(CD) Leslie Ting - What Brings You In

There's very little about violinist and interdisciplinary artist Leslie Ting's debut album What Brings You In that is conventional, and much of that has to do with the fact that the project is so much more than just a record. Though the Toronto-based Ting is very much rooted in musical expression, much of her creative output thus far has situated her playing within a larger context that draws upon elements of theatre, installation, and her experience from her former career as a practicing optometrist. Ting's breakthrough work, Speculation, threaded performances of John Cage and Beethoven through a monologue and captivating projections, all of which served to tell her story of witnessing her own mother's loss of vision and eventual (and sudden) passing. The piece garnered multiple award nominations, including the Pauline McGibbon Award for Emerging Theatre Director (2021).

What Brings You In also broaches deeply personal territory: therapy, but is more oblique and ambitious than its predecessor. Here, Ting enlists various collaborators to bridge a remarkable range of different worlds. Using interview research and personal experiences with talk therapy, hypnotherapy, dreamwork, sandplay, somatics, and reiki, Ting operates both as a performer and in a directorial capacity. The resultant work is unclassifable yet clearly sound-driven, grappling with questions of selfhood via the abstract discourse of music. It's an ever-evolving project that has already been mounted as a live theatrical event, a web-based installation, and a gallery show. In its present incarnation as an audio recording, its program is presented both in stereo and as a binaural recording, the three- dimensional headphone choreography of the latter serving to map the interior worlds of its thematic content.