Annual General Meeting

AGM June 24 Monday at 12 noon.

Come to this page just before noon to see a zoom or a jitsi.com link for the video conference AGM.

 https://meet.jit.si/moderated/4afbb495020bcc1f1ccaa38b1e3ec7dd87b13464a0e7b649861d1e53e9cc7fb1

BEAMS and AMASS sponsor Edmonton Noisefest 2024

 On August 17th 2024 Edmonton noisefest will happen again at the Aviary!

Checkout https://noisefest.ca/ for more details.

BEAMS Presents Drone Day 2024

Saturday May 25th, 2024, Idylwylde Community League, 3pm to midnight.

$10 for BEAMS members, and $10 for BEAMS memberships. Free for Idylwylde Community League members.

Time On	Project Name	Duration	Performance Description
15:00	m.o.a.i.n.	30 minutes	I will use some free software and Ableton live to improvise a live mixing variety of drones together for a complex dynamic of drone sound.
15:30	Brick Road	45 minutes	I will drone using pure drone and other continuous sounds with electronic and acoustic instruments.
16:15	Microenvironment	30 minutes	"Lost to time" An evolving layer of tension that slowly builds into a satisfying release.
16:45	Wayne Defehr	45 minutes	This piece weaves drone tones drawn from the sounds of the environment, such as my field recordings of the wind at the UA farm, and the North Saskatchewan R., along with the sounds of the weather sensors on the roof of the UA department of Geography, recorded with a JSON script and the API from a Weather Canada site.
17:30	Dinosaur Dragondrone	45 minutes	Building and maintaining an 'organic' feedback loop. Organic being not directly feeding the source signal back to itself...but relying on acoustic resonance and standing waves within the room to carry the sound.
18:15	Jared Epp	30 minutes	I plan to perform a new composition, that will be part structured and part improvised. It will be electronic based and may include some loops of found sound recordings.
18:45	James Parrott	1 hour	I plan to do a mix of improvised performance, plus a mix of field recordings and previous works.
19:45	Ghost Cars	1 hour	A longform piece made with guitar, keyboard, and samples.
20:45	Matt McKenzie	1 hour	Two or three compositions that explore ostinatos as a means of producing drones. Various synthesis techniques will be used including granular/sample-based.
21:45	Gary James Joynes / Clinker	1 hour	Modular Synthesizer Drone Set
22:45	Gray Hartley	30 minutes	Subject to change in the next 2 months but mainly just improvised guitar drones visually accompanied by the animated childhood trauma classic Watership Down
23:15	K.M. Toepfer	45 minutes	I plan to perform an improvised piece of sustained tones and shifting, reverberating drone-scapes created with feedback from home stereo equipment as the source material.

ddd

BEAMS Presents Drone Day 2024

 

For immediate release

April 28, 2024

BEAMS celebrates a decade of drone

EDMONTON—The Boreal Electroacoustic Music Society will commemorate National Drone Day, taking place Saturday, May 25, with an extensive live concert at Idylwylde Community Hall (8631-81 St.) starting at 3 pm. The event is expected to run until midnight.

Twelve artists from Edmonton and the surrounding region will perform sets varying in length from 30 minutes to an hour, performing drone music, often described as the taking the form of sustained sounds with a minimalist delivery. The repertoire of the acts playing that day (Brick Road, Wayne DeFehr, Dinosaur Dragondrone, Jared Epp, Ghost Cars, Gray Hartley, Gary James Joynes, Matt McKenzie, Microenvironment, m.o.a.i.n., James Parrott, and K.M. Toepfer) are slated to play a wide range of sounds from melodic tones to found-sound noise, which all fall under the requisites of what is considered drone.

The show takes place 10 years to the month of the first National Drone Day festivities, which first took place May 10, 2014. The event, first dreamed up by Marie LeBlanc Flanagan, co-founder of alternative music distributor Weird Canada, has become a national and annual occurrence ever since.

“Drone Day is a reclamation of the idea of a holiday, of a community celebration with no purpose beyond a shared interest in drone music, a community and a marked moment in time,” said LeBlanc Flanagan to Grid City Magazine in 2015.

Tickets to the Edmonton festivities of National Drone Day are $20, $10 for BEAMS members. The show is free to members of the Idylwylde Community League.

Media Contact:

Abram Hindle

info@beams.ca

 

 

Artist Spotlight

 Hi BEAMERS!

Every Friday we are going to be doing an artist spot light to help promote all the artists in our community.  If you want us to share your music/videos on our social media.  Send us a short bio and link to what you want shared.  This is going to be on going so there is no limit to how much you submit.  The more the merrier!  Make a list of all you would like to share along with the short bio and email your submissions to:

beams-submission@googlegroups.com

With the subject “Weekly Spotlight”  

Drone Day 2024 - Call for Performers

Hi!

We're looking for people who want to play 30 minute to 1 hour sets on Drone Day 2024, May 25th 2024.

Drone music is music with long tones, think the tubes on a bagpipe that the musician doesn't control, those are drones. Drone music is like that. Here's 6 hours of examples if you need a refresher on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDFcaXzo2sM

We'll be in person at the (probably) Idylwylde Community League, 8631 81 St NW, Edmonton, AB T6C 2W1.

It'll be from 2pm to 10pm on May 25th.

On April 20th, 2024 we will look at the submissions and adjudicate who to invite to Drone Day. We reserve curatorial rights.

Here's the form if you want to try to perform: https://forms.gle/GHiSega1u5SMacABA

 

 U.K. resident, multi-instrumentalist and improvisor Paul Morris brings his act Argument Club over to this side of the pond to his old stomping grounds of Edmonton for a one-night engagement presented by the Boreal Electroacoustic Music Society (BEAMS). Morris was a regular live performer and recording artist,  before absconding to England, where he continues to make his own brand of audio wizardry. He’s also recognized by the likes of Rochester, NY-based WAYO-FM as one of the world’s best improvisors. Also performing will be k burwash, Skrunt Skrunt, and Shawn Pinchbeck.

Art's Birthday 2024

Jan 20th 8pm and Jan 20th 2pm for Open Mic

Edmonton to join the world for a weird arts celebration

The Boreal Electroaoustic Music Society (BEAMS) will celebrate Art’s Birthday, one of the world’s most unusual celebrations of art. The event, Art’s Birthday Edmonton 2024, takes place Saturday, Jan. 20 at 8 p.m. at Idylwylde Community League (8631-81 Street). 

The show will feature a wide range of Edmonton sound artists and experimental musicians, many of whom have garnered international reputations for their work. Slated to play are James Parrott, Wayne DeFehr, Cave To Hades, Shawn Pinchbeck, Skrunt Skrunt, XiME, and The Alt-Wrong Orchestra.

BEAMS has hosted this annual event in Edmonton since 2010, as part of a global tribute to art, an idea conceived by French surrealist Robert Filliou in 1963. He believed that a million years ago, art did not exist until a sponge was dropped into a pail of water, and picked his own birthday, Jan. 17, to celebrate the occasion. Charmed by the absurdity of the notion, artists, predominantly in Europe, have been celebrating Art’s Birthday ever since. A comprehensive background of the event and international listings are available on artsbirthday.net .

A free open mic event hosted by the Idylwylde Community League also takes place that day at 2 p.m. Admission to Art’s Birthday is free to Idylwylde Community League members, $10 to BEAMS members, $20 to non-members, with a BEAMS membership to newcomers built into the price.