One of the most gifted improvisers in any kind of music, the remarkable German pianist returns to the pristine Chapel space for an unforgettable solo piano concert.
Presented by Earshot Jazz Festival with support from the Goethe Institute.
(photo by Kurt Rade)
KARA-LIS COVERDALE [Sacred Phrases, Umor Rex, Constellation Tatsu] works in both acoustic and electronic media to create works that “blur the boundary between the human and the electronic machine” (Weird Canada). A classically trained keyboardist who studied composition and musicology, she has held several organist and music director positions across Canada since age 13, most recently as a notable and controversial organist, composer in residence, and director of the MES mixed choir in Montreal. In 2015, her solo debut Aftertouches was named a top album of the year by The Wire, The Quietus, NPR, Adhoc, and others. Coverdale’s work has explored music’s sacred histories while forging its new, technologically mediated and culturally saturated frontiers: extended harmonic resolutions typical of Baroque keyboard music frame her approach to part writing, which she voices with hybrid keyboards, fractured samples, digitally rendered vocals, and VST miragery. Her music appears in films, provocative plays, commercials, and disturbing historical documentaries. She is active in the studio and live as a composer, performer, and collaborator.
MARK VAN HOEN is a British electronic music composer since 1981, releasing records from 1992 on labels such as R&S/Apollo, Touch, CCO & eMego. He has created music under his own name as well as Locust, and Autocreation, and produced/collaborated with Seefeel. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he hosts a regular show on Dublab.
MARCUS FISCHER (12k, Tench, Optic Echo) is a musician + interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, Oregon. His work typically centers around memory, geography and the manipulation of physical audio recording mediums. Slowly unfolding melodies and warm tape saturated drones have become a trademark of his recordings and live performances alike. These sounds have found their way into multimedia installations, short flims, and even into the award winning public radio program Radiolab. Fischer has released a number of recordings on the widely respected 12k label including his photographic + sonic collaboration with label founder Taylor Deupree.
Advance tickets available via PayPal c/o ambientzones@gmail.com.
An evening of hand built custom noise devices played live.
Bryan Day (San Francisco) is a sound artist, musical instrument designer, and conceptual artist. His sound work focuses on the subtle textural interplay of natural recordings and amplified electronic sounds generated by his invented instruments. Using scavenged electronics, repurposed mechanical components, and amplified materials that you might find in your garage or your great uncle’s office, he re-imagines them into constructivist sound sculptures. In addition to his own audio work, he has run the Public Eyesore / Eh? labels since 1997.
Driftwood Orchestra is not concerned with perfection or standards of artistic success, but is interested in creating a way to communicate with the forest with the intent to somehow, someday apologize. The point is not to create music, or to showcase instrument playing skills. More so it is a way to give a voice to the trees. All that they have survived to grow and exist and everything that has happened to a piece of wood before it became an object in Driftwood Orchestra. Ever increasing demands of civilization unconcerned with the survival of the forest always pushing. Until now the trees had no voice after death to tell the stores or share knowledge from a life of silent suffering. Not that the trees would use a language any of us could ever understand or perhaps care if we understand in the direct way we perceive language. However if given the chance and under situations where people are open to receiving messages from the forest via a dead tree it could be that the forest may send a message of sorts. As one listens to Driftwood Orchestra players struggle to find solutions to creating sound in a live improvised setting imagine that the message could be simply “we all live and thrive together or we all suffer and die together”.
Further Records hosts an evening of electronic music:
Ricardo Donoso is a composer, percussionist and electronic musician from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He studied composition at Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory before drumming for avant-metal visionaries Ehnahre and scoring Greg Barker’s Homegrown: The Counter Terror Dilemma (HBO pictures 2016) and Brazilian Grand Prize short film winner Casimiro Effect. Donoso has released music on Further Records, Hospital Productions, Denovali, and Digitalis, and tours throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America. He is most concerned with building and manipulating an immersive sound world under a chain of progressive rhythms, cinematic textures, and elegant melodicism.
Ex-Soft Metals superstar Patricia Hall has ventured out on her own with an arsenal of boxes, creating a diverse array of synthesizer music. Her sound lies somewhere between dance music, austere synthetic pop, and experimental electronic composition.
Kristen Thom’s solo musical venture Bardo:Basho, offers up a blending of the haunting spirituality of new age along with swooping downtempo beats, ghostly clouds of drones, and Thom’s steady and passionate vocals.
Visuals by Leo Mayberry, who has been composing, coordinating and performing live video for the last 15 years as Killing Frenzy Visuals. Projects have varied from improvisational explorations with Steve Fisk to complicated theater performance with the Degenerate Art Ensemble.
Composer Jeff Greinke is considered one of the pioneers of dark ambient music. His seminal vinyl release Cities in Fog broke new ground in 1985. 18 solo albums and 7 collaborative works later, with extensive touring throughout the US and Europe, as well as in Canada, Mexico, and China, he returns to Seattle with his latest project. Jeff will perform one set solo, and for the second set he’ll be joined by Seattle musicians Lesli Dalaba on trumpet, Austin Larkin on violin/viola, Greg Campbell on percussion, vibes, French horn, and Jim DeJoie on clarinets, saxophone, and flutes, with master shape-shifter Rob Angus on surround sound.
In the last couple of decades, Greinke’s music has been summarily described as cinematic, atmospheric, complex and sophisticated, subtle and serene, “dark age,” delicate and dissonant, sinister, funky and foreboding, edgy and compelling, organic and original, daring and adventurous, haunting and sublime, exquisite and timeless, “a marvel to hear.”
Jeff’s musical career flourished in Seattle for 20 years, and in 2003 he migrated to Southern Arizona to bask in the high drama spectacular skies and strange exotic terrain of the Sonoran desert. He lives with his wife Isabel with their dog and two cats, among prickly pear cacti, towering saguaros, howling coyotes, javelina and rattlesnakes, and the weirdest bugs you’ve ever seen.
Presented by Nonsequitur.
The Christian Asplund/Stuart Wheeler Duo is joined by Tari Nelson-Zagar for a set of newly composed experimental folk, followed by a set with the trio plus Tom Baker and the father-son percussion duo of Greg and Thomas Campbell.
Christian Asplund is a Canadian-American composer-performer based in Utah where he teaches at Brigham Young University. His interests have included the intersections of text/music, improvisation/composition, and modular textures/forms.
Hailing from Marysville and residing currently in Utah, Stuart Wheeler is an up and coming composer and singer whose inscrutable and soulful compositions and voice channel medieval polyphony, early American lining out, delta blues, etc.
Tari Nelson-Zagar is a third generation violinist and improvisor whose focus is collaborating with composers, choreographers, and other creative artists.
Performing on fretted and fretless guitars, Tom Baker has been active as a composer, performer and music producer in the Seattle new-music scene since 1994. He is the artistic director of the Seattle Composers’ Salon, and co-founder of the Seattle EXperimental Opera (SEXO). His most recent release, SAVE, with the Tom Baker Quartet, has garnered much attention and critical acclaim.
Greg and Thomas Campbell hail from a percussive dynasty originating in Bountiful, Utah. They are both equally comfortable in bebop and free improvisation and everything in between using drumset, found and artist-fabricated percussion, and traditional West African instruments.
An evening of site-specific electroacoustic compositions and improvisations with three original works from Seattle artists Timm Mason, Will Smith, and Skerik. All three are frequent collaborators with many artists as instrumentalists and engineers and will be bringing their individual sensibilities to new works written specifically for the Chapel Performance Space. Expect involved use of the resonance and surround space available in this unique venue.
This evening will mark the first official installment of TAP 4.0: The Nyxology Sessions, a series of experimental open rehearsals where all are invited to explore the full range of their personal movement-based practices, from meditating while lying down to every variety of dance/movement art, while The Antenna Project live-scores the entire experience.
Part music concert, part neo-dance jam, part sociocultural lab test, these evenings are designed as a hybrid experience for you to explore what The Antenna Project’s music inspires you to do. Bring a book, bring a sketchpad, bring a pillow, bring a yoga mat, bring a camera, bring a movement idea, bring a friend… The Nyxology Sessions are all about building a bridge to that next authentic level.
Christopher Hydinger’s The Antenna Project provides live-scores (improvised context-specific audio compositions) for all variety of live experiences including extended duration performance, yoga, meditation and other movement-based classes, events, performances and happenings, films, ceremonies and parties/gatherings. He employs electric guitar, an effects pedal and various methods of interfacing to create full-registered music ranging from subdued waves of droning minimalism to bombastically exuberant maximalism. Christopher’s held the artist-in-residence position at Punk Rock Yoga, creative directed and performed in the award-winning art-theater group PB_TMOG, curated and produced the quarterly Dance and Music improvisation-based performance series HERE/NOW, performed in graphic novelist Dame Darcy’s band Death By Doll and performed at venues such as Benaroya Hall, Neumos, The Crocodile, Chop Suey, On The Boards, the Henry Art Gallery, Northwest Film Forum and the Triple Door sharing the stage with such acts as Low, Woven Hand, David Bazan (Pedro the Lion), The Gossip, Sun City Girls, The Makers, Tara Jane O’Neil, Kinski, The Dead Science and Climax Golden Twins. He currently owns/operates WCS Art and Design.
Spill is the Berlin-based duo of Magda Mayas on piano and clavinet and Tony Buck on drums / percussion, formed in 2003. Releasing their 3rd album this year, Tony and Magda have been playing all over Europe, the USA, Australia and Lebanon.
Tony Buck is regarded as one of Australia’s most creative and adventurous exports, with vast experience across the globe. He has been involved in a highly diverse array of projects but is probably best known around the world as a member of the trio The Necks. Following studies and early experience in Australia he spent time in Japan, where he formed PERIL with Otomo Yoshihide and Kato Hideki before relocating to Europe in the mid-nineties. Some of the more high-profile projects he has been involved with include the band Kletka Red, and touring and recording with, among others, The EX, The Exiles, and Corchestra, and involvement with most of the international improvisation and new music community and festivals He also creates video works for use with live music performance and has had pieces shown in Tokyo, Belfast, Berlin, New York and Sydney. Current projects include TRANSMIT (a guitar driven post-rock project); New York based trio “Glacial” (with David Watson and Lee Renaldo); “The Fell Clutch” (with Ned Rothenberg, Stomu Takeshi and David Tronzo) and a long-standing duo with Axel Dörner.
Magda Mayas is a pianist living in Berlin. Developing a vocabulary utilizing both the inside as well as the exterior parts of the piano, using preparations and objects, she explores textural, linear and fast moving sound collage. Alongside the piano, Mayas has recently been performing on a Clavinet/Pianet, an electric piano from the 60s with strings and metal chimes, where she engages with noise and more visceral sound material, equally extending the instrumental sound palette using extended techniques and devices. Mayas performs internationally solo and in collaboration with a large number of musicians and composers. Current projects are a duo with Anthea Caddy (cello), a duo with Christine Abdelnour (sax), and “Great Waitress”,a trio with Monika Brooks (acc) and Laura Altman (cl). Magda Mayas has performed and toured in Europe, the USA, Australia and Lebanon and collaborated with many leading figures in improvisation and composers such as John Butcher, Andy Moor, Zeena Parkins, Joelle Leandre, Paul Lovens, Ikue Mori, Phill Niblock, Peter Evans, Andrea Neumann and Axel Dörner.
Opening is Seattle duo Bad Luck, the 10-year collaboration between Seattle-based musicians Chris Icasiano on drums and Neil Welch on saxophone/electronics. With four albums under their belt, Bad Luck has created an incredibly diverse array of music — no small feat in the heavily trodden world of drum/saxophone duos. Their melodies, improvisations and compositions are constructed from the ground up, creating a band sound much larger than the sum of its parts. Bad Luck formed out of late night drum and saxophone marathon sessions exploring Coltrane/Rashied Ali style duos and jazz standards. It was after adding live electronics that the unique sound profile of Bad Luck began to take shape. Welch and Icasiano are founding members of the famed Racer Sessions avant-garde performance series which takes place each week in Seattle. They are also founding members of the cutting-edge arts organization Table & Chairs, which produces music events and facilitates educational programs. Bad Luck tours extensively, having shared the stage with local bands throughout the US as well as major figures in improvised music such as the saxophone legend Roscoe Mitchell, and performers Cuong Vu, Andrew D’Angelo, Wayne Horvitz, Dave King (The Bad Plus) and Chris Speed.
Presented by Nonsequitur. Tony Buck & Magda Mayas are supported by Villa Aurora as current artists in residence.
FHTAGN is a maximalist improvisation & game orchestra from Seattle. With an ever-rotating lineup of more than 30 musicians from various disciplines, FHTAGN explores alternative methods of conducting, scoring, and extremes in spatial dispersion. Tonight FHTAGN will present Music to Make Love to your Favorite Creature By, an experimental piece celebrating the sounds of copulation in the animal kingdom.
Working Title (Lite) is a spin off of the group Working Title – a chordless quintet that explores the sounds pioneered by Ornette Coleman’s early work. In this incarnation of the group, the drummer and leader of the band Will Lone and reed player Jeremy Shaskus will perform new original music while exploring the art of the Duo or more…