Pique

Vivek Shraya is an artist whose body of work crosses the boundaries of music, literature, visual art, theatre, and film. Her album Part-Time Woman was nominated for the Polaris Music Prize, her music was featured on the acclaimed HBO Max show Sort Of, and her best-selling book I’m Afraid of Men was heralded by Vanity Fair as “cultural rocket fuel.” She is also the founder of the award-winning publishing imprint VS. Books, which supports emerging BIPOC writers.

A seven-time Lambda Literary Award finalist, Vivek has been a brand ambassador for MAC Cosmetics and Pantene. She is a director on the board of the Tegan and Sara Foundation, and is currently adapting her debut play, How to Fail as a Popstar, as a digital series with CBC.

vivekshraya.com is the digital archive for a living trans artist of colour, featuring her music, writing, visual art, theatrical and film works, from 2002 to present.

Joe Rainey is a Pow Wow singer. On Niineta, he demonstrates his command of the Pow Wow style, descending from Indigenous singing that’s been heard across the waters of what is now  called Minnesota for centuries. Depending on the song or the pattern, his voice can celebrate  or console, welcome or intimidate, wake you up with a start or lull your babies to sleep. Each  note conveys a clear message, no matter the inflection: We’re still here. We were here before  you were, and we never left.

Rainey grew up a Red Lake Ojibwe in Minneapolis, a city with one of the largest and  proudest Native American populations in the country. The Red Lake Reservation sits five hours  to the North, a sovereign state unto itself, but Rainey grew up down in what Northerners call  “The Cities,” in his mom’s house on historic Milwaukee Avenue on Minneapolis’ South Side. He  was raised less than a mile away from Franklin Avenue, the post-Reorganization Act urban  nexus of local Native American life, a community centered in the Little Earth housing projects and the Minneapolis American Indian Center. The neighborhood still serves as a home for both  the housed and the un-housed, and the don’t-even-wanna-be-housed Native. It is the  birthplace of the American Indian Movement (AIM), the pioneering grassroots civil rights  organization founded to combat the colonizing forces of police brutality. Rainey came of age in  the heart of this community, but always felt like he was living in a liminal space—not that he  was uncomfortable with that. “Growing up, knowing that you weren’t from the Rez, but you  were repping them, was kind of weird,” he says. “But I liked that.” 

Rainey became interested in Pow Wow singing as a child—at the age of five, he started  recording Pow Wow singing groups with his GE tape recorder, and his mom enrolled him in a  dancing and singing practice with the Little Earth Juniors soon thereafter. As a pre-teen he began hanging out around The Boyz (a legendary Minneapolis drum group) at a house some of  them stayed at in the Little Earth projects. “They knew me as a Little Joey,” he remembers. “As  in, ‘Hey I tried to get Little Joey to sit down and sing, but he’s too shy.” By the time he was a  teenager, however, he had found enough courage to help start The Boyz Juniors, his first drum  group, before going on to sing with Big Cedar, Wolf Spirit, Raining Thunder, and Iron Boy.  Eventually, his voice grew strong enough to sing in Midnite Express, a new drum group  featuring some of The Boyz themselves. They were professionals, city Indians travelling all over  the north country, repping their reservations and their neighborhoods on every side of every  conceivable border—competing for cash and cred, carousing, providing the beat to the grass  dances, always striving to capture that “Pow Wow feeling” of togetherness. Rainey was always  just as much of a fan as he was a participant—when he wasn’t at his own drum, he was  recording other drums, then studying the tapes when he got home, admiring and cataloging the  different singing styles, whether it was Northern Cree, Cozad or Eyabay. Now with an upgraded workhorse Sony tape recorder, he was a student of the game, a maven, a bootlegger  extraordinaire. 

On Niineta, Rainey finds himself in between cultures again. This time collaborating with  the producer Andrew Broder, who brought his multi-instrumentalist, turntablist sensibility to  the project. The two of them first met backstage at Justin Vernon’s hometown Eaux Claires music festival before encountering each other more frequently through Vernon and Aaron and  Bryce Dessner’s 37d03d collective—both contributing to the last Bon Iver album before

broaching the possibility of working together sometime in the future. “At first I didn’t know  what I could add to Joe’s incredible recordings,” Broder says. “But eventually I came to  understand everything is rooted in the drum—even the songs on our record that have no drum,  they're still rooted in the drum.” So each song started with Broder’s beats, the two of them experimenting with various sounds and tempos, before bringing in other 37d03d collaborators  to orchestrate and recontextualize the ancient Pow Wow sound in strange, new in-between  places. The album pulls from Rainey’s vast sample folder of Pow Wow recordings, layering and  remixing slices of his life of singing in venues across the upper Midwest and Canada. 

Rainey got his title, Niineta, from his drum brother Michael Migizi Sullivan, who  suggested a short version of the Ojibwe term meaning, “just me.” But he’s using the term only  in the sense that he’s taking sole responsibility for its content. Rainey is protective of Pow Wow

culture—which was outlawed by the United States government for a generation, defiantly  maintained in secret by Native elders he deeply respects—while trying to figure out exactly  where he fits into it and how he can fuck with it on his own terms. “These are all my creations,  but they're Pow Wow songs, and our language is sacred,” he says. “And I was like, okay, I  understand that, so our album is only vocals. I'm not recording when we're not supposed to and  I'm not giving our shit away.” He uses the analogy of working the hotel room door at a Pow  Wow. “If we are partying with one of our older bros, he'd always make me in charge of the  fucking door,” he says. So Rainey would like you to conceptualize this album as him working the  door at a Pow Wow after party. “You can think of this like, hey man, if all these people are  going to be fucking knocking and I'm the one answering the door, you're going to realize that  I'm not the only one in this motherfucker. There's tons of people in here. So if I'm answering  that door, I want to be like, hey, yeah, come on in. There's fucking tons of us in here. It ain't just  me.”

Longtime collaborators Amirtha Kidambi (voice) and Darius Jones (alto sax) join sonic and compositional forces to materialize "Angels and Demons", musical adaptations of cosmological writings by iconic composer and bandleader Sun Ra. The duo formed to honor the intellectual, literary, and spiritual contribution of Sun Ra, as a philosopher and teacher. Dancing between Ra's prophetic poetic verse, abstract phonemes and syllables, sound, noise, tone, melody and rhythmic interplay, Jones and Kidambi use their unique compositional and improvisatory voices to amplify Ra's poetry to contemporary audiences.

The double meaning of Brandon Valdivia's pseudonym Mas Aya neatly encapsulates his musical outlook. Over the past fifteen years, the Toronto composer, percussionist and producer has established himself as an integral part of the city's vibrant and varied music community through his membership in groups such as Not The Wind, Not The Flag, Picastro, The Cosmic Range, I Have Eaten The City and Lido Pimienta,

Máscaras is anchored by Valdivia's deft and atmospheric production style that folds together intricate spiraling synths, balmy environments, and crisp drum programming, variously drawing from trap, footwork, early Warp-label gestures, and the digital end of dancehall reggae. Yet it's his love of organic instrumentation that truly cements his commitment to an eclectic, unclassifiable aesthetic.

Mysterious elements of our natural world are studied alongside the super synthetic as I seek to shift perspective, challenging an individual perception of reality. 360° environments contemplate our sense of presence and connection to nature, inner spaces and reckonings of imagined landscapes. Remixing techniques, I navigate new digital tools to expand the lifespan and audience of durational immersive installations and location specific artworks.


Diana Lynn VanderMeulen is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto with a BFA Honors from York University. Recent projects include solo physical-virtual exhibition Shimmer of a Petal, Now a mountain Stream, with Sky Fine Foods & ArtGate VR and self-released Augmented-Reality application Swampy GoGo, which extends digital realities from a series of 2D mixed media landscapes. Alongside representation with Sky Fine Foods, VanderMeulen has been involved in many public and DIY ventures. She has shown at AGO, Canadian Embassy (Tokyo, Japan), CADAF Paris, Gardiner Museum, and Idea Exchange.