For those unaware, Jocelyn Morlock (1969 – 2023) was one of Canada’s leading composers. Remembered for music that is at once lyrical, quirky, and deeply rooted in emotion, Morlock was born in Saint Boniface, Manitoba.

She studied piano and composition at Brandon University with Robert Richardson Sr., Gerhard Ginader, and T. Patrick Carrabré, before moving to Vancouver in 1994 to complete her Masters and Doctoral degrees at the University of British Columbia with Stephen Chatman, Keith Hamel, and Nikolai Korndorf.

In her own words, Morlock’s music was inspired by “birds, insomnia, nature, fear, other people’s music and art, nocturnal wandering thoughts, lucid dreaming, death, and the liminal times and experiences before and after death.”

In the early years of her career, she performed as a member of UBC’s Gamelan Gita Asmara; the vigorous sound world of Balinese gamelan would inform much of the music she composed thereafter, bringing a rhythmic counterpoint to her expressive melodic writing. Similarly, her love of birdsong would shape her instrumental writing with melodies that were virtuosic, capricious, and delicate.

One of Canada’s most cherished and celebrated contemporary music composers at the time of her sudden passing in March of 2023, Artemis Sleeps is one of several new and forthcoming memorial albums on Redshift Records that feature the late composer’s output.

This current volume focuses on more intimate repertoire - in more ways than one. Not only are its instrumental forces smaller, there is also a deep personal current that animates this particular release.

For each piece on the disc features performances by vital Vancouver flutist and contemporary music ally Mark Takeshi McGregor, who in the accompanying liner notes explains “... as a flutist, colleague, friend, and even one time roommate of Jocelyn’s, I had a hand in helping create some of these works”.

While he is careful not to acknowledge the contributions of others in Morlock’s creative circles, it’s undeniable that their artistic proximity is a key ingredient in this collection.

1. Salamander
2. Velour
3. Forgiveness
4. Vespertine - I. Twilight
5. Vespertine - II. Verdigris
6. Artemis Sleeps
7. Unfurl
8. Verdigris

With the recording having been made possible thanks to generous support from the Canada Council for the Arts, and subsequently dedicated to John Korsrud, the new set opens on the atmospherically-charged, Wicked Witch of the West-esque Salamander and the adventurously willowy Velour, and then we are gifted the emotively engaging Forgiveness, a cinematically-hued yearn that threads throughout Vespertine - I. Twilight and a more tempered, gentler covert within Vespertine - II. Verdigris, the set rounding out on the beautifully embroidered title track Artemis Sleeps, a dutifully impassioned Unfurl, coming to a close on the ornately sumptuous, decadently unladen Verdigris.

Official Purchase Link

www.jocelynmorlock.ca

www.marktakeshimcgregor.com