Allison Cameron

“…intelligent, earthy, and playful.”
– Jennie Punter, Musicworks Magazine

Photograph by David Dacks, Courtesy of the Music Gallery

Allison Cameron is a professional composer, performer and improvising musician in Toronto. She has been commissioned in Europe and North America by many ensembles and festivals. Since 2000, she has also been an improviser performing on electronic keyboards, ukulele, banjo, piano, mini amplifiers, radios, crackle boxes, cassette tapes, miscellaneous objects and toys.

Allison has been celebrated in Musicworks Magazine, the UK’s The Wire Magazine, I Care if You Listen and a variety of other online publications. Her reputation for writing compelling compositions for contemporary music ensembles is international. She is also a sought after improviser with a strong national following. She has completed two national solo tours in the past four years. In 2007 she founded the Allison Cameron Band with fellow musician/composers Eric Chenaux and Stephen Parkinson to explore uncharted territory in her compositions by integrating a variety of musical forms into her work.  The result has been a critically acclaimed CD on the Rat-Drifting label of several genre-defying pieces. In 2009 she formed a trio with trumpeter Nicole Rampersaud and drummer Germaine Liu called c_RL (pronounced curl) who released the CD ‘Friends’ to critical acclaim.

Never one to shy away from exploration, Allison went on a residency to Svalbard, Norway in 2013, where she spent time recording underwater sounds from icebergs in the fjords of Spitzbergen. She is also involved in creating sound installations based on her experiences in the High Arctic among others.

Her interest in graphic/instructional notation has resulted in several scores that will soon be published together. Her experimental scores have had performances by Ensemble Supermusique (Montréal), Contact (Toronto), Suddenly Listen (Halifax) and other ad hoc groups in Toronto.