Saturday 12 September | 7:30pm | Royal City Mission
Nicole Mitchell . flute, electronics
SlowPitchSound . turntables, electronics, visuals
Our Saturday evening program begins with the return of Nicole Mitchell, this time in an ad hoc duo with other-worldly Toronto experimental turntablist, SlowPitchSound. Sets like this are part of what makes the world of creative music-making such an exciting thing to explore and celebrate as a presenter: two extraordinary musicians, as deeply committed to the art of collaboration as they are to their craft as instrumentalists and composers, meeting for the first time on stage so that we can witness the magick of that first meeting with them.
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Nicole Mitchell is an award-winning creative flutist, conceptualist, and composer whose work fuses creative music, Afrofuturism, and the natural world into a single, recognizable language. Emerging from Chicago’s creative-music community in the 1990s, she became the first woman president of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) — and a cultural daughter of poet Haki R. Madhubuti, for whom she worked at Third World Press.
Born in Syracuse, NY and raised in Orange County, California, Mitchell found in music a response to the racial hostility of post-integration suburbia — and a continuation of her parents’ belief in endless creative possibility. That belief still drives her: for over two decades she has used science fiction, and especially the writing of Octavia E. Butler, as a compositional engine, building large-scale, intercultural works for her primary vehicle, Black Earth Ensemble.
She has been commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture, the Chicago Symphony’s MusicNOW, the Fromm Music Foundation, the Newport Jazz Festival, the Art Institute of Chicago, the French-American Jazz Exchange, Chamber Music America, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award, United States Artist Award, Herb Alpert Award, and American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2025.
Mitchell is a Professor of Music Composition at the University of Virginia. Her first book, The Mandorla Letters imagines an egalitarian, technologically advanced world in tune with nature. She has been the official Powell Flutes artist since 2011. At home in rural North Carolina, she is a grandmother, a beginning farmer, and host to artist residencies at her forest home.
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SlowPitchSound (Cheldon Paterson) is a mix of live sound-design, turntablism and theatre. His shows are like experiencing nature unfolding, sounds constantly shift and bend throughout space. SlowPitchSound has been compared to legends like Kid Koala, Otomo Yoshihide and Miles Davis with a unique virtuosity playing his turntable and electronic devices. Self proclaimed as Sci-fi turntablism this style combines improvisation skills highly tuned to capture sounds from vinyl records or objects, and reinterpret them into new compositions in an instance. It’s a process that has been developing for nearly two decades.
SlowPitchSound has scored films and theatre live, collaborated with dancers, written scores, performed with orchestras and ensembles and has received the prestigious Dora Mavor Moore award for Outstanding Sound Design/Composition (2025).
He was also featured on the front cover of Canadian avant-garde music magazine, MusicWorks for his vision and many unique accomplishments.
SlowPichSound has spoken about his work at higher education institutions, including York University (Toronto, Ontario), Queens University (Kingston, Ontario), Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo, Ontario), University of California (San Diego UCSD), and Centennial College
(Toronto, Ontario).