Brian Fergus and Rob Angus present a multi-channel performance of electronic and acoustic music. The two originally met and worked together at Penn State in the 1980s and are excited to play together again.

Brian Fergus has been creating experimental electronic music since 1979. In the 1980s he studied electronic music and composition at Mills College with David Rosenboom, Larry Polansky, Lou Harrison, and Anthony Braxton. Brian is a Professor Emeritus of City College of San Francisco, where he taught electronic music for twenty eight years. He will perform abstract compositions featuring surprising sounds from unusual electronic, acoustic, and acousmatic instrument sources.

Rob Angus studied electronic music and composition at the Boston School of Electronic Music and Penn State. He constructs kinetic ambient-industrial soundscapes using a variety of acoustic instruments and toys to generate sounds that are manipulated, layered, and sent out into a multi-channel surround-sound system.

Part I: Factotum: Music of Work and Place – For Piano and Voice
Maria Mannisto – Soprano: Cristina Valdes- Piano

In remembrance of the centennial of the Everett Massacre, the first half of the evening will feature selected songs from Smokestack Arias. Additional works will include songs from Joe Hill, Me gustas cuando callas (with text by Pablo Neruda), and a song, commissioned by the Bushwick Book Club, based on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

Part II: Music for Solo Piano, Music for Piano and Electronics
Cristina Valdes-Piano, Wayne Horvitz Piano and Electronics

For Piano Alone, In Four Parts, plus Music in Other Rooms (Etude #6) for Piano and Electronics – Cristina Valdes
Improvisations for Piano and Laptop – Wayne Horvitz.

Wayne Horvitz is a composer, pianist and electronic musician. He is the leader of The Royal Room Collective Music Ensemble, The Gravitas Quartet, Electric Circus, and Sweeter Than the Day, and is the recipient the 2016 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. Upcoming projects include the recording of Those Who Remain Pt. I, premiered by the SSO in 2015, 21 Pianos (McKnight Foundation), and Those Who Remain (Pt. II) Concerto for Installation and Improviser, presented at SAM in the winter of 2017. (Map Fund, Japan Foundation).

Cristina Valdés is known for presenting innovative concerts with repertoire ranging from Bach to Xenakis. She has performed across four continents and in a multitude of venues including Lincoln Center, Carnegie Recital Hall, Jordan Hall and the Kennedy Center. An avid chamber musician, Valdés has toured extensively with the Bang On a Can “All Stars” and performed with the Seattle Symphony, Mabou Mines Theater Company, Parsons Dance Company, Antares and Trio V. Her festival appearances include the Singapore Arts Festival, Brisbane Arts Festival, Foro Internacional de Musica Nueva in Mexico City, New Music in Miami Festival, Festival of Arts and Ideas and the Festival of Contemporary Music in El Salvador, among others. She can be heard on several recordings on the Newport Classics, Albany and Innova labels.

Finnish-American soprano Maria Männistö moves comfortably among a wide range of musical styles to international acclaim. An adventurous recitalist, she has performed as soloist in contemporary works by Ligeti, Schönberg, Berio, Feldman, van der Aa, Scelsi, Crumb, and Boulez, and has premiered works by Wayne Horvitz, Garrett Fisher, William O. Smith, and Tom Baker. She has appeared frequently as soloist with the Seattle Symphony, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra, the Tacoma Symphony, EOS Kammeroper Köln, Seattle Modern Orchestra, and The Box is Empty. Ms. Männistö has performed over 30 solo recitals in the US, Canada, Finland, Belgium, and Germany, and has performed and recorded with The Tudor Choir, The Flemish Radio Choir, Opus 7, The Byrd Ensemble, and Solaris. A dedicated member of the Seattle area Finnish community, she serves as the primary organist at the Finnish Lutheran Church, and performs regularly at Nordic festivals and events.

Presented by Nonsequitur.

Seattle native, Rahikka is the artist pseudonym of Carson Rennekamp. As a sound and video artist, Rahikka creates meditative and abstract color field projections and organic electronic sounds that focus on color, repetition, and movement. Influenced by the works of Brian Eno, William Basinski, Oneothrix Point Never and Mark Rothko, Rahikka evokes the feelings of tranquility and patience. Carson graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design with his B.F.A. in Sound Design with minors in Film & Television and Art History and is currently a student at Seattle University where he is pursuing his M.F.A in Arts Leadership.

Pauline Oliveros – composer, improviser, electronic music pioneer, accordionist, Deep Listener, teacher, mentor, friend – passed away peacefully in her sleep on the morning of Nov. 24, 2016 at the age of 84. Tonight we honor and remember her with silence and sounding. Enter and exit as you wish, but please do so quietly. Chairs are provided, but if you prefer to sit on the floor, bring a cushion.

7 PM (bell): Silent meditation: “Listen in every possible way to everything possible to hear…and remind yourself when you are not listening.”

8 PM (bell): Tuning Meditation (voices only): “Begin by singing a pitch that you hear in your imagination. After contributing your pitch, listen for another player’s pitch and tune in unison to the pitch as exactly as possible. Listen again and sing a pitch that no one else is singing. The duration of pitches is determined by the duration of a comfortable breath. The dynamic level is soft throughout the piece. Continue by alternating between the three options described above:

• singing a new pitch of your own that no one else is singing
• just listening
• tuning in unison to the pitch of another singer.

Introduce new pitches at will and tune to as many different singers as are present. Although the dynamic level is soft make your tones available to others.”

8:30 PM (bell): Silent meditation

9 PM (bell): End

Butoh/sound improvisation with Greg Campbell (percussion), Beth Fleenor (clarinet, voice and percussion), and Vanessa Skantze (Butoh dance).

To translate the invisible wind through the water it sculpts in passing. – Robert Bresson

Greg Campbell (percussion) and Beth Fleenor (clarinet, voice and percussion) join Butoh dance artist Vanessa Skantze for an evening of free improvisation. The actions of deep listening and intuitive visceral response provoke forms and sounds unforeseen; arising in twin spirals of experience and beckoned openness to the moment erupting out of time.

Greg Campbell holds a doctorate in percussion performance with an emphasis on ethnomusicology from the University of Washington, and a masters degree in jazz performance from the New England Conservatory of Music. His doctoral work included a dissertation about the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) and other free jazz collectives in the United States during the 1960s. He plays drums and percussion in jazz, classical, and other musical contexts, including his long-standing membership in the Ghanaian traditional drumming group Anokye Agofomma. He teaches music courses at several colleges in the Puget Sound region.

Composer/clarinetist/vocalist Beth Fleenor harbors a strong love for variety & all sonic manipulation, moving freely through genres such as jazz, rock, classical, contemporary chamber, Slavic & American folk, metal, musique concrete, ambient & pop. Her work has been heard internationally from 100,000 seat rock festivals, maximum-security prisons, and performance art in rural bars, to art galleries, bunkers, sidewalks, sacred spaces, and some of the most prestigious concert halls, museums, clubs and theaters in the country. Believing that “art is the discipline of being,” Fleenor uses sound to open the channels of communication between and within individuals and environments. Her work as been heard in live music, recordings, theater, performance art, installation, modern dance, and film. She believes that an emphasis on creativity in a culture gives rise to creative solutions to social problems.

Vanessa Skantze is a Butoh artist and teacher of yoga and dance from Seattle. She has performed in the U.S. and Europe for over 20 years. She co-founded New Orleans sound/movement ensemble Death Posture in 2002, and collaborates with many renowned musicians including Jarboe and percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani. Skantze has trained with Jinen Butoh founder Atsushi Takenouchi since 2003, and performed with him in the U.S. and Europe. Since coming to Seattle in 2004 she has created numerous ensemble works under the name Danse Perdue as well as solo pieces. In 2013 she taught as part of Lydia Lunch’s Post-Catastrophe Collaborative. This past summer she was a movement director and performer for a production of Henry V with Freehold Engaged Theater, which tours correctional facilities in the Seattle area. She will continue to act as teaching artist with Freehold in the women’s correctional facility in 2017.

Further Records’ final production of the year features three northwest musicians. Prepare to zone.

Timm Mason (Master Musicians of Bukkake, Mood Organ) and Chloe Harris (Raica) join forces in DIAD. Their extended, long-form exploration of improvised electronics and dub mixing techniques generate oceanic drones and celestial vibrations that combine with blooming melodies to induce a sense of weightless, mildly euphoric wonder. Their debut album will be released on Further Records in 2017.

As Contact Cult, Portland’s Troy Micheau indulges in devotional drones and dub rhythms indebted to the transcendent spirit of early electronic and reggae music as well as the earthly tension of the metal records he devoured and produced before discovering synthesizers. The result is an anxious ambience that explores both the promise and fallibility of faith.

Leo Mayberry has been composing, coordinating and performing live video for the last 15 years as KillingFrenzy Visuals. Projects have varied from improvisational explorations with Steve Fisk to complicated theater performance with the Degenerate Art Ensemble.

Debacle Records presents the LP release for Seattle duo Medina/Walsh, entitled Vault of Angels. The seven-song album — and accompanying live performance — is a series of dense exercises in tension and release, comprised of atmospheric drone and industrial sounds blended amid American primitive guitar and psych influences. A sense of dialogue between the electronic and organic elements of the group’s sound sits at the core of their work, with Walsh at the helm of the modern electronic compositions and Medina providing the acoustic guitar flourishes.

Joining the night’s event is Mára, the solo project of Sige Records head Faith Coloccia. Her elegant and deceptively simple compositions situate at the crossroads of such grand narratives as death and transcendence, with an intimacy to her visions traced in the delicacy of her touch on the piano and the idiosyncratic etherealism in her lyrical mewl.

And Seattle brother-sister-brother trio Darto, who’ve shared musical output since high school, and utilize their current project as a means to communicate haunted spellsongs inspired by the creepy woods and rural farmland of their native Duvall.

Doors open at 7:30.

Trombonist Michael Vlatkovich approaches his music for the 21st century from an oblique angle. His stints in LA Latin bands (where he’s known as “El Rey”) and with Brian Setzer’s Big Band have left him with an affectionately sardonic take on jazz ensemble writing. One hears flashes of this twirling by like three-eyed koi in a pond. His titles are very witty, and through a substitution code serve as the notes of the music. Or vice versa. He will be joined by long-term compadres Jim Knodle (trumpet) and Greg Campbell (percussion), and a new friend, Yves Chartuest (saxophone), from Montreal.

Satchel Henneman will premiere six new works by young Northwest composers for classical guitar, electric guitar, guitar and computer, chamber music, prepared guitar and dance.

Lucas Winter’s Frog Perspectives explores temporal ambiguity through the use of constantly changing poly-rhythms against an unwavering pulse. Quitters by Adam Briggs draws on the sustain and uniformity afforded by an electric guitar to form a 10-minute wall of sound. Marguerite Brown’s Ouroboros for guitar and homemade percussion employs a palindromic nature, meant to be experienced the same backwards as it is forwards. 29 by Amelia Coulter for guitar and computer utilizes poetry activated by pitches played on the instrument. Ruby Dunphy’s work Had Happened makes sharp transitions between moments of extreme clarity to points of total chaos reminiscent of heavy metal. Allison Burke presents a dance work based on Kurt Vonnegut’s short story Harrison Bergeron dealing with handicaps, equality, and a distopic utopia.

Dialectical Imagination is a duo comprised of pianist Eli Wallace and percussionist Rob Pumpelly. Their music is sparked by the dialectical relation of compositional structure and spontaneous creative volition. The resultant art is a unique embrace of the composition/improvisation paradox. Their key performance aim is the happening of aesthetic ecstasy. For any given Dialectical Imagination performance, the aesthetic experience, itself and altogether, is primary. No abstract cause or theory validates or qualifies the directly presented aesthetic offering. Dialectical Imagination generates ecstatic music for ecstatic people.

Eli Wallace is a dexterous pianist, composer and educator residing in Brooklyn, NY. A soloist and bandleader with interests in jazz, improvisation, and contemporary avant-garde classical music, Eli’s performance schedule is extensive and broad, covering much of California as well as other parts of the U.S. and even abroad. Eli earned his Master’s in Music (Jazz Composition) at the New England Conservatory in Boston, MA where he studied with Jason Moran, Jerry Bergonzi, Ken Schaphorst, Frank Carlberg, and Kati Agocs.

Rob Pumpelly is an adept composer, multi-instrumentalist, theorist and educator residing in Oakland, CA. His compositional activities span a wide range of styles and platforms including works for classical and avant-garde chamber ensembles, vocal ensembles, percussion ensembles, jazz combos, rock groups, hardcore groups, and improv collectives. Rob is responsible for the compositional structures and formal arrangements utilized by Dialectical Imagination. Rob earned a Master of Arts degree in Composition at Mills College in Oakland, CA where he studied with Fred Frith, Alvin Curran, David Bernstein, Pauline Oliveros, and Chris Brown.

Dialectical Imagination is thrilled to be joined by Megan Mckearney-Inciardi, performing a live visual light show during the musical performance.

Opening the show, Seattle trombonist Christian Pincock will lead a small group of musicians using Soundpainting, the internationally-practiced sign language for live composition or conducted improvisation. In this method of working, the composer/conductor signs gestures to the ensemble indicating what to do and the members of the ensemble respond and interact creatively within the guidelines of each gesture.