What Brings You In
Leslie Ting; Various Artists
People Places Records PPR | 045 (peopleplacesrecords.bandcamp.com)
Toronto-based violinist and interdisciplinary artist Leslie Ting’s creative output has incorporated elements of installation and theatre as much as pure musical expression. Her unusual career trajectory is also of note. After working as a licensed optometrist, from 2013-2017 she served as Associate Principal Second violinist in the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra.
Ting’s theatre work Speculation layered the music of John Cage and Beethoven with a monologue and projections to tell the story of her mother “slowly losing her vision, while [Leslie] makes a career change to pursue her dream of becoming a professional musician.”
An unconventional, ambitious debut album What Brings You In is much more than a violin recital of contemporary repertoire. Calling it, “A violinist confronts the noise of her psyche in an electroacoustic soundscape,” Ting operates both as a director and performer in the project, employing talk therapy, hypnotherapy, dreamwork, sandplay, somatics and reiki in her creative process with her co-musicians.
Having been produced as a live theatrical event and a web-based installation, for this five-track audio recording of What Brings You In Ting has collaborated with several Canadian musicians: Germaine Liu on percussion and amplified sandbox, while Matt Smith, Rose Bolton and Julia Mermelstein provided electronic sounds, the latter two also contributing compositions.
The album also features Ting as eloquent solo violinist, beginning with Linda Catlin Smith’s delicately austere violin and percussion composition Dirt Road. Bolton’s Beholding for solo violin and electronics follows the composer’s sometimes turbulent internal therapeutic transformation. Mermelstein’s Folds in Crossings couches Ting’s violin performance in orchestral sounding electronic textures, culminating in a final peaceful violin sigh.
