The Knot

Toronto

The Knot is the duo of cellists Tilman Lewis and Nick Storring. Emerging in summer 2006, with allegiance to both form and freedom, they have since embarked on sonic explorations that draw on various folk traditions and experimental musics. The pair love to bend the instrument’s lyricism, drawing not so much on extended techniques as on an array of audacious contra-techniques: preparations/ apparati (practice mutes, hair-clips, clamps, wine corks, mallets, egg beaters, plectrums etc.). They still, however, permit the instrument’s natural beauty to have its place. These sonorities are channeled and combined into single unified textures, and everything from improvised heterophony, to stark contrast. Both Lewis and Storring have been active in various Toronto projects. Storring regularly plays solo under his own name and as member of Picastro, Loom, son jarocho collective Café Con Pan, and of I Have Eaten The City. He is also a composer of chamber and electronic music, and winner of the Canadian Music Centre’s 2011 Toronto Emerging Composer Award. Lewis has recorded with the AIMToronto Orchestra, the Kyle Brenders ensemble, and experimental songsmiths Slim Twig and Clara Engel, and performed with the improvising superband that hosts the Music Gallery’s Compose Yourself events. The pair have appeared together backing Sandro Perri, in a band playing with Doug Paisley, and as part of Aidan Baker’s large ensemble project Liminoid.