NSCAD University, Halifax, Canada. Image: Craig Leonard, Bad Seeds (detail), 2009.

Event Announcement: “In partnership with Kingston Punk Productions, Modern Fuel Presents a Vapours concert featuring The Famines (Edmonton) and local band False Face on Thursday July 30th at 8pm. Vapours is a semi-regular concert series hosted by Modern Fuel whose aim is to provide alternative space for exploratory musical performances and to promote emerging experimental musicians both locally and nationally.”

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False Face is a rambunctious group of musical troublemakers in Kingston, namely Stephen Guy, Paul Saulnier, and Mark Streeter. They bring the combined energy of years spent in garage rock bands, these guys are ready to explode.

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The Famines are an indie rock band hailing from Edmonton with two members, Raymond E. Biesinger on guitar and vocals, and Garrett Heath Kruger on the drums. The band uses a modern and minimalistic approach that draws comparisons to mid 70s punk and fuzzy garage rock. 

Event Announcement: “For ‘Sadderday Night,’ clock din Sound System returns after a two-year hiatus to accompany the sonic sculpture of Anders Oinonen and Mike Murphy in an exhibition of the same name at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre. This exploration of the ‘din of disappointment’ takes the form of an immersive environment in the main gallery at Modern Fuel on June 20th, 2009.”

Read the full event program here.

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clock din is the ongoing collaboration of artists from Canada, Europe and Japan, curated by Gord High. clock din has been exploring ‘components of sound’ for over ten years. First as an interactive sound website, then as a performing sound system, clock din fuses ‘dada and dubplates’ to create and to let users create their own soundscapes.

The clock din website (http://clockdin.com) went online in 1998, allowing over a million users to generate their own mixes with its library of sounds. Early adopters of clock din included the CBC’s 120seconds, Zed TV, and Brave New Waves, as well as print media including SHIFT, NOW, and Exclaim! magazines.

clock din has performed as an audio ‘sound system’ at a number of art and performance spaces including Ed Video in Guelph, the Gladstone Art Bar, the 2BOND in St. Catharines, and the infamous Electric Eclectics Festival in Meaford, Ontario. Generally, clock din Sound System includes a rotating roster of artists who have contributed sounds to the interactive site, joined by Gord High. clock din always performs ‘free form’, and makes use of its own signature sounds in a live setting.