If there’s anything central Canadians know, it’s that sometimes you have to band together to stay warm. And that’s certainly one of the driving forces behind Raging Against the Machine, a touring project initiated by Toronto’s Thin Edge New Music Collective and its Montreal equivalent, Ensemble Paramirabo.

Faced with shrinking government support for the arts, the two young groups decided that they could make things friendlier—and more financially sustainable—by sharing resources, musicians, and repertoire.

“When we first started discussing the possibility of collaboration, it actually began with a mutual sharing of our experiences starting up new-music ensembles—or collectives, in Cheryl’s case. And it is a hostile environment right now,” says Ensemble Paramirabo’s leader and flautist, Jeffrey Stonehouse. He’s referring to Cheryl Duvall, Thin Edge’s pianist and co–artistic director, who’s sharing a cellphone with him while on a break from rehearsals in Toronto.

“It’s really competitive, and very challenging to get any help and to build and to keep existing,” she says, jumping in. “I wouldn’t say there’s safety in numbers, but we wanted to help each other out. Jeff’s group hadn’t come to Toronto very much, and we hadn’t really been to Mon­treal to perform, but we each had our own audience base, so we were like, ‘Well, why don’t we just do something together. You guys can come and be introduced to our audience, and we could be introduced to yours.’ So we just went for it.”

The project was helped by the fact that Stonehouse, Duvall, and Duvall’s Thin Edge co-conspirator, Ilana Waniuk, all met on neutral ground, as students at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. There, they discovered a shared interest, not just in contemporary composition, but in working closely with living composers. Although two of the five pieces they’ll play in Vancouver—Steve Reich’s Double Sextet and Louis Andriessen’s Workers Union—are modern classics, the rest of the program consists of one work written for Thin Edge, one for Paramirabo, and a new work that was jointly commissioned.

“I guess the repertoire naturally came first, and from there we sort of determined a theme between the Andriessen and the Reich, which is sort of their mechanical nature,” Stonehouse explains.

“Their rhythmic drive,” Duvall adds. “And there is also a bit of political drive, both from Workers Union and from some of our own personal experiences. We’re trying to make things happen in kind of a different community than the one we walked into.”

Sonically, the Raging Against the Machine program shows its sociopolitical bent in pieces like Brian Harman’s double sextet Hum, which Stonehouse describes as “very much inspired by the ambient sounds or the humorous sounds of machines”, an obvious analogy for factory labour. Patrick Giguère’s Le Sel de la Terre is “based on an essay about people who decide to go against the grain of society—artists and artisans and farmers and people who build their own careers and their own jobs”, Duvall reveals. As for Anna Höstman’s Fog, “My interpretation of how she related to the [Raging Against the Machine] theme was actually a rejection of it,” Stonehouse says. “Her piece evokes misty landscapes, and it has a very ambient, spacious kind of beautiful sound.”

Taken as a whole, the program reflects the musicians’ intent to make music that has relevance beyond the academic world.

“I do think that a lot of the composers that we gravitate towards have definitely been taking their cues from things in society, different things about the environment, or political things,” Duvall says.

It’s appropriate, then, that Raging Against the Machine is being sponsored by two of Vancouver’s most progressive new-music presenters, Music on Main and the Little Chamber Music Series That Could. Will this first foray lead to further cross-country explorations?

“Phase three, eh?” Stonehouse says, laughing.

“Yeah, phase three!” Duvall concurs. “This project is definitely going to have legs.”

Music on Main and the Little Chamber Music Series That Could present Raging Against the Machine at the Fox Cabaret on Thursday (April 30).