Strophe Rocket: Freesound plays the Music of Martin Arnold
+ Chris Dadge Solo Drums
Toronto-based collective Freesound is one of a number of young groups of musicians representing the future of Canadian contemporary and experimental art music through innovative and compelling programming. Freesound operates as a non-hierarchical collective composed of nine members: Matthew Antal, Amahl Arulanandam, Michael Murphy, Émilie Fortin, Paolo Griffin, Aysel Taghi-Zada, Matti Pulkki, Wesley Shen, Tristan Durie.
For this special performance for New Works Calgary, Freesound will perform Strophe Rocket (2025), a new very long work by Alberta-born, Peterborough-based iconoclast composer, teacher, and psychedelic ultra-lounge guitarist Martin Arnold.
Opening the evening we’ll experience a rare solo drumkit performance by Calgary drummer and Bug Incision founder Chris Dadge.
Strophe Rocket will be performed by the following Freesound members:
Émilie Fortin: trumpet (live and on the gated recording)
Wesley Shen: melodica (harpsichord on the gated recording)
Aysel Taghi-Zada: violin (pizzicato violin on the gated recording)
Martin Arnold: melodica (gating a recording)
Bios
Martin Arnold
Martin Arnold is a musician and teacher based in Peterborough, ON. As a composer of notated music, his pieces have been performed nationally and internationally by many acclaimed artists including the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Quatuor Bozzini, pianist Eve Egoyan, violinist Mira Benjamin, and cellist Anton Lukoszevieze. As a performer, he is a member of a number of marginal free improvisation, experimental pop, psychedelic ultralounge, and weird folk communities, playing (very idiosyncratically) melodica, electric guitar, tenor banjo and garage electronics. With Eric Chenaux, he co-founded the influential rat-drifting records. Martin is an Associate Professor in the Cultural Studies Department of Trent University.
Arnold’s pieces are characterized by a sense of dislocation and discontinuity, effects which are created using atonal melodies and novel combinations of instruments and timbres. It is generally slow-paced and characterised by a drifting, directionless quality, which he terms "slack". Within Canadian experimental music and beyond, it has been said of Martin Arnold that ‘A lot of the people whose work probably matters the most to you are Martin’s students as well as his friends’ (Kurt Newman for Sound American, 2020).
Like Mark Ellestad, whose piece ‘In the Mirror of This Night’ we presented in Spring 2025, Martin Arnold and his compositions are closely connected to a group of aesthetically distinct Canadian experimental composers who studied under Czech composer Rudolf Komorous at the University of Victoria, during a particularly rich period of creative exchange between the mid-1970s and 80s. These include not only Ellestad and Arnold, but also Jon Abram, Linda Catlin Smith, Allison Cameron, Stephen Parkinson, Christopher Butterfield, Owen Underhill, and others. While each of these composers creates distinct work, there is an ‘aesthetic of the wonderful’, a reverence for meaningful experimental pathways and willingness to break conventional form that threads them together.
Freesound
Toronto-based collective Freesound is one of a number of young groups of musicians representing the future of Canadian contemporary and experimental art music through innovative and compelling programming. Freesound operates as a non-hierarchical collective composed of nine members – eight performers and one administrative lead.
Freesound is: Matthew Antal, Amahl Arulanandam, Michael Murphy, Émilie Fortin, Paolo Griffin, Aysel Taghi-Zada, Matti Pulkki, Wesley Shen, Tristan Durie.
The collective’s diverse cultural composition fosters a wide variety of musical interpretations, enabling Freesound to explore a wide array of contemporary and experimental chamber music. Freesound’s members are among Canada’s top musicians specializing in contemporary and experimental music, each bringing unique perspectives, collaborative approaches, and artistic strengths to the collective. Each member of Freesound actively participates in programming decisions, commissioning new works, and producing concerts.
Founded in its current format in 2021 through an agreement by its nine members, Freesound’s concerts combine commissions, performances of existing works, and revivals of landmark works from the 21st and late 20th centuries. Since 2021, commissions have included Laure M. Hiendl (DE), Martin Arnold (CA), Maria Eduarda Martins (CA/BZ), Alex Jang (CA), Haotian Yu (CA/CN), Christina Volpini (CA), Andrew Hulse (CA/US), Christopher Fox (UK), Wesley Shen (CA), and a growing list of composers from Canada and around the world.
Freesound has performed at festivals such as Suoni Il Popolo Festival (Montreal) and Women from Space (Toronto) and since 2023, has been ensemble-in-residence at the Arraymusic in Toronto.
Freesound has appeared on albums of music by Georgia Denham (2024, Sawyer Editions) and Andrew Hulse (2024, Self-published).
Freesound, its commissions, and performances are generously funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Toronto Arts Council, the SOCAN Foundation, Lorna & Roger Smith, and the contributions of its various private donors.
Chris Dadge
Chris Dadge lives in Calgary, Alberta, where he works as a producer/engineer, percussionist, composer, multi-instrumentalist, record label operator, and concert organizer.
As a musician & performer, the bulk of Dadge’s output occurs in two main fields. In the realm of free improvisation, Dadge has spent the bulk of his years playing percussion, developing a voice based on an increasingly open-ended variety of sound-generating objects, integrating found items, extreme tunings, and re-purposed strings. Massimo Ricci writes, “the almost perfect balance between skin, wood and metal-derived timbres is definitely cherished,” and David Keenan (The Wire magazine) noted, “Dadge has a fleet, needling style that would transpose Milford Grave’s multi-pulse work to a looser, more thought-paced setting, working in bursts of propulsion and single emphatic sound events.” This underlying quest for a personalized vocabulary led to the broadening of the instrumental palette, adding violin, broken electronics, crude sampling, and various other small instruments to the list, which The Wire's Byron Coley called "a splendid, low-bore Improv racket in the classic pots-and-pans style."
He maintains an active duo with saxophonist Jonathon Wilcke (the two also released Rural Optimism, a trio recording with guitarist Joe Morris), and has additionally, in mostly ad hoc, one-off settings, worked with Peter Evans, Jason Kahn, Tim Olive, Eugene Chadbourne, Jack Wright, Chris Riggs, Eric Chenaux, Mats Gustafsson, Christian Munthe, Ellwood Epps, Bill Horist, John Oswald, and Colin Fisher. In 2005, he founded Bug Incision, one of Calgary's longest-running experimental music-focused DIY organization.
Dadge also maintains a busy life in the world of pop music. He plays in Sub Pop recording artist Chad VanGaalen’s backing band, The Bleach Wipes, and appears on all of the studio albums by Toronto-based indie pop darlings Alvvays, including their last two albums Antisocialites and Blue Rev, which took home Juno Awards in 2018 and 2023 for Alternative Album of the Year. Dadge also plays drums for and co-produces records with Samantha Savage Smith and for more than a decade he led Lab Coast, a critically acclaimed bedroom pop combo.
As a producer and engineer, he runs Child Stone Studios out of his basement in Mount Pleasant, and has worked on releases by Hermitess, Eye of Newt, Victrix, Stucco, Starpainter, Ryan Bourne, Jom Comyn, and Oranje, to name but a few.
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