The Record Centre Series continues this week with two listening sessions that couldn't be more different from each other — and both of which feel exactly right for a room full of records.

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Terry Riley — A Rainbow in Curved Air

Thursday, July 31 · 4:00 PM · Free

Terry Riley turns 90 this year. We're marking the occasion the right way: putting A Rainbow in Curved Air on the turntable and listening to it together, front to back, in the store.

Released in 1969, A Rainbow in Curved Air changed what people understood a single musician could do with tape loops, keyboards, and pure repetition. Before there was a genre called minimalism — before Philip Glass or Steve Reich had fully articulated the movement — Riley was already there, building shimmering, hypnotic, endlessly evolving soundscapes from a small set of simple materials. The title piece is eighteen minutes long and feels like it lasts both forever and not nearly long enough. The record still sounds like the future.

Come sit with it. No background noise required — just this record, this room, and ninety years of one of music's great originals.

Thursday, July 31 · 3:00 PM · The Record Centre · 1099 Wellington Street West · Free

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Cris Derksen — The Visit

Saturday, August 1 · 3:00 PM · Free

Cris Derksen — cellist, composer, and one of the most important voices in contemporary Indigenous music in Canada — passed away in 2025. The Visit is a memorial album, and this listening session is an opportunity to honour her work and her legacy in the way that feels most fitting: attentively, together, in a room built for this kind of listening.

Derksen's music moved fearlessly between classical composition, electronic production, hip-hop, and traditional Cree music — and it always arrived somewhere that felt genuinely new. She was a collaborator across genres and communities, a performer of extraordinary presence, and a composer whose work will outlast all of us. The Visit deserves to be heard this way.

Saturday, August 1 · 3:00 PM · The Record Centre · 1099 Wellington Street West · Free

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Both sessions are part of the official Ottawa Chamberfest 2026 programming. No tickets. No reservations. Just come in.