Exit Points #35 - 3rd Anniversary - February 24

Performers

Yang Chen

Yang (they/them) is just happy to be here with you :) They are a percussionist with many side-hustles who prioritizes collaboration, personal growth, and joy. Yang is a grateful nexus of playful curiosity, cross disciplinary yearning, classical training, and loving relationships. All of which influence process & product within their work.

Yang released their debut album, titled “longing for _” on People Places Records. 

Racha Moukalled

Racha Moukalled is a Lebanese jazz Vibraphonist based in Toronto. She has a degree in Jazz piano performance at York University, where she studied with Mark Eisenman, Lorn Lofsky, Kelly Jefferson, Kevin Turcott and more. During her last year, she found a new passion and curiosity for the Vibraphone. Along with her jazz studies, Racha had the pleasure to study Free Improvisation with Casey Sokol. She aims to apply these teachings in her playing, as well as Free Improv soirees that she hosts monthly at Annette Studios, holding the same tradition and values as the ones hosted by Casey Sokol. Racha has been performing with multiple artists in the city: Donovan Lock group, The Zest Creatives, Bureh Bk and the shop,  and with many more notable Toronto musicians. 

Charles Spearin

Charles is a co-founder of the influential Toronto indie-rock collective Broken Social Scene, co-founder of the art-rock ensemble Do Make Say Think, as well as a touring musician for celebrated Canadian artists Feist and Gord Downie. In 2010 he won a Juno for his critically acclaimed solo album "The Happiness Project" in which, by artfully playing with the cadence and rhythms of his neighbor's voices, he arranged recorded interviews as though they were songs. In 2021 he released a second, mostly instrumental , solo album entitled “MyCity of Starlings” and he continues to be an active, influential member of the Toronto experimental music scene.

Olivia Shortt

(They/Them: Anishinaabe, Nipissing First Nation) Olivia Shortt is a Tkarón:to-based, multifaceted artist and storyteller whose work encompasses hybridity from start to finish.

Highlights include performing Raven Chacon’s ‘For Olivia Shortt’ at The Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC) as part of Chacon’s series of solo works 'For Zitkála-Šá' during the 2022 Whitney Biennial; playing at the Lincoln Center (NYC) with the International Contemporary Ensemble; performing in their film debut in Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan’s 2019 film ‘Guest of Honour’; as well as recording an album of Robert Lemay’s music two kilometres underground in the SnoLAB (Neutrino Lab in Sudbury, Canada). Recent projects include a new site-specific semi-improvised opera and a commission for Blueridge Chamber Festival (Vancouver). Works created over the last two years include commissions from Long Beach Opera (California), the JACK Quartet (NYC), and Din of Shadows (Toronto).

Shortt was a finalist for the 2021 Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award as well as awarded and named one of the 2020 Buddies in Bad Times’ Emerging Queer Artists. Shortt was featured in the 2020 Winter edition of Musicworks Magazine.

Animal Party

Ethereal, bassy beats, harp, vocals. A manifestation of the sounds of the club mixed with the organic. Animal Party is a multi-instrumentalist and electronic music producer with a hardware-heavy live show, which includes live harp, synthesizers, and midi controls. She paints imagery of natural phenomena, relating to the human condition and her own personal experiences through music by blending dense textures, ample beats, organic and synthetic sounds. 

Rod Campbell

Rod has played with numerous improvised music groups, at various venues, including Audiopollination, Coexisdance, Music in the Galleries, Distillery Jazz Festival, New Music Marathon at Yonge Dundas Square, the Electric Eclectics Festival in Meaford Ontario, and the Element Choir. He is currently a member of the Toronto Improvisors Orchestra and the improvising quartet ARRC.

Bea Labikova

Bea Labikova is a Slovak-Canadian saxophonist and improviser whose music traverses free improvisation, avant-garde, modern jazz and Slovak folk music. She is part of many ad-hoc ensembles across Toronto as well as the avant-groove Future Proof, free improvised project “No Beginning No End” alongside Germaine Liu and William Parker, the avant-jazz group Triio and the contemporary afrobeat band Asiko Afrobeat Ensemble. In her solo project Mount Joy, Bea couples wind instruments, vibraphone and percussion with electronic processing to create sonic landscapes that reflect the arctic tundra. Her spontaneous compositions are accompanied by large-scale visuals developed at an arts residency in Svalbard near the north pole. In addition to specialising in saxophone, Bea has been developing her own innovative style on the fujara, (a Slovak overtone flute), exploring the fujara's percussive potential. Bea is the co-founder, visual artist and one-half of the driving force behind the Women From Space Festival. ​ ​

Hrysovalanti

Hrysovalanti is a media artist, researcher, enthusiast and experimenter by trade. She is currently doing her PhD in Computational Arts at York University and she regularly live codes with the Endemics(@cymatiste,@artbykavi,@magfoto). Generally, in her practice she emphasizes on the creation of groups of electronic sound/kinetic sculptures that act as artificially living communities. She is always keen to jam with others and speculate about the performativity of the world.

Justin Massey

Canadian saxophonist and composer Justin Massey is an interpreter of contemporary music based in Toronto, Ontario. With an obsession of creating new sonorities and textures through the saxophone, Justin searches for obscure and unexplored sounds offered by the instrument and its unparalleled potential to create visceral and emotional music. Justin presents music of his generation in all of his performances by commissioning new repertoire and collaborating closely with composers in search of these new sounds, often through electronic manipulation of the saxophone.