Start Making Noises Now
a film by Nicholas Loess & Joe Sorbara
film premiere: Saturday 22 February, 12:30pm
Start Making Noises Now is an experimental documentary film about free improvised music in Toronto. In 2012, with the help of the Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice research project, Nicholas Loess and Joe Sorbara began gathering upwards of 60 hours of interview and performance footage featuring many of the city's creative improvising musicians. They then got to work constructing a film that would speak to the beauty and complexity of improvised music-making and the diverse ecology of approaches at play in an active community of improvisers. Start Making Noises Now looks at and listens to many of the struggles that make and sustain free improvised music in Toronto. The film asserts both the musicality of human speech and conversation and the dialogical nature of an often cacophonous music. It's lens is as much aural as it is visual. It asks you to listen as much as it asks you to watch. It also asks you to consider, to question, to laugh, to enjoy. And it asks you to improvise.
Nicholas Loess is a Guelph-based video artist and improvisation scholar. He is a PhD candidate in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph where he is exploring the creative linkages between experimental film and improvisation. His "ultra-short" one-minute silent film, 24Progressive, won first prize at the Toronto Urban Film Festival in 2012.
Joe Sorbara is a drummer and percussionist living and making music in Toronto. An active member of Toronto's creative music scene, he is equally at home playing jazz standards, free improvised music, punk rock, and chamber music--but he prefers to play them all at the same time. As an educator, Sorbara works with young musicians through the School of Fine Arts at the University of Guelph and through the Regent Park School of Music in Toronto. He is also a member of the Somewhere There Collective, the director of the long-running Leftover Daylight Series, and was a founding board member of the Association of Improvising Musicians Toronto.