Biographies

Nicholas Murray / murr. Born in Barbados, murr is a composer and producer of electronic music and a sound designer for theatre and film. He is a founding member of the band Lal and the music production company Da Grassroots. He has produced for Mood Ruff, Ghetto Concept and K-os, among others, and has released 12-inch vinyl on Nick Holder's DNH label, Adam Marshal's New Kanada Label and various electronic works on Public Transit Records.

Entirely self-taught, murr's journey into music began with two tape decks. Staying up all night he would record songs off the radio and then repeat them, creating sound collages, composing whole stories using the lyrics of popular songs. He then graduated to turntables and then to Samplers and Computers. Though hip hop has been the love and push behind murr's production style, he also felt he had to explore other modes of programming. This need led him to exploring and experimenting with different forms of Electronic music: techno, house, and drum and bass. Public Transit Records has provided an outlet for his love of experimentation.

Nicholas also conducts sound workshops with Rosina Kazi.

As a musician, Jonathan Adjemian is known for his skill as a keyboardist and his knowledge of digital and analog audio. Active in improvised, composed, and song-based music, he has performed and recorded with, among others, Jennifer Castle, US Girls, Ken Aldcroft, The Mike Smith Company, and Phrase Velocity, a tabla and electronics duo. Solo recordings include six electronic records as Hoover Party, mostly released by Healing Power Records, and a solo piano record, Adequacies. His works for instruments, electronics and voices have been presented by The Music Gallery, Flowchart, the Canadian Music Centre, and others. Credits in dance include Amanda Acorn's MULTIFORM(S) at the 2016 Festival Transamérique in Montréal, and projects with choreographers Nova Bhattacharya, Meryem Alaoui, Barb Lindenberg, and Amelia Ehrhardt. With Araz Salek, Jonathan co-founded Labyrinth Ontario, an organization dedicated to the study and presentation of modal music traditions of Central and Western Asia and the Mediterranean. He also runs "School," a series of informal academic-style seminars mainly in Toronto art galleries, and translates from French, most recently Souleymane Bachir Diagne's Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition (Columbia UP, 2018).