Western Front

Electro-Pythagorus is an intimate and subjective portrait of the late Martin Bartlett, the Canadian electronic music pioneer who studied with Pauline Oliveros, David Tudor, John Cage, and Pandit Pran Nath. His contribution as an interdisciplinary composer, educator, and founding member of Western Front, though undoubtedly extensive, is in danger of being erased from cultural memory since his death from AIDS in 1993. Navigating an array of archival materials including letters, correspondences, notebooks, personal photos, and a huge body of unreleased music and field recordings held at the archives of Simon Fraser University, Electro-Pythagoras is a journey through the evolution of Bartlett’s musical time and space, softly guided by Luke Fowler’s insightful camera and montage—creating an experimental portrait that defies one-dimensionality.

A down on his luck thirty-something develops a feud with his local bin collector.

A fantasy using hand movements, involuntary gestures, attitudes and habits. With the absence of words, these movements become choreographies. A musical passage alerts them and guides them like a punctuation, or carries them towards unexpected fictions. At times calm, curious, anxious or very nervous, a parrot appears among the various monologues and dialogues which form and come undone...

This tape provokes the audience to question where their morals lie. A classic view of consumerism, religion, death, sexuality and vices is created with a stirring soundtrack of clichéd music styles.

Dana Claxton uses low-grade video equipment to create degraded images that correlate the treatment of the earth with the treatment of women’s bodies. A figure stands enmeshed in cutting barbed wire among ravaged forests and chopped tree stumps. Grainy black-and-white images have been electronically ripped, cut and torn in post-production while repeated images of the artist’s open-mouth scream silently against a volatile red sky. A video work from the early 1990s continues to resonate in our contemporary moment—and with decades of missing and murdered Indigenous women across exploited lands.

This video tape is a triptych about love and desire.