David Parker (he/him) is a musician, sound artist, and producer based in Kingston, Ontario / Katarokwi. David draws on personal histories of community radio involvement and social justice organizing to develop a sonic aesthetic rooted in situatedness, narrative, meditation, and togetherness. His musical influences include sonic collage, cosmic americana, drone, free jazz, folk, field recordings, contemporary classical, and electroacoustic composition. His recordings have been released by VACANCY RECS (Niagara, ON), Tall House Recording Co (Guelph, ON), Small Scale Music (Montreal, QC), and Shimmering Moods (Netherlands).
As a member of the Kingston Improvised Music Collective (2023), he co-organized a concert and workshop series for improvised music in Kingston. The (h)EAR Concert and Workshop Series hosted performers and composers from across Canada and the United States to lead participatory workshops and perform.
In 2018 he co-organized a music venue with a group known as the 12CAT Arts Collective. The same group went on to direct and produce an art film / music documentary that won the award for Best Local Short at the Kingston Canadian Film Festival (2022). The documentary explores the music community on Wolfe Island and improvised music in particular.
Parker has performed at the Tone Deaf Festival (Kingston), the In The Soil Arts Festival (St. Catharines), Mardi Spaghetti (Montreal), Audiopollination (Toronto), and IMOO (Ottawa). He has participated in artist residencies at the Lookout Arts Quarry (Washington, USA), Modern Fuel Artist Run Centre, the Grand Theatre, and the Isabel Bader Performing Arts Centre. He has toured internationally as a sound designer and technician with the Caravan Stage Company.
He is currently studying composition with Matt Rogalsky in the Sonic Arts Studio at Queen’s University.
The wide-open form crushes an acoustic Americana piece and reconstructs it into an almost painterly sonic experience. The instruments each have room to roam over a wide, mid-century minimalist canvas. The improvisational nature of the work necessitates dabbling in dissonance when one or more of the musicians does something that cuts against the work of the others. But the dissonance resolves here, not leaving the listener stranded; the piano does particularly good work in grounding the listener with gentle, subtle melodies. It’s a little more gnarly than most “meditative” music, but I found myself able to connect with it in the way I do some more traditionally peaceful meditative work. It’s a fascinating track.
- independentclauses.com, February 2022
The only thing we love more than former DOMINIONATED contributor David Parker's unique insights and distinctive album reviews is his equally idiosyncratic music as Slow Man Tofu. Soft Melody Maker, his second full length under the moniker, is a righteous slab of Parker's unhurried style, allowing the colours of folk and country to run into a lo-fi wash to create a vibrant and wondrous canvas of colliding sounds and styles. Do yourself a solid and play this record from front to back, but play close attention to track two, "Meat Birds": if you're not sold on Slow Man Tofu by the time its coda cascades into the ether, check to ensure you're human and not an emotionless automaton.
- Jim Di Gioia, Dominionated newsletter, May 2020
I particularly enjoyed Parker's bass playing, with his imaginative use of arco techniques and muting to create different sounds, and how he combined the bass with pre-recorded loops. Wellman impressively expanded his repertoire with the baritone (sax), retaining his own style and using the different capabilities of that instrument to create beautiful sounds. And playing together they showed considerable empathy and coordination. They'd be well worth hearing together again.
Magicmouth is the latest release from David Parker's multi-tentacled creature called Slow Man Tofu. Where his previous tape, Steer, was anchored in rock and folk songwriting with a occasional forays into freer-form experimentation, Magicmouth abandons all conventions of song structure and instead floats on extended and effected guitar improvisations, layered with synthetic tones and dubby, echoey half-singing. David allows his slow paths to wander uninhibited, resulting in an expansive collection of tracks that moves between drone, doom, noisy free improv, and ambient music. Do you sleep? When you sleep, do you dream? When you dream, do you know that you are dreaming?
Slow Man Tofu brilliantly bottles the cacophonic energy that comes when one person turns to another and says, “Hey, you wanna start a band?” on the aptly named “Starting Bands”. It’s about music as therapy, music as release, music as a way of life. It’s finding kindred spirits whose first reaction to such a question isn’t to laugh, but to dream.
“Do The CEO” with its pounding drums and distorted guitars simply defies any genre classification. “For David Blackwood” is weird folk, with emphasis on the “weird”. “Puke Purple” is pretty enough but is definitely off-kilter, and you begin to realize that Parker’s voice sounds like Eddie Vedder from an alternate universe. By the time “The Bellows” rolls around you are so indoctrinated that the music begins to sound normal to you, despite the fact that it burbles and echoes with electronics.
Hot on the trails of his 2015 EP Calm Me Down, Slow Man Tofu (aka David Parker) has just released his latest project titled Steer. Parker describes Slow Man Tofu as straight-ahead rock, whereas his other projects have him creating experimental music and collaborating with a diverse group of musicians and a poet as well. Interesting note: those looking to snag Slow Man Tofu’s new album will be delighted to learn that they can purchase it on cassette (20 copies available).
From Kingston, Canada we have singer-songwriter David Parker who releases under the name of Slow Man Tofu giving us a folk-rock jam with Hate Crime. Check this melodious slice of gorgeous guitars and confident vocals, pulled from recently released EP Calm Me Down via his Bandcamp.