The Music Gallery presents

Egyptrixx + The Dun Dun Band + Deenzi

X Avant XI

Thursday, October 13

Doors: 7pm | Concert: 8pm

The Music Gallery, 197 John St.

Tickets: $15 Regular | $10 Members/Students |$13 Advance at musicgallery.org

“Freehanded compositions of atmospheres that should be toxic to humans, but you’ll want to keep breathing them in.” – The Fader, on Egyptrixx

This year’s X Avant Festival is subtitled: Reverberations. So much in music depends on reverb. It colours our perception and enjoyment of music on many levels: take it away and music sounds unnatural, pour it on and it sounds majestic. Reverberation influences stylistic classification and composition of music, from booming Jamaican dub to atmospheric jazz.

But there’s more to reverberation than science and aesthetics. We’re also presenting artists whose work has made a profound impact on music practice and community building, thus we take it back to the source as we marvel at the figurative reverberations.

Night one is headlined by world-renowned Toronto electronic composer and DJ Egyptrixx. He deals in celestial club music; pursuing a shifting balance between melodic and dissonant, rapturous and antisocial. The music is primitive, minimalist – fixated mainly on texture, weight and crudely abstract grooves. These are concrete and euphoric slabs of sound.

The Dun Dun Band is guitarist/DJ Craig Dunsmuir’s latest ensemble. Long respected as that guy behind the counter of your favourite record store with great taste and zero attitude, he’s assembled contemplative, polyrhythmic music which draws heavily from but is not dominated by electronics. The Dun Dun Band is his biggest band yet, featuring Mike Smith, Karen Ng, Blake Howard, Colin Fisher, Jay Anderson and Josh Cole.

Deenzi – Heidi Chan & Andy Yue are a couple of musical psychonauts who make trancey folktronica using Asian wood flutes, glitchy broken beats, piano drama, and granular electronics. It’s the soundtrack to a Wuxia movie set on a space station orbiting a collapsing star. Ancient Asian to the future