WEDNESDAY 7/29
AN UNHOLY CANADIAN TRINITY
Norm "Panabrite" Chambers doesn't promote many shows, because he's usually too busy creating great music. But when he does, attention must be paid. For this bill, he's drawn three exceptional Quebecois musicians to the utilitarian Gallery 1412. Black Givre (aka Samuel Bobony) is a drummer who treats electronic sounds like they're his own private punching bags. His jagged, sample-heavy compositions rankle academia-nurtured musical decorum and make chaos sexy, as they spasm unpredictably through your head. I hear late-era Boredoms influencesâalways a good thing. Charles BarabĂ© shows a bit more refinement in his genre-elusive works. On 2014's Adieu FantĂŽme, he creates audio collages that feature a menagerie of surreal sounds and voices jutting hither and yon in the stereo field Ă la Nurse with Wound. It's extremely artful. Jean-SĂ©bastien Truchyâbassist for several avant-rock bands on Montreal's revered Constellation Records, including Fly Pan Am and Set Fire to Flamesâplumbs a rigorous strain of minimalist sound design that allows for Cage-ian jolts of chance actions. Using modular synthesizers, distorted vocals, and field recordings, Truchy finesses a subtly disorienting array of sonic events. His Neither cassette, which was inspired by Morton Feldman and Samuel Beckett's opera of the same name, has parallels with Scott Walker's stark, disturbing last few albums. Gallery 1412, 8 pm, $5, all ages.
THURSDAY 7/30
T. WILLIAMS'S SUAVE HOUSE MUSIC
London-based DJ/producer T. Williams makes slick house music designed to banish your worries, of which you have many, because it's the 21st century and we've botched things. He's injecting a warm humanity into what can sometimes be a grid-like, metronomic style of music, and if you're into that, your body's going to get hot to T. Williams's suave dance-floor lubricators. With Secondcity. Q Nightclub, 9 pm, $10, 21+.
FRIDAY 7/31
HOLLY HERNDON'S GLEAMING ELECTRO-CUBISM
Despite her first two albums' staunchly uncompromising aesthetic, Holly Herndon has become an underground electronic-music star. Her 2012 debut full-length, Movement, sounds at times like a contemporary pop record trying to power its way through an electromagnetic storm; every vocal's serrated and fun-house-mirrored beyond meaning, rendering it into malleable aural putty. At other times, Movement comes off as a modern twist on the eerie, sparse work of Polish jazz-improv singer Urszula Dudziak. This year's Platform is a bit more polished but just as fractured in its song structures. It's like a cubist Björk album, and one of the strangest artifacts with a 4AD logo on it; go straight to the gorgeously grotesque "DAO" for proof. Herndon is the rare artist striving to generate new forms of beauty in a scene rife with copycat underachievers and hardline nostalgia fetishists. With as_dfs. Kremwerk, 9 pm, $15, 21+.