Photo by Brad Ardley

In Concert Photo Gallery: 15th Anniversary edition of Manifesto

Story by Howard Druckman | Wednesday September 22nd, 2021

Live music is back! The Manifesto festival of music, arts, and culture celebrated its 15th Anniversary with a live concert at CityView Drive-In on Sept. 11, 2021, featuring performances from Savannah Ré, Notifi, Charmaine, Baebe Ruth, and JAHKOY. Check out our photos from the event below, taken by SOCAN Video Editor Brad Ardley.

Photo by Brad Ardley (Shoshonna Kish, left/à gauche), and by courtesy/courtoisie (Amanda Rheaume, right/à droite)

Ishkode Records: Creating narrative sovereignty for Indigenous music

Story by Perry Stern | Thursday September 30th, 2021

Unlike so many musicians during the pandemic, Shoshona Kish and Amanda Rheaume weren’t trying to find ways fill up too much time on their hands.

Besides their longstanding and successful careers as singer-songwriters and recording artists themselves, Kish (who is Anishinaabekwe, and a member of the JUNO Award-winning duo Digging Roots) and Rheaume (Métis Nation and a Canadian Folk Music Award winner) have busy lives as activists in their Indigenous communities.

They first met onstage at the Ottawa Folk Festival in 2003, and in 2017 they got together to launch the International Indigenous Music Summit, now in its fourth year. It was while working on the Summit that they first considered the idea of launching a record label of their own. Their partnership proved to be bigger than the sum of its two parts. According to Rheaume, “It’s sisterhood, like family. The connection and the alchemy is just that much stronger.”

First Up: Aysanabee
Ishkode Records’ first signing is Toronto-based Oji-Cree singer-songwriter Aysanabee. The multi-instrumentalist creates genre-defying music, which makes him a perfect fit for the new label, and his debut Ishkode release will be an album in 2022. “I think it’s really exciting,” says Kish, “and I think that these are voices that haven’t been heard. I think we’re going to hear all sorts of new sounds and new ideas that we currently don’t have access to.”

Ishkode Records (pronounced, ish-KOH-day) – the first major-label-distributed (by Universal) Canadian record company created and run by Indigenous women – is the end result. On a three-way conference call, Kish explains that “As we were looking at the ecology of indigenous music here and abroad, we came to realize some of the big gaps” that existed and had to be filled.

Launching the label, which references its name from an Anishinaabe prophecy, wasn’t motivated by frustration with the music industry in general, nor a determination to make a statement of their own. “It was mostly inspiration,” says Kish. “There’s just so much extraordinary talent – these incredible voices and human beings that you want to work with, that you want to be a part of amplifying to the world.”

Just as their own music is completely distinctive from each other’s, the music to be found on Ishkode promises to be unpredictable. “Indigenous people and our nations, we’re so diverse,” says Rheaume. “It’s not all just the same.” The label, she said, will be “focusing on authenticity and truth telling. There are so many artists who are courageous, and are defining their own space, instead of trying to fit into a space that already exists.”

The label’s primary goal isn’t to create an umbrella definition for Indigenous music, but to provide a space devoted to narrative sovereignty. “Narrative sovereignty is really about self-determination,” says Kish. “How we tell our own stories – it’s a core thing that Indigenous people are fighting for. It’s an inherent right.”

While COVID-19 may have created the right space in time for both of them to embark on a new journey, “It would have happened inevitably,” says Kish. “Given everything that has happened in the world, it felt that to be engaged in really meaningful work, and make a real contribution, was very important to us at the time.” The label’s first release was the Digging Roots single, “The Healer,” on Aug. 5, 2021. Kish said they’ll have, “new offerings, new signings to announce In the upcoming weeks and months.”

Photo by courtesy of / courtoisie de Stéphanie Hamelin Tomala

#ComposersWhoScore : Stéphanie Hamelin Tomala stands out from the pack

Story by Philippe Renaud | Wednesday September 22nd, 2021

“I knew I wanted to become a composer from a very young age,” says Stéphanie Hamelin Tomala with conviction. “I composed my first piece when I was 10, and my teacher helped me transcribe the sheet music. Then, when I was 13, I saw Lord of the Rings. Howard Shore’s music! That’s when I knew I wanted to become a screen composer.” She achieved her goal a few years later: nominated in the Emerging Artist category at the recent Gémeaux gala, Stéphanie’s career took off.

Stéphanie Hamelin TomalaShe’s animated by a passion for both music and movies. “I’m very attracted to sci-fi,” says Tomala, who distinguished herself with the original score for the short film Area 51 (Lee Gallagher, 2018) that earned her a first prize from the SOCAN Foundation in the Best Original Score – Animation.

“I really enjoyed that project, because it’s a mix of sci-fi and animation, which is one of the hardest media for which to compose. That’s because animation often has a lot of very rapid changes in the emotional spectrum, and you need to compose music that follows those changes. It’s demanding, it’s a challenge, but that’s what I enjoy the most.”

Tomala even says she planned her entire education according to her goal of becoming a screen composer. A violinist by training, she turned to the piano while she was in high school, “because a teacher told me that I needed to learn to play the piano if I dreamt of becoming a composer. Whenever a teacher gave me advice, I’d listen!” says the musician, before adding that the piano is like “a small orchestra that I can use to imagine the arrangements of a piece for an actual orchestra.”

After graduating with a Master’s degree in Composition from the Université de Montréal, she then obtained a graduate degree in Film Music at Université de Québec à Montréal (UQAM), and continued her training in Lyon, France. “There aren’t that many programs to learn screen composition in Montréal, at least [there weren’t] back then. I had to go out and get all the training I could,” before getting into the business. Since then, she’s penned music for some 60 short films, as well as feature films and television productions. “I really enjoy inter-disciplinary work, as long as there is a story behind the project that can inspire me,” she says.

Tomala is adamant that she’s the most comfortable when dealing with the constraints inherent to a director’s vision. “The directors I work with guide my work, sometimes with precise musical references, sometimes not at all, which leaves me free rein,” she says. “I prefer working from reference music, but not already placed on the images of a scene, because it often means that the director wants something very similar to the reference piece. I still prefer that they send me one or two pieces of music in the style that they’re looking for. From there, I’ll ask myself, ‘Why this sound or that style? What do they like?’ And based on that, I look for inspiration for my own vision… or their vision!’

She cites the influence of John Williams, “one of the first models you turn to in the business”; Italian composer Dario Marianelli, a loyal collaborator of director Joe Wright (his score for the film Atonement won him an Oscar); and the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, who scored three of Denis Villeneuve’s films (Sicario, Arrival, and Blade Runner 2049). “His way of mixing textural music and melodies brought about a different way of writing music,” says Tomala.

Women are still under-represented in the field, but she insists on highlighting the contributions of the great Rachel Portman (‘”he uses strings a lot in her music, which I really like – I’m also a violinist, there’s a connection!”) and, more recently, Iceland’s Hildur Guðnadóttir, who was Jóhannsson’s assistant.

“We need more women in this business, especially in Québec,” says Tomala. “Personally, I know about 40 who are already working in this field, or who’ve expressed the desire to pursue such a career. The problem is, it’s difficult for them to stand out. And that’s something that’s dear to my heart: giving a space to women in screen composition.”