líthos klásma (1995) was commissioned as the acousmatic score to the dance piece “Meshing” by Dave Wilson and the Parahumans. It premiered as part of the show Coded in October 1995. Part composition, part soundscape, it was a self-contained production on the Korg 01/WFD workstation, which was a convenient and affordable way for me to work.
The score is typical of my style at the time, incorporating modified factory patches, ambient synth drones, drums, metallic percussion, canonic loops, and digital noise gestures. The waveform shaping, automated mixing, panning, and precision reflect several years of exploration using the above device and its predecessor, the Korg M1.
The workstation is set to a just intonation tuning as follows (in cents deviation from equal temperament): C -16, C# -31, D -12, D# 00, E +39, F +4, F# -33, G -14, G# -2, A -49, A# +2, B +41.
Composed and recorded September-October 1995
Korg 01/WFD, live transfer to CD-R, August 2000, unmastered
Image: my birthday, January 1995
Music and composer’s notes copyright Bruce A. Russell 2025
Study for Two Pianos and Tape (1990) is a collaboration with Garnet Willis. We were electronic music students of Philip Werren and composition/music history students of James Tenney at York University. The piece was recorded live at a student recital, where both Werren and Tenney were in attendance. This is a single mic recording that has survived several stages of media storage.
I created the tape by layering synth lines, drones and homemade samples, varying the tape machine speed during mixing to create glissando effects. I then added a series of very quick cuts with a razor blade and blank leader tape.
Garnet is playing a grand piano, and me a partially prepared upright, which he later detuned while I played to create further glissando effects. The piano parts are semi-improvised around a D-flat extended/microtonal tonic centre. A classmate volunteered to mix the tape around the room speakers during the performance. There were random pans and fade ins and outs, to which we responded with active gestures, minimalism and a hint of romanticism.
Garnet is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist, audio engineer, composer and instrument builder. I highly recommend exploring his groundbreaking work. He’s also one of the first friends I made in Toronto.
Note: this recording is dynamic, beginning quietly and becoming loud in several segments.
Recorded in concert, April 5, 1990, DACARY, York University Two pianos, reel to reel tape (Yahama DX-27, Roland S-50, DEP-5 effects) DAT recording transferred to cassette in 1990, transferred to CD-R in 2003
Artwork: sketch for the concert program, artist unknown
Music and composer’s notes copyright Bruce A. Russell 2025
On August 29, 1998, composer, educator and former Arraymusic Artistic Director Linda Catlin Smith walked up to the attic studio of CIUT 89.5 FM on St. George St. and gave a brilliant, illuminating, live interview on Radio Music Gallery. I was a year into hosting the show, brash and awkward, and yet made space for Linda to speak expansively about her work and ideas. She was gracious in correcting my on-air mispronunciation of her name. I was fortunate to have made this early connection, and be present for what in retrospect felt like a composition lesson.
The source audio is an aircheck recording on cassette, digitized in July 2025. The release of this interview was authorized by Linda Catlin Smith.
Recordings referred to during the interview:
The Surroundings (1995), performed by Barbara Pritchard
The View from Here (1992), performed by Barbara Pritchard
Versailles (1988), performed by Les Coucous Bénévoles
I began compiling the songs for this mixtape at the beginning of 2020, letting the playlist shift and grow over three tumultuous years. This is my “ultimate” mixtape; one that covers the formative decade of my childhood that began a half century ago (concentrating on the early 80s), and focuses on Black legends in the genres of R&B, jazz-funk, disco and boogie during the final period of analog recording. This is music that finds me most at home in my body, with familiar and positive lyrical themes. It’s a Black yacht rock movie dream.
As with previous mixtapes, there is melodic and harmonic mixing as well as beat matching and a smooth tempo curve. I worked to create an occasionally seamless conversational flow from song to song, and was surprised that led me to include well-known anthems alongside my usual “rare groove” selections. The result is a more unified mood and less eclectic set. No effects have been used, and where possible, songs are segued naturally with little or no crossfading.
PART I Barry White | Never, Never Gonna Give Ya Up (1973) DeBarge | I Like It (1982) Wally Badarou | Preachin’ (1980) Gene Dunlap Featuring The Ridgeways | It’s Just the Way I Feel (1981) George Duke | Corine (1979) Syreeta | I Don’t Know (1977) Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson | Alien (Hold on to Your Dreams) (1980) Tania Maria | Come with Me (1983) Minnie Riperton | Adventures in Paradise (1975) Anita Baker | Do You Believe Me (1983) D Train | Children of the World (1983) Jeffrey Osborne | Ain’t Nothing’ Missin’ (1982) Herbie Hancock | Magic Number (featuring Sylvester) (1981)
PART II The Jones Girls | Nights over Egypt (1981) Odyssey | Love’s Alright (1982) Billy Ocean | Everlasting Love (1981) Patrice Rushen | Get Off (You Fascinate Me) (1984) Brenda Russell | Way Back When (1979) Chaka Khan | I’m Every Woman (1978) Aretha Franklin | Jump to It (1982) Luther Vandross | I Wanted Your Love (1983) Bernard Wright | Move Your Body (1983) Dazzle | All (1979) Maze Featuring Frankie Beverly | Love Is the Key (1983) The Emotions | Here You Come Again (1981) Sylvia St. James | So I Say to You (1980)
Eccentricities is a six-song, self-released cassette EP which emerged in the fall of 1990. I recall having 100 copies made and being satisfied with that level of dispersion; it was all I could afford in any case. In honour of the 30th anniversary, I present two of the songs here (with a third linked below).
My recordings during this period were all effectively demos. Made with no budget, engineers, producers, retakes, final mixdowns, editing, mastering, label releases or promotion. They were an in the moment document, like the solo piano recordings I turned to focus on in later decades, created with a minimum of tools and preparation and on the raw side. There are many songs and pieces I’ve returned to for revision or reimagining, but the version 1.0s are always done quickly, very rarely seeing a live performance.
Track 1, side B. In its awkward, often corny way, “The Gardener” was about envisioning a sustainable, equitable and peaceful future. Musically, it looked back on the two decades which preceded it terms of tempo, rhythm and melodic style; and even further back in the century with the use of stacked-fifth chords as the main harmonic fabric. All the keyboard parts were performed live. The presence of the TR-808 marked the first time I incorporated a preprogrammed element into my music. I often wish I had seen fit to capture it on its own as a stem as it was so fun to make, and like the song itself, it expressed a unique side of my musical thought at a particular time.
Written and recorded July 1990 half-inch 8-track, unmastered mixdown to DAT Roland S-50, Roland TR-808, Yahama DX-27, Fender bass, voice
Track 3, side B. “One Foot Firmly Planted” is the closing song of the EP, and like “The Gardener” which opens the side, it employs chords of stacked fifths in the organ as the harmonic material, sometimes doubled here by the voices. The intro is clearly modelled upon Steve Reich’s “Tehillim.” It’s a piece which did not “emerge from the ground” as I boast in the liner notes but neverthless formed spontaneously, layer by layer from a bare bones beat of conga, clapping and floor tom; coloured with organ and hailed by some strange, quasi-philosophical, quasi-choral voices. In an unconscious nod to the period of study of electroacoustic composition which I had just concluded, I randomly spliced and recombined the last few seconds of the multitrack tape, where the song disintegrates.
Written and recorded July 1990 half-inch 8-track, unmastered mixdown to DAT percussion, Korg CX-3, voice
Iconic composer Steve Reich turns 84 today. He was recently alleged to have made some pointedly anti-Black racist remarks in the early 70s.
Today is also a kind of late emergence for me; my first performance on a symphony orchestra program (albeit of a chamber work). As a child, I first heard the n-word directed at me in the early 70s.
I don’t need to imagine how white people were back then. I was there. I’m not shocked to the point of sudden offence by recollections of it today. It was normative then, now it is “partisan.”
The two events above are unrelated, and yet as a simultaneity they’re cause for some reflection in my world. I’ve been a great admirer of Reich’s music for decades, and have spoken with him numerous times after his concerts. His work has influenced my own as it has generations of other musicians, except that as someone from the African diaspora, I once saw this influence as my own reclaiming of the African diasporic musical ideas in minimalism.
I studied the music of Ghana—the predominant source of Reich’s structural ideas and sound—as well as that of other African nations at the same time I was discovering and studying his music and minimalism in general. I remember as a student observing his defensive spin on appropriation and bristling at the “mechanized Africans” joke that he wrote in his early 70s book. He was still making that joke in the 2010s. I’ve always loved his music but remained mindful of the composer’s positionality and increasing conservatism.
It would be wrong for me to actually claim Ghanaian musical traditions as my own, though my distant and not-so-distant ancestors came from there and other places in West Africa (especially Nigeria), and notwithstanding my eternal quest for the roots of my Black identity. Reich got around the problem of appropriating another culture the way white people have for centuries: entitlement.
I can think of a lot of examples of bald-faced Orientalism in my early music, as embarrassing for my lack of originality as for their crassness. I’ve long noted how the lack of performative Blackness in my person and my music creates a distance between me and the Black communities I’ve interacted with. It is what it is. At the same time, I’ve sought to be authentic for who I really am rather than what I might aspire to.
A longstanding power struggle within Black diasporas is over whom among us is truly Black, in terms of cultural heritage and especially skin tone and lineage. Blackness is not monolithic, and neither is that conflict. But we didn’t create it, colonialism did.
Reich, an artist who built their career through exploiting Black voices, was outed as a racist by a white journalist, Val Wilmer, who made their career by exclusively covering Black voices and photographing Black faces. This bears examination. From the get, Black folks aren’t party to the discussion.
Cancelling Reich or anyone else of his generation is disingenuous in this context, especially when led by the white classical music world who’ve generally kept Black people (and Indigenous and racialized artists in general) off the concert stage and out of the canon. And I can tell you, after many years of attending new music concerts, it’s usually been pretty darn awkward being in the audience too, or the post-concert mingle: “Who are you, again?”
Honestly, go cancel Handel for buying shares in the companies that transported and traded Africans into slavery. See how well that will work out.
Conversations on race aren’t going to address anti-Black oppression. Sharing the power is, and that does mean white folks getting out of their comfort zones, taking up way less space and not enacting white gaze. Reconsider your obsession with Black culture and Black pain, profiting from it, if you’re not Black. Are you supporting or dominating?
Conversations are still necessary, but they have to reflect equitable power structures.
I’m not sure if I have a coherent, fully-formed take on what is happening with my music right now. For one thing, it depends on whether it continues to happen. But I do know that, as with how silence and empty space operate in tandem with musical sound, what is not happening and what can’t be heard or isn’t being noticed is just as important as that which is.
I’m here. I’ve always been here. As with minimalism in music, what is changing depends upon your vantage point. If change is in fact constant, the answer to when change will happen can never be, “Give it time.”
The northern Great Lakes steel town took a big fat eraser to my Blackness. The adults had no way to acknowledge it because it exposed the cognitive dissonance of my existence in their world, and thus had no way to deal with the bullies, the rednecks and the N-wordage that swarmed around me like black flies at the beginning of camping season. They would say to me, in 1970s Canadian news voices, “Look, you have only good things here. If you had been left with your poor brethren you would suffer urban blight.” They would say, “You are accepted because… you are here.”
So was the caricature Black lawn jockey across the street from the schoolyard sandbox I played in everyday. It was in a front yard next door to my aunt’s house, on the same street as ours, and I don’t remember anything about the people who lived in that house. Or if people actually lived there. Who would do stuff like that. The sandbox was beside the basketball court.
Every time I tried to play basketball I kept seeing that damned lawn jockey. I don’t remember now when exactly it was removed, somewhere in the 1980s perhaps, but anyway I discovered performance sports felt like too much exposure for my body, a body that had no guarantees of its protection.
They who were in those days more bookish would tell me I was biracial. I realized much later that it meant: white… and something else. I would forever be expected to be a model of racial harmony, and spend a lifetime listening to white people ring that front desk bell in my consciousness.
Getting kicked out of the lobby of a Howard Johnson in Biloxi, Mississippi in 1978 was the most surreal moment of my childhood. If not the most traumatic, because my white family claimed me and I got to go back to our room. (In fact, my parents were out of state for the night and one of my older siblings rescued me, as they often did). It was the coldest water I ever felt seize my body, and I grew up jumping in freezing lakes. That was my introduction to the American South. My ancestral homeland.
Being an early transracial adoptee was traumatic in many ways. If you are a white person reading this, I am not recounting or performing this trauma for you. I am not your James Baldwin. This is a Juneteenth musing. As I get older, I start to understand more my own sense of my relationship with my Black biological history in Alabama, the Caribbean and West Africa. My white heritage, settler North America, the United Kingdom and Western Europe, was virtually handed to me on a plate.
I never ever have to celebrate my white history—as the historical narrative underpinning systemic racism it was used to temporarily but effectively obliterate my Blackness—but I am always aware of my economic and cultural privilege through my proximity to whiteness, and shade privilege through my light skin.
Two summers ago I briefly visited the steel town again, for the first time in two decades. I had a few spare, early morning minutes to walk down my old street and see my old house and also the schoolyard where I’d spent nine school years and summer breaks interacting with other children in the community, almost all white.
There was one critical exception: my closest friend was of Indo-Caribbean descent. It didn’t hurt that we lived a few doors away from one another. He had a large family with whom he shared a heritage. I loved hanging out with him and getting up to many things, including a two-man, lo-fi 80s band and much later, a theatre/music partnership.
In front of my old house, the one where all the good, ecstatic, formative and traumatic episodes occurred, at around seven in the morning, a grey dawn, I paused with a calmness I wish I had had more at the ready back then. Our old home was there, and I took in all the little changes to its appearance, feeling the coziness of the street again. A man emerged next door, with an infant.
I never thought about being the feared other upon returning home. Because it was a given, a constant value like n always equals, at any hour of the day, in any setting. A trip to a Mike’s Milk in 1986, home for a visit after a few weeks away for my first year of university, saw me sucker-punched and bloodied, glasses knocked to the ground and damaged over my garish clothing: a five-dollar sixties leather mosaic vest from Courage My Love in Kensington Market. It certainly wasn’t about anything but the clothing… and my uppitiness in wearing it and inevitably challenging the manhood of a frustrated young white man. It wasn’t the worst thing that ever went down there, but it was the one that reminded me once again who I was beyond the protection of white family proximity.
I chatted with the father, as it turned out, of the infant. I knew the history of families who had lived in all the houses on the street, almost. He seemed less interested in clocking my presence right about then. Mine was a very old house built in about 1905; it wasn’t a stretch to add me to its history in a border town.
That morning I discovered that there were townhomes being built over where the sandbox, the basketball court and the view of that racist front yard had been, leaving me without any familiar visual to trigger memories. I was OK with that. You can’t go home again, and sometimes you don’t want to.
Grateful for so much as my history unfolds in reverse. Summer’s first journey to my birth mother’s home, with a family whom I’m so proud of with me. Upon our return my paternal side manifested. A grandfather in the Jim Crow South. Voice on the line who shared this family’s history of migration to the north, who invited me to holiday gatherings and told me, “You’re not alone in this.” Music and accomplishment has flowed through both sides. My genetically aspirational test results confirming Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica as ancestral places. And out of the sky, my long-failed career as a recording artist is suddenly not quite so failed (recall: history in reverse).
I created a playlist a couple of years ago, to collect a series of 70s and 80s re-edits emailed to me in draft form for my feedback. One of the tracks arrived by way of reply to an email I’d sent with a gift of remastered music files, the source material for the re-edit. This was how it was with me and Masimba Kadzirange, Grandmaster DJ Son Of S.O.U.L., Source of Undying Love. For me it was an acknowledgement: among circles which intersected and didn’t in our brief friendship, we had this. A man of extraordinary musical gifts, recollection, insight, technique and experience, he included me among those trusted folks from whom he sought an opinion and whose musical values were understood and shared. I’m honoured by that fact.
It’s been one month since he left us suddenly. I’m grateful to have shared in the wonderful human being he was, while part of me remembers not taking up his invitation to “come through one time” to a recent series of club nights he was putting on only a ten-minute walk from my home. I was too tired from my job or busy tending to the bedtimes and wakeups of our small children. Every time I did get to hear him spin and cut — always with turntables, music on vinyl and no software — I was astounded by his musicality and brought to my feet to dance and sing along.
Masimba made a tremendous impact in his community. He was loved. He will be missed in person, though his memory will continue to be celebrated by those who knew him, and through the music that was a central part of his own celebration of life.
“Pardon the delayed response my brother. You all will see me soon.”
July 2001, early morning. I pass through an intersection in a quiet neighbourhood and walk along a street that appears impossibly green, even for Toronto. As I look in all four directions I see no one else. The light is golden, the air still cool and I have a rare unobstructed view into the distances. I am about to begin a new chapter. There’s a lot of fear but this moment is breaking it up. This corner of stolen land or what is built upon it seems briefly mine.
November 2011, mid morning. I reach that same intersection in a busy neighbourhood, to view the apartment home that my wife, children and I will live in. The corner is bustling. Much has changed here in a decade, in my own life to an almost unfathomable degree. Spiritually it feels like coming home; mentally the years are a discarded anchor; physically this is only a brief resting place.
July 2013, late evening. I stand on our balcony, staring out at the intersection. Always that. The year is barely half over, and already it has seen almost as much change as the dozen just passed. Change that flows out of the natural course of things, and sudden, surprising change. It’s not all good, it just is. Love is more difficult, but deeper. Ideals are more firmly grounded, less rosy. But dreams don’t die.
EL MAHBOOB 