** 2021 Stock ** Recording in Saskatoon in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan the day before their performance at the Sounds Like Festival, audio explorer Tim Olive brings his magnetic pickups in a first meeting with Doreen Girard performing on a prepared tsymbaly, a Ukranian hammer dulcimer, for a single, unusually evolving, and wonderfully rich improvisation.

Boro, a 2018 first-time meeting with Winnipeg-based sound artist Doreen Girard, develops a more abstracted quality, with recordings of the duo “overlaid and minimally edited” to create a single twenty-six-minute piece. The layering both extends and randomizes the interaction, developing dense fields of low-level events and simulating a brilliant improvising quartet of largely indistinguishable members. Girard plays the tsymbaly, a Ukrainian hammer dulcimer; eschewing any traditional use, she creates a certain hollow resonance that in one segment effectively foregrounds Olive’s whistling electronic musings. Both mysterious and compelling, Boro eventually recedes into the quietest of bell-like tinkles. - Stuart Broomer, Musicworks

"Every day you learn to know new musicians, such as Doreen Girard, but also you learn about the instruments they play. Girard plays the tsymbaly, of which Wiki tells, "Is the Ukrainian version of the hammer dulcimer. It is a chordophone made up of a trapezoidal box with metal (steel or bronze) strings strung across it. The tsymbaly is played by striking two beaters against the strings." That read and listening here, it is perhaps not the way she plays it. There is no frame of reference here. Tim Olive plays his magnetic pickups and last he was back in his former home country to play at the Sounds Like festival Saskatoon and the day before he recorded music with Girard, which is now "overlaid and minimally edited". The result is quite a short CD, of just over twenty-six minutes, and it is quite lovely. It starts like a bumpy ride, with the strings being plucked and Olive on his pickups with some rough sounds and it sounds quite raw with loving intention to do so. It cracks and bursts under the mild attacks, but then slowly moves gentler explorations, in which the bow starts playing a bigger role. In the final section, these two ends are going for a clash of bowing, scraping and some lovely textures produced by Olive, with sounds almost sparking off from whatever it is that he touches upon. It is quite the rocky road but it works all very well. There is a collage-like approach yet because of superimposing various recordings together there is also a great continuity in this."- Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly