Tonight, musicians from diverse areas of the Seattle Creative Music Scene unify to present a special concert.

Opening the concert will be MESS, a collaborative performance ensemble that was founded in 2015 by Amelia Coulter (trombone, electronics, voice), Mariah Davis (dance), and Haley Freedlund (trombone/voice). Their work is inspired by queer theory, liberation politics, social situations, personal storytelling, gender & sexuality, and finding new ways of relating to themselves and others. As a group, they co-create scores as rough templates for interactive, improvisational, and durational work.

Next up is the WIND/BAD LUCK two duo quartet, playing a collaborative set of pieces by each of the four players: WIND is the duo of Oberlin immigrant Don Berman (drums) and former Bay Area resident, Tim Volpicella (guitar/electronics), who will contribute pieces involving atonal counterpoint and nocturnal sounds informed by all four players’ dreams. UW Racer Sessions/Table and Chairs recording artists BAD LUCK – Chris Icasiano, drums and Neil Welch, saxophone/electronics – will bring pieces involving both strong and free rhythmic motifs and contrasting duo voices that will morph into a unified quartet sound.

An evening of music and discussion with Seattle composers:

Ivan Arteaga
Amy Denio
Keith Eisenbrey
Patrick O’Keefe

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!

On Havlíčkova Street is a new work by sound artist Dead Tosa, inspired by and composed in the old town of Prague. This impressionistic soundscape, in three continuous movements, sees its first public performance at the Wayward Music Series. Dead Tosa is also the composer of a song cycle on YouTube, Songs that Cannot Be Bought or Sold, that reinterprets the website as a sampler for ambient performance.

Arrington de Dionyso and Oomung Varma use bass clarinet and tabla to explore the rhythms and timbres of Hindustani classical music through the lens of post-60’s American Minimalism (LaMonte Young, Tony Conrad, Henry Flynt, Velvet Underground), which was in turn equally fascinated by the teachings of Pandit Pran Nath and the ecstatic experience of jazz.

Hair and Space Museum is the duo of Emily Pothast and David Golightly, who are also the co-founders of the band Midday Veil and the record label Translinguistic Other. HaSM projects are multimedia meditations on the generative, cosmic properties of sound.

Thirty years ago, visual artist Mariko Marrs made 56 lovely hand-painted 7″ reel-reel tape boxes for a cassette release by Steve Peters. That project never materialized, and Peters has saved the boxes in storage for all this time, waiting for the right opportunity to use them “someday” for “something.”

A Gathering is a limited edition box of visual art, text, and music by Peters and friends Renko Dempster (aka Suiren), Jessika Kenney, Alan Lau, Mariko Marrs, Cristin Miller (aka Stella Haze), Shin Yu Pai, and Matt Shoemaker. Each artist contributed 56 items to put in the boxes (either multiples or unique works), along with a CD of new sound pieces by Kenney, Miller, Peters, and Shoemaker. Each box is different, and all of the work has been created specifically for this project.

Tonight we assemble everything in the boxes and make them available, along with live music performances by Kenney, Miller, Peters, and Shoemaker, readings by Lau and Pai, and improvised painting by Dempster. The boxes will be for sale – buy one and get in for free. If all goes well, this might become an annual thing.

Engaging in collective improvisation using only unprocessed field recordings, the Seattle Phonographers Union explores the ways in which we recognize, differentiate, map and navigate our sonic environment. Our intent is to move beyond habitual experience of sound and uncover what is foreign in the familiar and familiar about the foreign; to explore what we hear and relearn what we know. Some sounds will be familiar; others less so. Both novel and familiar sounds are juxtaposed in ways unique to each event. Our intent is to investigate and enrich both our intuitive and analytical relationship with sound. The goal is not to excite, confuse or entertain per se, but to attend to the world, which is much more detailed and diverse than any one person’s perception of it.

Jen Gilleran was invited to record with Gregg Keplinger, Allison Miller and Sean Lane the week she arrived in Seattle from Costa Rica (before that Denver, before that NYC). It was a powerful and cinematic experience. The Racer Sessions offered her another unique introduction to a community of brilliant improvisers and composers and the band GRID was formed. With over 15 on the roster, GRID performed live to the films of Fritz Lang (Metropolis), Buster Keaton (Cops and Playhouse), Robert Enrico (An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge), Ilya Chaiken (Matchflick), Maya Deren (At Land) and many others at such notable venues as the Northwest Film Forum, Henry Art Gallery, Vermilion, Racer Cafe, The Chapel, Central Cinema, The Royal Room, and the UW Planitarium.

Nineteen Crimes is Gilleran’s latest manifestation of all the images and sounds that swirl in her head and in her garage. Jen Gilleran, turntables/percussion; Erica Carlson, set design; and Joe Malcomb, modulator. Following Nineteen Crimes will be Chris Icasiano and Neil Welch’s badass duo Bad Luck, and ending the evening will be special guests from NYC – All Region Player, headed by the extraordinary talent of Rob Price on guitar with Ben Gallina, bass and Andy O’Neill, drums. Not to be missed!

Inverted Space‘s ongoing Long Piece Fest performances feature a single piece that is 60 minutes or longer. This month’s selection:

Antoine Beuger: jankélévitch sextets

Long-tone meditation.
Electronic world.
Sonic possibility.

Featuring 2 electric guitars, electric violin, theremin, gestural control device and EWI (electronic wind instrument).

Antoine Beuger (b. 1955) Dutch composer, flutist, and founder of the Wandelweiser Group, whose music is about “the evaluation and integration of silence(s) rather than an ongoing carpet of never-ending sounds.”

Inverted Space presents contemporary music in contemporary venues, bringing performances of new classical music into the Seattle community through diverse programming, adventurous performance spaces, and casual concerts. Founded in 2012, Inverted Space has premiered the works of numerous Seattle-based composers, presented a series of local cafe concerts, and recently produced a multimedia opera of Bruno Maderna at the University of Washington.

Composer Neal Kosaly-Meyer performs Finnegans Wake (Part I, Chapter 2) by James Joyce from memory, with acute attention to musical detail.

“Lift we our ears, eyes of the darkness”—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake is a feast and a light for the ears. The author’s response to those mystified by its incessant densely layered puns, portmanteaus, non-English vocabulary and the occasional hundred-letter “thunderclap”: Read it aloud, and enjoy the music.

As a twenty-something music theory grad student, and never much of an aficionado of fiction, Finnegans Wake grabbed me, and never really let go. On my first acquaintance with its opening pages, I felt that this was not like literature that one “reads;” it had more in common with a piece of music that one learned a little at a time, hands separately, slow tempo at first, carefully working out tricky rhythms, figuring breathings, bowings and fingerings. After dedicated and patient practice, one would ultimately be rewarded with the satisfaction of finally hearing the music embedded in the notation, or in the case of Joyce’s novel, the words and punctuation.

So when I perform the Wake’s second chapter, it’s not intended as a feat of memory or of physical or mental endurance: I simply want my audience to hear its music; to experience a text which is definitely (and intentionally) obscure as far as what’s going on story-and-character-wise, but delightfully direct in its comic, enchanting, lyrical, emphatically musical beauty.

Our staging of the Wake is entirely in the service of making that beauty accessible. As Joyce often likened his book to the night, and its difficulties to trying to see in the dark, the performance will take place in the dark (with occasional flashlight illumination). Finnegans Wake is a dream, a wandering through caverns of the unconscious, and so we have attempted to re-create the reverberation and echo of those caverns with a carefully-composed sound design executed by Jake Thompson. Joyce’s novel is preoccupied with the experiences of reading and writing themselves, and their history, so we have made an ancient manuscript, beautifully rendered by Sarah Colburn, occasionally visible in flashes to reinforce that element. The pomp and mystery of sacred books and rites permeate the Wake, so our staging attempts to resonate with its ritual, including the use of a celebrant’s robe made for the occasion by Karen Eisenbrey. This performance is a part of our ongoing Finnegans Wake Project. Stay tuned next year for Chapter 3!

Charles Mingus was one of the most important figures in twentieth century American music. He was a virtuoso bass player, accomplished pianist, bandleader, author, poet, civil rights activist, and a prolific composer. His number of jazz compositions is second only to Duke Ellington. He recorded over one hundred albums and wrote over three hundred scores. His compositions retained the hot and soulful feel of hard bop and drew heavily from black gospel music and blues while sometimes drawing on elements of free jazz and classical music. Yet Mingus avoided categorization, forging his own brand of music that fused tradition with unique and unexplored realms of jazz.

During his lifetime, Charles Mingus was widely recognized in jazz circles as one of music’s most talented contributors. It was only after his death that his brilliance as an indomitable creative force began to be fully realized. His legacy is enormous, but this evening’s program focuses specifically on Mingus’s impact as a composer. Mingus’s compositions pioneered new and extended forms in jazz: changes of tempo and meter, open vamps, blurred lines between composition and improvisation, advanced harmonic explorations, aggressive sounds, and idiosyncratic voicings. These innovations have fueled the compositional efforts of every generation of musicians since, and surely many (if not all) generations to come.

Guitarists Rik Wright and Jason Goessl, longtime devotees of Mingus, have organized a night of music to pay tribute to the man and his music. The concert will showcase groups led by Wright, Goessl, James DeJoie, Jim Knodle, Tim Kennedy and John Seman. The participants have selected and arranged a dozen different Mingus compositions, featuring performances by Alicia DeJoie, Darian Asplund, Dave Bush, Doug Lilla, Geoff Harper, Greg Campbell, Mark Ostrowski, Maxxine Smith, Pete Turner, and Robby Beasley. Time allowing, the night will end with a group improvisation of  “Canon”, a quintessential Mingus theme in which, as the title suggests, the melody can be superimposed upon itself. A fitting tribute to a compositional legend.

Noisegasm is Greg Weber (guitar, keys, electronics) and Brad Anderson (keys, electronics). Influences ranging from Noise, Ambient, Heavy-riffage, Hollywood soundtracks, and Classical, combine to create an intense, psychedelic, and completely original sound.

Brad Anderson uses Audiomulch to shape a wide variety of sonic textures and mixes them with Classically influenced keyboard lines.

Ambient guitars slither through an undergrowth of orchestral samples. Goldenrod is the somber reptile in Mantovani’s garden. Mood music for the terminally relaxed.

Matt Fay sounds like this.