writing published elsewhere
"Quinton Barnes: Explorations in Black Noise"
Musicworks, Winter 2025 / Spring 2026
"Quinton Barnes makes music to meet the moment. The Montreal-based emcee began releasing solo recordings in 2018, drawing avant-garde hip-hop, R&B-adjacent pop, and experimental electronic idioms into tracks that animate dextrous lyricism with a fierce political drive. His work takes on big feelings as well as big ideas; it is candid, confrontational, and unmistakably and unabashedly queer."
"'The process is the project': Egyptian Cotton Arkestra stays rooted in Time and Place
New Feeling, 28 Nov 2025
"ECA remain dedicated to immediacy and contingency, to fearless creative expression, to playfulness as well as fury, all of which animate their thrilling live performances and guide their politics as a band. 'Everything we ever do is just about the time and the place that it happens,' says Goddard. 'It’s a lot of ‘what happens if we’re here, in the now?''"
PRAED Orchestra! - The Dictionary of Lost Meanings
A Closer Listen, 1 Nov 2025
"Electronic elements and organic performance elegantly intertwined, the album captures the fluctuations of a tightly controlled chaotic energy, channelled by turns towards both expert precision and propulsive exuberance."
Clare O'Connell – Light Flowing
A Closer Listen, 20 Sept 2025
"Light Flowing is primarily a solo affair, though judicious use of loops and the sporadic appearance of guest musicians add welcome ballast without overtaking the arresting intimacy at the album’s core. Most of the pieces here remain in a fairly restrained and introspective mode, though not to the exclusion of tension and momentum, weighty emotional gesture, or indeed a few moments of thrilling drama."
Theresa Wong – Journey to the Cave of Guanyin
A Closer Listen, 31 May 2025
"Wong shines here as both composer and performer, building a captivating sound-world from layers of multitracked acoustic cello, principally tuned in just intonation. Based around a narrative of a solitary figure returning from sea to offer prayer to Guanyin, the Chinese folk deity of compassion and mercy, the album feels at once transcendent and firmly rooted to the sensuous earth. "
anthéne – Frailty
A Closer Listen, 3 May 2025
"Atop serene washes of processed guitar, [anthéne] layers simple melodic flourishes and impressionistic field recordings, effecting textured and grainy soundscapes that reverberate with humanity and emotion."
"Wood, Wire, and Willpower: BIG | BRAVE Patch the Circuit"
New Feeling, 30 April 2025
"BIG | BRAVE’s moody, ear-splitting full-band compositions have often been pigeonholed as some iteration of “metal” — a label Wattie and Ball categorically reject — but for OST, their forthcoming album, they’ve left the guitar squalls and Tasy Hudson’s pounding drums entirely behind. Instead, the trio cede the spotlight to a homemade assemblage of discarded piano innards and detritus from Ball’s wood shop, fittingly dubbed “the instrument,” along with various secondary studio instruments and fragile, wordless vocal articulations. It’s an austere and demanding listen, closer to a Pauline Oliveros meditation than Sunn O)))."