Onomatopoeia (all alternate spellings accepted) is Cassie Lear, flutes, Soren Hamm, saxophones, and Rebecca Olason, French horn. Faced with a menagerie of seldom-paired instruments and no repertoire whatsoever, these award-winning soloists and longtime friends came together to experiment with new ensemble timbres. Please join us to hear some brand new and newly-arranged music for this unusual combination!

The program includes but is not limited to:

Aus Liebe will mein Heiland Sterben by JS Bach (arr. Cassie Lear)
Found Objects on the Beach by Jenni Brandon (arr. Cassie Lear and Soren Hamm)
Trio by Steven Luksan (World Premiere)
Cityscape by Ben Seavello (World Premiere)
And some other aural treats from the brain of Chris Thile, arranged by Rebecca Olason

I WENT THROUGH THE WILDERNESS. Album listening event for experimental electronic group, YOU DIED!; live performances from YOU DIED!, Tree Cathedral, & Bit Graves.

Join us for the debut of the second album from experimental electronic group, YOU DIED! Josh Lim (Limanjaya) and Gabriel Wheeler come together to blend aspects of noise and ambience to create ever-evolving and dynamic pieces of electronic music. They use a wide variety of instruments from modular synthesizers, electric guitars, and more. They will be joined by modular-synth duo Tree Cathedral and experimental electronic / noise duo Bit Graves.

The Big Band at the End of the World asks and provides one of many possible answers to the question: What might improvisational music have to say to the relentlessly numbing and seemingly banal cruelty of our contemporary conjuncture – from border walls, internment camps, and the global rise of reactionary populism, to ubiquitous surveillance, to the melting of the polar ice caps and the extinction of species? Our answer takes the combined form of words, images, and sound. While the mood cannot but be of sadness, anxiety, and anger, the collective act is one of democratic hope.

We are 15 musicians, a visual artist, and a prose writer/performer. Stranger Genius Award-winning author Stacey Levine provides the words; artist & architect Anjali Grant provides video and animations; Gregg Miller has assembled an all-star line-up for the big band: Matt Benham (electric guitar), Heather Bentley (viola), Noel Kennon (viola), Jim Knodle (trumpet), Haley Freedlund (trombone), Kenny Mandell (flute/soprano sax), Jeremy Gonzalez (alto sax), Bryan Lineberry (alto sax), Alex Liebman (tenor sax), Gregg Miller (tenor sax), Domenic Chiaverini (bass), Nathie Katzoff (harmonium), Greg Campbell (french horn/percussion), Don Berman (percussion), Casey Adams (percussion).

Reflecting on 3 years living in Seattle, clarinetist and composer James Falzone presents his meditative solo work, Sighs Too Deep For Words, plus new compositions for his Tao Trio, featuring James alongside pianist Wayne Horvitz and bassist Abbey Blackwell. Also joining James will be dancer Alia Swersky.

An Evening in Improvised Sound and Movement
Created and Curated by Alia Swersky and Tom Baker

An evening of improvisation consisting of 4 sound and 4 movement artists joining together in sets of chance occurrences. Groupings of movers and musicians will be determined by aléa (the French word meaning indeterminacy). Decisions will be made by picking out groups of players and durations of time just before they are to begin. As is the nature of improvisation, each group will work with unpredictable conditions, they will meet the moment and see what unfolds.

Performers:
Sound: Tom Baker, Greg Campbell, Jesse Canterbury, Brian Cobb
Movement: Tamin Totzke, Matt Drews, Fox Whitney & TBD

What is B.S.T.S?
What happens when seasoned musicians and movers come together to create variable durations of improvisational performance?

These improvisational events will consist of a varying selection of curated sound and movement artists who will be brought together in purposeful improvisational collaborations. These ongoing performance happenings will selectively group artists with the intention of instigating dynamic collaborations. Each event will consist of a unique set of guidelines in relation to body, space, time and sound, but the constant for each grouping is that they connect in some way before the performance. Selected artists will be introduced, then asked to score and rehearse their piece in accordance with the indeterminacy of meeting one another, the performance themes of each event, and the convening of their shared interests. A goal is to bring together artists in different disciplines, and bridge diverse improvisational aesthetics. Performers will be asked to create structured scores that harness the unknown spontaneity of improvised performance.

Performers to include: Tamin Totzke, Matt Drews, Fox Whitney, Mike Hodapp, Tom Baker

In a striking integration of Deep Ecology, electroacoustic sound art and experimental dance, this performance invites the audience to consider the connection(s) between sensorium and ecosystem, the body and the earth.

The culmination of a 6-week interdisciplinary environmental science and somatic studies workshop, the dancers and musicians in this performance experiment with performing both sonic and somatic choreographies modeled after biological creatures quantum physicist Karen Barad calls “Queer Critters.” These highly intelligent and interconnected beings — from the underwater Brittlestar to the subterranean Mycelium fungal networks — do not posses a central brain and challenge our Western understandings of delineated corporeality. They perceive and understand the world with their body; they make sense of the earth with their skin. This performance asks: How can other-than-human beings illuminate our understandings of embodiment, and how can their dances through the world further enrich our own?

Sound artist Rocco Strain utilizes miniature contact microphones to sense audio vibrations produced by physical contact with the flesh and skin of living plant and fungal organisms such as plants, trees, moss, mycelium, mushrooms, lichens and flowers. Looped seamlessly into into a textural tapestry of sonic transmission, what you hear is flesh-to-flesh contact and cross-species encounters, the rubbing of overlapping earthly skins, the attraction and the repulsion. In this live electroacoustic sound piece, the musicians also incorporate bio-sonification devices that use electrodes hooked up to living, breathing plants to translate the bioelectricity and electromagnetic currents occurring within the plant’s organism into soundscapes.

Choreographer Iván Espinosa, highly influenced by his intensive studies of Japanese Butoh, takes up Nancy Stark Smith’s conceptualization of the “Skinesphere” to explore the intimate links between our senses and the earthly sensuous. An obscure footnote in Contact Improvisation, a postmodern dance form initiated in 1972 by American choreographer Steve Paxton, the SKINESPHERE aims to draw attention to that which is contained within the boundaries of the body and how this inner sensorium leads to bonding with the Earth. In connection to the sensorial modes of perception embodied by the Brittlestars, Mycelium and other “Queer Critters,” the dancers in this performance engage with the SKINESPHERE as a cross-species phenomenon. Breath by breath, pore-through-pore, skin to skin, we invite you to join us as we meditate on what ecologist David Abram calls the “reciprocity between our animal body and the animate terrain…the simple, somatic affinity that entangles our body with the bodies of other creatures, binding our sentience with that of the local earth.”

To learn more about choreographer Iván Espinosa’s electroacoustic sound art and live dance collaborations, you can read about his work here.

Doors at 7 PM.
The performance will be followed by a Q&A and refreshments.

Inverted Space presents a reinterpretation of the music from Twin Peaks. The concert will feature a handful of the Harry Partch instruments and draw upon different elements of improvisation. The goal will be to produce a new sound to an already innovative score.

FHTAGN is an experimental chamber ensemble started by Blake DeGraw in 2015. Since its inception, the group’s amorphous lineup has been joined by over 70 musicians from a wide variety of musical backgrounds. Primarily employing non-traditional means of scoring and conduction, FHTAGN has performed as a string orchestra, surround-sound choir, saxophone quartet, guitar orchestra, and many other formats, often employing large numbers and extremes in spatial dispersion.

Nital Etch is cello and synth based ambient drone and post-classical.

Blood Rhythms is the collaborative umbrella moniker of Chicago transplant Arvo Zylo, who has been living in Seattle for a little over a year. Blood Rhythms began slowly in 2007 as a brass/drone ensemble; which is to say, as many blaring horns as possible, effected in a nonmusical repetitive style. Since then, things did evolve into a sort of synth and junk-metal collective. “Assembly”, an LP out on legendary noise label RRRecords, is the culmination of what Zylo has done in post-production for five horns recorded in a meat locker, and Blood Rhythms has recently made their formal Seattle debut sharing members with FHTAGN, opening for Blevin Blectum this past October. Back in Chicago, Blood Rhythms has included as many as fifteen horn players, or at other times, five drummers, but more recently, the Seattle iteration of the project has focused on studio work, minimal trios and more dense sonic concepts.

ADVANCE TICKETS ARE SOLD OUT! There will be a limited number of tickets available at the door, cash/checks only.

Gamelan Pacifica presents an evening with Darsono, one of the most prominent musicians in Central Java today. Darsono will be making his first appearance in Seattle. Also joining Gamelan Pacifica will be guest pesindhen Jessika Kenney. The concert will feature Gendhing Candranata, Ketawang Gendhing Kabor, Jineman Kandheg and other pieces from the Central Javanese repertoire.

Darsono comes from a prominent family of music and theater traditions in Central Java, Indonesia. He grew up in a small village outside of the court city of Surakarta, long known as one of the major hubs for performing arts in Indonesia. Darsono studied karawitan, a genre of music played with a gamelan (a primarily bronze percussion ensemble) from Central Java. He also learned the revered art of shadow puppetry, primarily from his father and other relatives, until he continued his study of Indonesian performing arts at Institute Seni Indonesia, a national conservatory of the arts in Indonesia. Darsono graduated in 2002 with a Bachelor of Performing Arts, and a major in traditional Javanese court music. Today, he is one of the most prominent musicians inside and outside of the city of Surakarta. At the royal court of Mangkunegaran, Surakarta, he serves as the main drummer for dances performed at the court. In the surrounding villages, he is regularly featured as an accompanying musician at shadow puppet theater performances (wayang kulit). At his alma mater, he teaches and inspires many young generations of musicians who are mesmerized by his improvisational practices on several instruments of the gamelan.

Darsono’s first opportunity to perform abroad was when he joined the original troop for Robert Wilson’s I La Galigo, a musical theatre production based on a myth from Sulawesi, Indonesia, which premiered in Singapore in 2004. Ever since, he has traveled widely as a teacher and performer of music as well as a puppet master (dhalang) in Europe, the US, and Asia. In the U.S., Darsono has been appointed as an artist-in-residence at several institutions, including Wesleyan University, Smith College, Tufts University and Bates College. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at Cornell University. During his residencies in the U.S, he has traveled and performed music with a number of university and community groups. Darsono is proud to watch the traditional arts of his culture — the trade of his family for generations — become a bridge that allows him to travel far, experience various cultures and interact with people from all over the world. Darsono believes that within the domain of the performing arts, there is a “mysterious property” that allows people from various backgrounds to naturally come together, transcend differences, and reach a deeper mutual understanding.

Gamelan Pacifica is among the finest ensembles devoted to the performance of music for gamelan in the U.S. Formed in 1980, it has performed extensively in the Pacific Northwest, as well as Canada and throughout the U.S. Gamelan Pacifica is an active and adventurous ensemble, with a reputation for creating diverse productions merging traditional and contemporary musical forms with dance, theater, puppetry, and visual media. They perform often in the Northwest and have been guest performers at The Smithsonian Institute’s Festival of Indonesia, New Music Across America Festival, Vancouver New Music Society, On the Boards, Walker Art Center, Performing Arts Chicago, and many others. Visiting artists have included some of the most notable artists of Indonesia, including Rahayu Supanggah, Al Suwardi, Peni Chandra Rini, Heri Purwanto, Sutrisno Hartana, Wayan Sinti, Didik Nini Thowok, Sri Djoko Rahardja, I Made Sidia, Endo Suanda, Dedek Wahyudi, Ki Purbo Asmoro, Goenawan Mohamad, and Tony Prabowo.

Director, Jarrad Powell
Karawitan Coach, Jesse Snyder
Guest Pesindhen, Jessika Kenney

Gamelan performers: Noah Colbeck, Michael Dorrity, Stephen Fandrich, Ted Gill, Emily Hockel, Austin Larkin, Will Lone, Deena Manis, Richard Robinson, Sean Ryan, Troy Scheifelbein, Stephanie Shadbolt, Jesse Snyder, Jarrad Powell (Director).

Enjoy an evening designed by Mother Tongue’s Angelina Baldoz, and Katherine Cohen with music, movement, and poetry. Special guests poet Omar Willey, dancer Ezra Dickinson, and trumpeters Greg Kelley and Ray Larsen will join for this one-night-only special offering.

Mother Tongue is a two-headed art making machine specializing in post-disciplinary creation, formed in 2015 by composer and musician Angelina Baldoz and multidimensional artist Katherine Cohen (kt shores) who both have decades of performance experience and now run Studio Current in Seattle.

Presented by Nonsequitur.