Pique is back with a new twist; this time Debaser, Ottawa’s leading independent and underground presenter, is joining forces with the Ottawa International Animation Festival to bring innovative, artist-driven programming to the Arts Court & the OAG on Sept 24th, 2022 in conjunction with OIAF's annual NightOwl party.
Pique is a festival like no other, and its 2022 fall edition will feature live music performances, visual art installations and DJ sets, on multiple stages and levels, indoors and outdoors.
Entry is PAY-WHAT-YOU-CAN from 5pm to 2am.
Visit thisispique.com for more info.
Tickets are available on eventbrite.
FEATURING...
PERFORMANCE:
Ata Kak
unfortunately Ata Kak’s performance is cancelled due to issues with entry paperwork :(
Gayance (guest curator)
TIMEKODE
Turkwaz
ZANDOLI II & THE WASAFIRI ✬
Juju Le Moko ✬
Golpesar
Scott Hardware
Kim Alpert
ee portal
Tiger Balme
Magbeta
Ensh
Yung Heat
Moov Ottawa Dance
✬ = curated by Gayance
ART:
Dottie July Gordon - Sheer Transit / Clear Plastic.
A site-specific installation of painted works, printed matter and material art.
by Dottie July Gordon, from September 22nd - September 25th
The general idea is to emulate a moment of being en route, when you witness another person pause to take a cellphone photo of the sky. Less so that clouds could be documented, stored in a digitized drive, or reproduce a similar emotive state when reviewed through the screen. I just like to see it, the diversion from an unpronounced or routine trajectory, where being on-time or fixated in a state of transit is set aside. An instance when someone you have not been introduced to communicates they are having a moment without needing to spell it out. There is not so much to say, as the gesture dictates that we are in the right place, at the right time. The activity is to be immersed in a cloud formation or a particular spectrum of light. As if one were an angel - either about to vanish into thin air, or appearing as though enmeshed in the image. Ambience. Maximalism forever being the terrestrial suggestion. It’s for you, a lucky cloud in the sky.
BIG LONG PAPER
featuring CoBlou + FAUXBEAR + Emma Orhun + Hannah Found!
Graphic artists & illustrators CoBlou, FAUXBEAR, Emma Orhun & Hannah Found work alongside Pique audience members to create one BIG LONG new drawing. Pick up a pencil, marker, or a pen and start doodling!
DRINK AND DRAW
featuring Jas Nasty
Back by popular demand, an Animation Fest / NightOwl favourite, sit and sketch featured cosplayers while Jas Nasty spins her signature eclectic vinyl mix.
Revised schedule following Ata Kak’s cancellation.
For enlargeable and plain text versions, click here.
-
Pique takes place on the stolen land of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people. If you support our programming, please consider also donating to a local Indigenous organization or fundraiser. Learn more about this land acknowledgement and find educational resources and ways to support at www.debaser.ca/land-acknowledgement
-
Before attending the event, complete a COVID-19 self-screening. If you do not pass the self-screening, please STAY AT HOME.
The following are strongly recommended for attendees of this event to reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission:
take an at-home antigen test before arriving on site. Antigen tests are currently available for free from many pharmacy and grocery store locations (find out more here).
take two doses of approved COVID-19 vaccinations received at least two weeks prior to the event
wear a KN95 face mask over the mouth and nose at all times while at the event (we will have a limited number of free masks available for audience members)
wash your hands or use the provided hand sanitizer often
COVID-19 policy is subject to change based on government and venue regulations and guidelines.
-
Entrances are accessible by ramp, and indoor spaces are accessible by automated doors and elevator to all floors. Wheelchair accessible, gender neutral washrooms are available throughout the building.
Click the following links for accessibility and visitor information:
-
Attendees are expected to respect one another. Violence, aggression, oppressive behaviour or language, or bullying will not be tolerated. If you are currently implicated in an accountability process, please ensure you are respecting the space and well-being of those your actions have affected before joining this space virtually or in-person. If Debaser's staff and/or Board are made aware of any behaviour that violates our safety policy, the person(s) perpetuating this behaviour will be asked to leave immediately. We reserve the right to intervene and/or remove ANY person(s) in the space who are creating or contributing to an unsafe environment.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Ata Kak
photo credit: Ana Vioti
Ata Kak is the mysterious Ghanaian electronic/rap/highlife icon who kick-started the whole Awesome Tapes From Africa phenomenon. After a long wait he has now started to play his first ever live performances in Europe.
Ata Kak’s Obaa Sima cassette fell on deaf ears when it was first self-released in Ghana in 1994 but when American musicologist Brian Shimkovitz stumbled upon the tape at a street stall in Cape Coast, Ghana eight years later it became the stimulus for him to launch his Awesome Tapes from Africa blog, writing in his inaugural post: ‘This is it. The song is called Moma Yendodo. You may never hear anything like this elsewhere. No one I know in Ghana listens to this frenetic leftfield rap madness.’
The music on the recording – an amalgam of highlife, Twi-language rap, funk, hip-hop and electronica – traverses a pop music landscape that encapsulates international modes while reflecting contemporary Ghanaian music of the period. Presented with the sweaty passion of a Prince record and the lo-fi recording charm of early Chicago house music, Obaa Sima’s joyous soul and casual brilliance made the enigmatic Ata Kak an underground internet sensation and a party-starter the world over. After more than a decade of searching Brian finally tracked down the singer and released the LP officially in March 2015.
photo credit: Tess Robe
Gayance, pronounced ‘guy-ence’, is a creole word for joyfulness. An apt description for the unapologetically joyful Aïsha Vertus’ musical project. The DJ, producer and radio-maker’s Haitian roots are a driving force for her explorations in sound and space. Her sets are a journey through Black music from all corners of the globe, delivered with raucous energy.
Born and raised in Montreal-Nord, Gayance started her musical journey in 2013 on a romantic whim, making a mixtape for her first love. More mixtapes and then radio performances followed on n10as and CKUT. Her eclectic taste was quickly picked up by local respected selectors and promoters. She started playing shows in the club circuit in Canada and has since torn down festival and club venues in more than 18 different cities in 4 different continents.
Gayance is a traveler, having found her artistic family in Brussels and her musical family in São Paulo and Salvador, Bahia - places she returns to regularly. She collects a large variation of music on vinyl, from Afro-Latin Jazz, North American Black music, Caribbean vintage sounds and West-African music to Black Electronic music from Detroit, Chicago and London. She showcases these sounds in her monthly residency on the late-night show ‘Nouveaux Sons’ on Radio-Canada.
Though she had already edited and remixed other artists’ productions, the pandemic saw Gayance channel the energy she normally releases in front or behind the decks into her own productions. The result was the brilliant EP ‘No Toning Down’, a confluence of broken beats, UK garage, Dillaesque and Bossa Nova that garnered her praise worldwide. Not long after, she released ‘Sirens feat. KALLITECHNIS’ as part of Sherelle’s label Beautiful Music’s debut compilation, ’Beautiful Vol 1’.
Not one to sit still, 2022 will see Gayance release a full album of original music and tour extensively both at home and abroad.
photo credit: Maryem Tollar
Turkwaz is a unique combination of four musician/singers, immersed in diverse traditions from mysterious Sufi devotional love songs, to rousing Thracian dance music. Each performer brings a special flavour to the group. Maryem Hassan Tollar draws on her Arabic language heritage, Jayne Brown and Sophia Grigoriadis bring their experience with Greek music to the mix and Brenna MacCrimmon adds her Turkish fascination.
They have a long-standing collective interest in Balkan traditions and add Albanian, Bulgarian and Macedonian and whatever else strikes their fancy to their repertoire. The love and respect they have for the traditions they draw from are clear but they are not afraid to arrange the tunes in new and unexpected ways to give them a fresh spin.
image credit: Gloria François
Multidisciplinary artists and producers ZANDOLI II are no strangers to music. The duo is comprised of producers Tonton Osman and G L O W Z I -- between them, they cover the myriad of creative fields exploring music, producing, multi-visual sensory practices, fashion, art, and design. Pulling from their African-Caribbean aural memories to explore the alternative sub-genres of Afrofuturistic sounds, the duo elevates their eclectic Haitian and West African sonorities infusing multisensory, vibrant visuals, and live instrumentalists to melange into a funk-imbued and genre-bending experience. Their live production reflects their intrigue in tracking the inter-generational flow of how past, present & future sonic environments connect to their ancestral movements from the African and Caribbean territories into Western cultural spaces. Through their proposed audiovisual voyages, ZANDOLI II conveys whoever lands their eyes and/or ears on their experimentations to a funky, spicy & well-seasoned adventure!
Juju Le Moko's unbridled sound has been brewing in Montreal's local clubs and parties. His DJ style is a blend that incorporates electronic rave sounds, Afro Caribbean grooves mixed with 808 cadence.
Dottie July Gordon (JG)(b. 1993, Canada) is a visual artist, designer and textile printmaker who lives and works in Montréal, QC.
With an affinity for maximalism, print, illustrated graphics, objects and materiality Dottie utilizes a diverse array of tactile disciplines and design techniques in their approach to image-making and spatial arrangement.
Over the past two years, Dottie’s practice has been actively engaged with archiving ephemera and the research of fixed social points and cultural phenomena between 1975-1986. Magnetized by the motifs, iconography and use of pattern projected through the fashion and design houses of that period, they’ve found a relatable space within the intersection of print-based advertising, pop-art, analogue production models, instructional illustration, as well as the exuberant aesthetic influence the immersion of queer personalities and ideology has consistently had on material culture, fashion and popular design. While not fixated on the creation of replicas, or becoming thematically bound or identified to a purely nostalgic theme. Dottie’s work can be related to these influences and foundational elements, as they approach the creation of contemporary pieces in the sphere of fashion and gallery exhibition through employing a similar tenacity, character and methodology of material art production.
Corinne Blouin a.k.a CoBlou is a francophone multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on street art and community engaged projects. Through art making, she questions the intricate relationships between human emotion and the energetic body. Transforming these abstract states into material form allows them to take on new shapes through the unique perspectives of those interacting with her works. Her background is in illustration/graphic design and her most recent on-going project is called Street Offerings where she hides small pieces of her creations for people to find within the urban landscapes.
Since 2011, multidisciplinary collective ee portal (Elyse & Emilio Portal) has been creating ecopoetic installations, new media works and performances. They have shown work throughout Canada. They recently presented their video & sound installations at the Fabulous Fringe Festival of Film, On The Edge Fringe Festival, and Up Here. Their methods of working are based in fluid, spontaneous and vulnerable actions that encompass many fields including philosophy, poetry, spirituality, ecology, performance, sound, video, sculpture, painting and craft. They often employ a large old smoky canvas, naturally extracted plant dyes and fibres, cryptic field recordings and alternative sources of energy. When not making art, they enjoy playing with their son, Teo Sol.
Website | Website | Soundcloud | Instagram
Ensh, is the queer-pop project of Milenko Vujosevic founded in 2013. Ensh formed a cult following in their native Serbia with three independent releases: their debut EP, " Belgrade ", the regionally acclaimed sophomore EP, “ Both Of Them Milenko ” and 2018's lofi mixtape " Okvir ".
Currently Toronto based Ensh has spent the last decade playing all over Europe and the UK in venues, bars, squats and galleries, as well as several festival dates including: MIDEM, Dev9t, the award-winning Exit Festival, and Ireland’s Electric Picnic festival.
Their ambitious new release "Summer Vacation" is dystopian bilingual (English and Serbian) electro pop opera that follows a hero's journey from the exuberance of rebirth to climate despair and ultimately to galactic catharsis. Following in the footsteps of fellow pop innovators the likes of Björk, Sophie and Death Grips.
(FAUXBEAR, Michael Faubert) is a Toronto-based visual artist and one of the City of Toronto’s ArtworxTO emerging artists of 2021-2022.
For over a decade I pursued an academic career in both Montréal and Toronto, but have recently moved out of the ivory tower and into the studio. My work contrasts playfully absurd characters with surreal environments to convey abstract concepts, extreme emotional states, and half-remembered nightmares. A fan of street-art, graffiti, comics, and all things animated, I produce pieces that use a wide-range of media: silkscreen printed clothing, stencil-based paintings using acrylic and spray paint, watercolour and ink illustrations, traditional comics, and animated shorts. My style is currently inspired by other artistic work that combine contrasting ideas in substance and form: intense and playful pop-art, animation that speaks to audiences both innocent and mature, and wild illustration styles used to capture more serious and complex events.
GOLPESAR is the sonic project of Montreal based artist and musician Rouzbeh Shadpey. Avant-garde electronics, spoken word, and echoes of Iranian sonics overspill. An affection term in Farsi, GOLPESAR /گلپسر imperfectly translates to “flower boy”.
Jas Nasty (she/her) is an eclectic vinyl DJ that draws from various musical genres and influences, from sweet 60's &70s soul and disco to current electronic music.
Jas has been involved in radio and various DJ events in Peterborough, Ottawa and Montreal since 2001.
Now in Ottawa, she continues to DJ events and fill the airwaves with her love of collecting and sharing good music, old and new on her radio shows Heavy Friends on CKCU 93.1 FM and on mixlr.com/hellagroove. You can also find her live streaming DJ sets at twitch.tv/jasnasty1.
Jas Nasty is DJing during the Ottawa Internation Animation Festival’s Drink and Draw event as part of their annual NightOwl Party.
Kim Alpert combines analog and digital technologies, movement, music, and interactivity, to create sculptural and performance-based video systems. Kim's visual practice centers on humanism with inquisitions into psychology and spirituality - understanding and translating the impact of visual language to create meaning.
Kim uses digital and analog techniques, feedback, and found footage to weave dream tapestries both recorded and improvised. A significant part of Kim’s performed work is in collaboration with improvisational musicians, blending pre-rendered content with live visualizations. Kim performs in collaborative and cross-discipline works such as Anteloper, Mike Reed’s Flesh and Bone, Ken Vandermark’s Momentum, The Instigation Orchestra, and with her project Scan Lines.
Montreal-based Congolese musician MAGBETA uses hard-hitting electronic pulses to dive deep into nostalgia’s darkest shadows, creating a uniquely haunted yet energized atmosphere as they entrance audiences with their unrelenting poetic vulnerability. Fusing the raw catharsis of alternative folk-soul with lively afro-latino rhythms, MAGBETA tastefully blends influences as they expose the infernal truths of their heart’s history, performing with an infectious passion from which no one is immune.
On Ballad of a Tryhard, the third album by Scott Hardware, the moniker of Toronto-based musician and composer Scott Harwood, he attempts a response by honouring the splendor of “living between emotions.” It’s an album where a rich inner monologue, and the undefined space between reflection and realization can offer an invaluable reprieve.
Over luminous keys and sky-sweeping melodies, Harwood reverse engineers his capabilities as a composer skilled in the art of complexity to deliver his boldest album to date — unselfconsciously ambitious Y2K rock; a reimagination of experimental adult contemporary that tweaks the limits of soft rock with curiosity and appreciation.
The story of Toronto-based Tiger Balme is the story of Yang Chen, Estyr, Danielle Sum, and Anda Zeng coming together to sing songs they could only sing once they had found each other. With members taking turns writing and singing their own stories, Tiger Balme’s alt-indie heart beats with hues of disco, rock, and 90s acoustic pop—the grounding forces of drums, guitar, and bass shimmering with the addition of vibraphone, harp, and soaring harmonies. Since 2018, they have created sonic spaces of tender resilience at festivals, intimate art shows, and music fixtures around Toronto and Southern Ontario. Their upcoming debut album, the self-titled Tiger Balme produced by Paul Chin, is an embrace of the wounds that shape us and the connection that heals us, an ode to the courage that arises from being true to one’s own heart.
Meshing Hip-Hop, RnB, and Electronic -- Jamaican-Canadian musician Yung Heat is most known for his popular genre-bending tracks on SoundCloud. Yung Heat is a triple-threat musician with over 10 years of producing, engineering, and composing. He has managed to amass over 14M streams over various streaming platforms.
Yung Heat is an active member of Ottawa’s underground music scene organizing live events and mentoring young artists. He is the lead coordinator of a youth-led grassroots organization called “Produced By Youth”, where he mentors, teaches and facilitates Black youth like himself -- giving them the tools and resources to create and release their music projects.
His latest project titled “CITY ON FIRE!” is a collaborative venture blending Electronic and Hip-Hop including topics like Black identity, police brutality, and lower-class struggle. Features include vocals/production from some of Ottawa's top talent such as NTHN, City Fidelia, Lia Kloud, and even his youth mentees from Produced by Youth.
Moov Ottawa Dance
Moov Ottawa Dance, run by Alea de Castro & Arnaldo Betancourt Silva, is a leading Street Dance Company who specializes in the styles of Hip Hop, House, Waacking, Breaking "Break Dance" and more. We share our skills and knowledge through dance classes, workshops, school programs (EN&FR), shows, high level performances, corporate gatherings, community events & dance battles.