Bay Area composer Zachary James Watkins (half of the duo Black Spirituals) is joined by outstanding Seattle musicians – guitarists Tom Baker & Satchel Henneman, violinists Austin Larkin & Tari Nelson-Zagar, violist Heather Bentley, bassist Darth Nielsen, and trombonist Greg Powers – for an evening of compositions exploring site specificity and just intonation, among other things.

“This concert presents a collision of works written between 2004 and now. These compositions are interested in questions most of which I have yet to define. One clear concern is high vibration resonance. This can be understood any way you wish as each of the three words have complex meanings. For me this phrase represents an interest in imagining radical energy exchange / transformation. Composing relationships that have potential to excite, resonate, grow, energize.

Over time my output for new through-composed works has focused on site specificity, individuals, economy of resources. I often attempt single page scores and I always try to write for specific individuals and rooms if at all possible. Strategies designed to investigate high vibration resonance.

This concert will feature a premiere revision of for Andy scored for trombonist Andy Strain, myself performing cassette diffusion and battery powered electronics and the Marin Headlands Battery Townsley resonant frequencies. Weeks prior I was given access to the resonant underground WWII era Battery and identified room resonances by remixing experiments envisioned by composers such as Alvin Lucier. for Andy premiered on August 4th 2013 as part of the San Francisco Soundwave 6 Biennial. We were able to excite the space with sympathetic frequencies resulting in amplified room resonant echoes and rich harmonics.

Suite for String Quartet is my first substantial piece. Composed between 2004 -2006 and in continuous revision ever since employs a 16 tone harmonic tuning distributed among the four string instruments. This is my first piece to utilize a specific tuning based on the unique resonant frequencies of the performance space (in this case the Mills College Concert Hall Foyer) as well as live interactive computer synthesized multi-channel processing.

Finally the compositions Positively Right On for two electric guitars and Treatment No. III for double bass and violin written in Just Intonation. These pieces were written during a period when I was questioning dyads and duo formats. Both works explore an intimacy by placing emphasis on dynamic improvisation in collaboration with strict notation and a hyper sensitive intonation.

The entire program wishes to achieve a high vibration resonance.”

Presented by Nonsequitur.
Photo: Mark Mahaney

Gift Tapes/DRAFT presents a night of experimental electronic music featuring Seth Nehil, RM Francis and Cameron Shafii – for the third installment of its 2017 program at the Chapel.

Seth Nehil (Portland) has released over 15 albums of experimental music and has performed internationally. In the last decade, he has produced sound for dance and theater, has written and directed original multimedia performance works and has created multichannel sound and video installations. Among other things, he is currently creating music for a retrospective exhibition by sculptor Bill Wills (August 2017), designing sound for the Hand2Mouth Theater production Psychic Utopia (November 2017) and composing for Linda Austin’s dance piece A World, A World (December 2017). Seth teaches courses in sound and video at the Pacific NW College of Art. Listen here.

RM Francis is a Seattle-based musician working with computer-generated sound in performance, installation and recordings. Drawing on a panoply of digital synthesis techniques, his work interrogates the boundaries of musical form and performance. Francis is also a member of the networked computer music ensemble Mesh Collaborative. His spring 2017 release, Hyperplastic Other, is published by Nada. Listen here.

Cameron Shafii (San Francisco) is an Iranian composer practicing generative and electroacoustic music. His compositions are inflected with a host of digital synthesis processes and are informed by aspects of acousmatic theory, particularly spectromorphology. His works do not impose any temporal scheme upon the listener – rejecting the semiotic operation of ‘engagement/disengagement’ in the discourse of A.J. Greimas. Rather, he presents an asymmetrical narrative that features hyperkinetic movement, tensions and complex sonorities. His works aim to explore a functional range of sounds from microscopic and minimal, to macro and maximal. Shafii has remixed, reprocessed and produced compositions for Anòmia and Farmacia901. Currently, he is working in conjunction with Chris Douglas (Scald Rougish, Dalglish) on a forthcoming collaborative release. He runs the Ge-stell label. Listen here.

An evening of music and discussion with Seattle composers:

John Kammerer, new music for marimba and electronics

Jeremiah Lawson, Zombie Sonata Rags

Patrick O’Keefe, Morning Stroll for Saxophone Quartet

John Teske, vectorscores

The Seattle Composers’ Salon fosters the development, performance and appreciation of new music by regional composers and performers. At bi-monthly, informal presentations, the Salon features finished works, previews, and works in progress. Composers, performers, and audience members gather in a casual setting that allows for experimentation and discussion. Everyone is welcome!

Ask the Ages is a Seattle, Washington based avant-jazz band. Formed in 2010, the group includes: Greg Campbell (drums and percussion), Steven Bell (Vibraphone ), Brian Heaney (guitar), Kate Olson (sax/woodwinds) and John Seman (bass). Influences are Sonny Sharrock, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. This is their first gig in over a year. Expect special guests and new music.

Eveline Müller presents the reunion of her Klang Quintet, featuring James Drage (laptop/sound manipulations), Stuart McLeod (EEG brain waves), Carl Farrow (electronics/drums), Brad Hawkins (cello), and Eveline Müller (Boaeing, a collection of metal pieces). The Klang will take you on a journey through beautiful, ugly, loud, quiet, tense, and sparse sonic landscapes.

Opening up is the Klang Orchestra with a new 20-minute piece in works called Song of the Ice Flow, inspired by such and the sounds of ice in general. The orchestra features strings as “water instruments”, guitar, trumpet, electronics, field recordings, and the Boaeing as “forest instruments” and samplers as the ice itself.

The Drone Cinema Film Festival, now in its third year, showcases cutting-edge, minimalist works of ethereal beauty that bring sonic drones into the visual realm. This year’s festival, whose theme is GOLD, takes place again Vrijplaats in Leiden, Netherlands, as well as at the Good Shepherd Center Chapel in Seattle.

Drone Cinema draws its inspiration from a wide range of sources, from the mid-century experimental films of Stan Brakhage and Jordan Belson, the hurdy-gurdy used in Early Music, the tambura of Indian music, to the minimalist drones of La Monte Young and Terry Riley and the recent film genre called Slow Cinema. Drone Cinema filmmakers offer their vision of what sonic drones look like.

Drone Cinema filmmakers transmute sonic drones into moving images. Festival founder Kim Cascone refers to Drone Cinema as “transcendigital” media – media conjured through active imagination instead of being driven by software.” A member of the audience at the first festival in Leiden commented: “Drone cinema is a lot like the visions I have in a flotation tank.”

This year’s entries:

Phillipe Neau Ormophosis
Mike Rooke In Absence of Music Theory
AUME As Above, So Below
Sequencial Haumea
Kat Cascone Thecosomata
Don Haugen The Black It Moves Between Them
Stewart Collinson & Andrea Szigetvári Newton’s Dream
Kris Force Psychomanteum

The evening opens with a live performance by Seattle drone masters: bitės.

Presented by Nonsequitur.

This concert will feature guitar music by Seattle composer Tom Baker, spanning the past 25 years. Works for solo classical guitar, guitar and soprano, and for electric guitar. Baker published his first guitar composition in 1992, called The Green Guitar while a graduate student in music at Arizona State University. Since then, he has written many works that include guitar, both in a solo setting and with ensembles. He has asked several of the area’s most accomplished guitarists (and good friends) to perform seven of his guitar works on this evening celebrating the instrument: Michael Partington, Michael Nicolella, Mark Hilliard Wilson, Satchel Henneman, Cherie Hughes.

Works will include the aforementioned Green Guitar from 1992, and the most recent Cage Elegies for electric fretless guitar. In between will be Possible Lullabies for guitar and soprano, based on texts by Garcia-Lorca; The Curse of the Fathers – a work exploring the creation of the universe; Three Movements – each movement represents a different type of movement (slalom, butoh, and rapid-eye); and Eleven – a work for solo electric guitar (dedicated to the great, fictional guitarist Nigel Tufnel.

Inverted Space Ensemble showcases an evening geared at sculpting time in new ways. Drawing on a tradition of long works, Inverted Space returns with a pair of newly composed long pieces. Our co-director Jeff Bowen unveils a world premier ensemble piece. Also on the concert is the Seattle premier of John Eagle’s tuning #3 (first position) performed by our artistic director and violinist Luke Fitzpatrick.

Liminal drone-pop from Ensemble Economique (Denovali, Not Not Fun), tactile sound corrosion from Jim Haynes (Editions Mego, Ghostly International), and polyglot esoterica by way of murder ballad and / or blotted collage from Robert Millis (Climax Golden Twins, Abduction, Sublime Frequencies).

Based in California’s Humboldt County, Brian Pyle wanders the world on his countless travels. Far from being restless, he has his very own Pylesque way of travelling. Much like a Lynchian version of Hemingway, he has an eye for the thin layer between restlessness and relaxation, gloom and serenity. Wherever he goes, he ardently absorbes these nuances, rarefies them and molds them into a seamless array of glimmering styles, from drone and ambient to shoegaze and post-wave, giving birth to yet another creation of his prolific Ensemble Economique project.

Jim Haynes is a California artist defining his work through the phrase, “I rust things.” The statement embraces a multiplicity of meanings across various media. There are three major approaches in the work at large: the mangled surfaces of corroded photographs, the cryptic tension of the video / expanded cinema pieces, and the caustic field disturbances in sound composition. Blight. Dislocation. Subcutaneousness. Toxicity. Brackishness. Psychic unease. These allusions (amongst others) develop and materialize through various chemical, digital and/or analog means, often an intertwined amalgam. This process seeks to accentuate the instability of these conditions and territories as a series of evocations, hauntings, convulsions, and evanescence.

“Some people can sum up their lives on a business card; Robert Millis needs a whole deck, full sized, both faces of each playing card, and you’re still liable to miss something while he shuffles. Filmmaker, photographer, guerilla ethnographer, collector and sharer of 78 RPM records, weaver of multi-layered ambiences, improviser, annotator, jokester, traveler…” Bill Meyer, Dusted. He’ll be playing a duo set with trumpeter Greg Kelley.

Dowsing uses saxophone, synthesizer, and cymbals as divining rods to locate deep musical aquifers.

This performance is the debut of saxophonist Steve Griggs with his son Ben on analog synth. While Steve improvises on the acoustic foundations of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, Ben plugs into experimenters Pauline Oliveros and Steve Reich.

Greg Campbell joins on percussion. Steve and Greg first collaborated in 2001 on the Earshot Voice and Vision Series at the Seattle Asian Art Museum and have crossed musical paths ever since. Every meeting generates new conversations.