Announcing:

Available on Redshift Records!

Music for Spaces, the first full-length solo release by cellist Leanne Zacharias, captures the spirit of her ongoing performance project by exploring unique environments with sound. In this intrepid endeavour, she and engineer Paul Aucoin (National Parks Project, Hylozoists) hiked, boated and drove miles of dirt road to access four off-grid acoustic structures selected as recording sites. Featuring a log cabin, a strawbale observatory and two historic churches, the album presents five distinctive modern works that Zacharias has championed over the years (by composers John Cage, Emily Doolittle, Andrew Norman, Michael Oesterle and Eugene Friesen) in  encounters with sonic depictions of light, northern star charts, plucked grooves and an array of timbres and technical complexity, all intermingled with bird song, crickets and squirrel chatter.

Music for Spaces is a performance project which creates unique listening situations which explore and renegotiate relationships between audience, performers, compositions, buildings, public spaces and the natural environment. It pursues site-specific, audience-oriented and environmentally-sensitive concert design while deconstructing concert rituals to form new types of encounters with music and sound. Instalments have been presented around the continent, and findings of the project have been shared at festivals and conferences including Project Anywhere: Art & Research at the Outermost Limits of Location-Specificity (Parsons, NYC), Timeforms: Aesthetics of Temporal Experience (McGill University, Montreal), Sound In the Land: Music & Environment (Conrad Grebel College, Waterloo), and the International Institute for Advanced Studies in Baden-Baden, Germany. A large-scale event was staged in the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, presented by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra New Music Festival in January 2018. Most recently, the project was presented by Sound Symposium XX in St. John’s, Newfoundland in July 2022.