Six Turntables
- Christopher Willes
- Akash Bansal
Six Turntables is an ongoing project about collective listening led by multidisciplinary artists Christopher Willes and Akash Bansal. It gathers young people to listen to, remix, and reimagine audio archives of experimental music. Each iteration of Six Turntables works with a different collection of recordings, and takes shape as a series of workshops. Please join us for the concluding event in which participants will perform soundscapes developed through workshops at Western Front, and share a zine documenting their process.
For this iteration, students from Simon Fraser University took part in a four-day workshop focused on the first decade of the Western Front’s musical history. The group listened to recordings of concerts staged in the Grand Luxe Hall during the ‘70s and '80s, with a particular focus on solo and improvised performances.
The workshops blended soundmaking, somatic practice, writing and dialogue, and sought to treat records not as commodity objects but as shared experiences. Using turntables, amplifiers, and custom-pressed vinyl records, participants followed a score-based process to transform fragments of the archive into new compositions together. In this way, the group developed a collaborative listening practice, with the time spent with these ephemeral sonic moments becoming a way of imagining what experimental music/sound practice might yet become.
Curated by Aki Onda.
About the Artists
Christopher Willes is an artist, musician, composer, and facilitator based in Toronto and Montreal, Canada. His interdisciplinary work focuses on the subject and practice of listening, and encompasses performances, exhibitions, music/sound works, publications, and educational projects. Recent projects include Resonance Gathering (2023), a collective publication on the work of Pauline Oliveros, and MANUAL (2022), a one-on-one sound-based performance which is staged covertly in public libraries and has toured Canada, Japan, Thailand, Norway, and the United Kingdom.
Akash Bansal is an artist based in Toronto, Canada. Rooted in cinema, sound, and poetics, they practice in multi-dimensional forms. They work as a curator, DJ, sound artist, dramaturge, filmmaker, (story) editor, writer, production coordinator, sound technician, and facilitator. Their work examines borders— both real and imagined, between people and places, and especially those within ourselves. Over the years, they have worked with countless organizations including The Music Gallery, Standard Time, Toronto Dance Theatre, TO Love In, MOCA, Nuit Blanche, Toronto Public Library, The Ace Hotel, Art Spin, Seance Centre, Swimmers Group, The AFC, SummerWorks, and more.
Accessibility
The Grand Luxe Hall is located on the second floor of Western Front, which is accessed by a flight of twenty-six stairs. While plans for a full building upgrade to facilitate access for wheelchair users are still underway, events in the Grand Luxe Hall are made available virtually via high-quality livestream (see link above). Further details about accessibility at Western Front can be found here.
Acknowledgements
Presented by Western Front in partnership with the Music & Sound program in the School of Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and the Gibson Art Museum, with support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and SOCAN Foundation.
Western Front is a non-profit artist-run centre in Vancouver.
We acknowledge the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations as traditional owners of the land upon which Western Front stands.