I wear a number of hats in the music community. I'm primarily a composer and musician, but work as critic, curator/presenter, and publicist.
Just as COVID-19 was ramping up, American imprint Orange Milk Records released my sixth full-length recording entitled My Magic Dreams Have Lost Their Spell digitally and on LP/CD, composed in my home studio by overdubbing my own performances on a wide variety of instruments. On the writing end of things, I'm a regular contributor with Musicworks Magazine and my work has also appeared in publications such as the Wire and Exclaim! I've been the guest curator of the Canadian Music Centre's CMC Presents Series for the past two seasons, and have also devised programs for Soundstreams, the Music Gallery, New Adventures in Sound Art, and my own independent productions.
Publicity is the newest facet of my career, but it is expanding rapidly. Most of the work I've been doing has provided support to Canadian artists and events within my orbit.
For the most part I've actually been very fortunate in terms of the impact of COVID-19 on my various endeavours thus far. In a funny way, I feel as though it has created a receptive climate for recorded music and that's had a positive impact on the critical reception of my own record. That's been tremendously heartening.
There are a few things that have been suspended: a collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Gary Kirkham and vocalists Bó Bardos and Pam Patel; Yvonne Ng has been working on a new full-length quintet dance entitled Wéi since 2017 and the plan had been to premiere it in the coming half-year. Thin Edge New Music Collective and I have been working (very slowly) on an album of my chamber music with Jean Martin at the controls. We've already recorded over half and hour of music, and it would be nice to wrap it up.
There's not really much that can be done to prepare this work in any way, except to remain positive, and I've been doing my utmost in that domain.
Instead, I've been continuing with other work of various kinds, publicizing new and forthcoming recordings by various artists, mixing some intriguing new recordings from multi-instrumentalist Colin Fisher that will no doubt surface, and been writing various grants for clients.
I also recently started a solo piece for baroque cello for Elinor Frey that poses an interesting challenge. As a cellist myself, I'm trying to imagine the music away from the cello as much as possible, to prevent my own habits and limitations on the instrument from seeping through. I want to be writing for her, her interpretive gifts, and her instrument, rather than merely transcribing myself.
Apart from that: various studio pieces, including a set where everything is recorded through those cheap humbucker pickups that one mounts in acoustic guitars for amplification. They only respond to the vibration of magnetic metals, which makes for a strange cocktail of serious restriction and peculiar sonic possibilities—everything from a Slinky to barbecue skewers, from tape measures to steel wool.
To find me: My website www.nickstorring.ca offers the most thorough overview; my Soundcloud serves as a kind of audio scrapbook: https://soundcloud.com/nick_storring; and my commercial recordings are all available from my Bandcamp: http://nickstorring.bandcamp.com
