Portland’s Wild Card of Cascadia, (Marcus Fischer (12k), William Selman (Mysteries of the Deep) and Paul Dickow (Strategy) ) visit Seattle for an evening of immersive electro-acoustic music —with Pacific Northwest electronic music veterans Cindy Reichel (Patchwerks) and Marc Barreca (Palace of Lights).

Wild Card of Cascadia is a trio from Portland whose immersive, spontaneous music emerges from omnivorous, ever-changing, inquisitive working methods. In search of unexpected discoveries, they deploy conceptual prompts, unexpected instrumentation, and game-like challenges. Their emphasis on electro-acoustic sound means they draw from a large palette of techniques, from free improvisation to concrete composition. Wild Card’s membership includes established artists William Selman (Mysteries of the Deep, Critique of Everyday Life), Marcus Fischer (12k), and Paul Dickow (who records as Strategy), but the group’s sound is distinct from their individual projects.

Cindy Reichel is a Washington-based electronic musician & co-founder of Patchwerks, Seattle’s local hub for synthesizer sales, education and community events. Cindy uses a highly improvised approach to performance, blending spacious, slowly evolving sonic landscapes with intricate, tightly-woven melodies. She enjoys performing live throughout the Pacific Northwest and beyond, both as a solo act and as a member of Dahliia (with Tom Butcher) and the Monster Planet collective.

Marc Barreca, veteran Seattle electronic music composer, performs electronic compositions with modular synthesizers, samplers and audio processing. He has been making electronic music in Seattle since the mid-1970s, releasing a number of projects over the years on the Hawaii-based Palace of Lights label and performing with Young Scientist. His most recent releases include solo CDs A Discourse of Mist, Recordings of Failing Light, and a collaboration with K. Leimer, Arrhythmian.

Huck Hodge is a composer of “harmonically fresh work”, “full of both sparkle and thunder” (New York Times). His music has been praised for its “immediate impact” (Chicago Tribune), its “clever, attractive, streamlined” qualities (NRC Handelsblad, Amsterdam) and its ability to “conjure up worlds of musical magic” with “power and charisma” (Gramophone Magazine, London). His musical collaborations include those with members of Ensemble Modern and the Berlin Philharmonic, the Seattle Symphony, the Orchestra of the League of Composers, the Aleph, ASKO/Schönberg, Dal Niente, Divertimento, SurPlus and Talea ensembles, the Daedalus, JACK, Mivos, and Pacifica string quartets, and numerous other ensembles.

His music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and at numerous major festivals throughout the world — the New York Philharmonic Biennial, Berliner Festspiele, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, Shanghai New Music Week, ISCM World Music Days, and many others. Recordings of his music appear on the New World and Albany record labels.

Hodge was educated at Columbia University and at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Stuttgart, Germany where he studied with Fred Lerdahl, Tristan Murail, Marco Stroppa, and Georg Wötzer. Hodge is currently Professor and Chair of the Composition program at the University of Washington.

Performers:
Abbey Blackwell, double bass
Jeff Bowen, guitar
Luke Fitzpatrick, violin
Huck Hodge, melodica
Naeim Rahmani, guitar
Brian Schappals: clarinet
Laure Struber, piano
Cristina Valdes, piano
Neil Welch, saxophone
Bonnie Whiting, percussion
Marcin Pączkowski, conductor

Curated by Naeim Rahmani for Nonsequitur’s NonSeq series.

Seattle musicians Leanna Keith, Kate Olson (KO Solo), and Levi Fuller (Passenger Pigeon) will perform three overlapping sets of improvised, loop-based music. Leanna plays flutes in a wide range of settings and contexts (see her new bass flute album Body of Breath); Kate plays saxophones seemingly everywhere all at once; and Levi plays guitars and bass, writes songs, and has a day job. In addition to their many other pursuits, the three share a love of making stuff up with the help of a variety of trusty loop and effects pedals, so they have joined forces to do just that.

81:80 is a group that explores new textures and the passage of time through microtonal improvisation. Consisting of cellist Ha-Yang Kim, electric guitarist Jeff Bowen and violinist Luke Fitzpatrick, 81:80 will present the expanded version of Ha-Yang Kim’s may you dream of rainbows in magical lands (2021/24) for multiple strings and electronics. The group will be joined by local legend and versatile electronic wizard Marcin Pączkowski. 

Commissioned by and written for violinist Olivia De Prato (Mivos Quartet), this piece was initially conceived as a collaborative sound exploration between Olivia and her son, celebrating the profound connection between mother and child. The expanded version incorporates multiple string instruments (violin, adapted electric guitar, and cello), found objects, as well as electronics, to create an enriched sound world. Drawing upon the Kraig Grady Centaur tuning as a starting point, centered on the fundamental 174 Hz, the piece further delves into extended just intonation. Layers of sustained single notes evolve into pulseless, shifting chords that float within a dreamy, ambient texture. Found objects, such as Lego toys and glass bottles, bring a playful dimension to the soundscape, enhancing the atmosphere with spontaneous textures and resonances. In this meditative work, electronics subtly augment the live instrumental sounds, conjuring imaginary landscapes and dreamlike vistas inspired by the improvised play of children.  “may you dream of rainbows in magical lands” is also dedicated to the composer’s daughter, whose own visions of magical lands filled with rainbows serve as a guiding inspiration. Together, these elements create a slow, immersive journey into a realm where the everyday transforms into the magical, inviting listeners into an intimate, enchanted sonic experience. 

Alan Licht’s first-ever solo performance in Seattle closes out a West Coast tour in support of his new double album Havens (VDSQ/Black Editions), a sprawling summation of his decades-long exploration of solo electric and acoustic guitar performances that navigate and challenge the boundaries of Minimalism, rock, and other non-idiomatic music-making. Licht is masterful and relentless in his negotiation of the often-unknowable intersections that exist between juxtaposing strands of sound. His work is marked by contrast & contradiction: maximalism versus minimalism; rockist inclinations versus avant, expanded-field expression; loose improvisation versus considered performance. What these dichotomies shouldn’t obscure, however, is the simple pleasure that transpires in his refracting of idiom, conjuring expansive pieces that collapse, stratify & convolve competing schools of music to wholly singular ends.

Alan Licht has released several albums of his own structured improvisations for solo guitar and tape pieces and appears on dozens of other commercially released recordings. A co-founder of the indie rock bands Love Child and Run On, he has played with figures in the worlds of jazz, rock and the avant-garde, ranging from Rashied Ali to Tom Verlaine to Yoko Ono. He’s also known for his long-standing duo with guitarist Loren Connors, and for Text of Light, an ongoing ensemble which performs freely improvised concerts alongside screenings of classic avant-garde cinema, which he co-founded with Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo in 2001.

Alan has written extensively about the arts for Artforum, Modern Painters, Rhizome, the WIRE, Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Village Voice, Time Out New York, and other publications. His books include Common Tones: Selected interviews with artists and musicians (Blank Forms), Sound Art Revisited (Bloomsbury) and Will Oldham on Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (Faber & Faber/W.W. Norton). Licht was curator at the famed New York experimental music venue Tonic from 2000 until its closing in 2007.

Presented by Nonsequitur.

7 – 8 PM social time; 8 – 9:30 event.

‘TAP 4.0: The Nyxology Sessions’ are high-level experiments in the art and craft of designing and presenting simultaneous, multi-participant and multi-discipline live performances, or “art-theater”, that inhabit a venue’s on and off-stage spaces and feature the live-scores of The Antenna Project as the core audience experience.

Founded in 2002, The Antenna Project provides Instrumental Live-scores (improvised context-specific audio compositions) for all variety of experiences. Amplified electric guitar, an effects pedal and various methods of interfacing are used to create full-registered music ranging from subdued waves of droning minimalism to exuberantly celebratory maximalism. The project’s mantra is Devoted to the Present, a double nod to both the “present” as current moment and as gift.

Californian Chuck Johnson (joined by Seattle percussionist/composer Alex Vittum) performs pedal steel-based ambient compositions in support of his new album Sun Glories, and will share the night with the haunting folk elegies of acclaimed Seattle artist Tiny Vipers.

Chuck Johnson is a California-based composer, producer, and musician. He approaches his work with an ear towards finding faults and instabilities that might reveal latent beauty, with a focus on pedal steel guitar, experimental electronics, alternate tuning systems, and composing for film and television. Recordings of his work have been published by Western Vinyl, VDSQ, Thrill Jockey, Temporary Residence, Kompakt, Ghostly, and Three Lobed, among others. In August of 2024 he released his Sun Glories LP, about which Pitchfork said, “By melting his instrument down to a wall of shimmering sound, Johnson has created a blank canvas for just about anything.”

Seattle’s Jesy Fortino has performed under the name Tiny Vipers since her teen years. Honing her craft in punk houses and squats, Fortino’s haunting folk elegies are as sparse as they are dense. While she has shared a stage with the likes of Patti Smith and Damo Suzuki, and has collaborated with Liz Harris (Grouper) as Mirrorring (releasing Foreign Body on Kranky Records in 2012), her artistic identity has remained as elusive and mysterious as her music. It is seldom that we encounter an artist as unique and singular as Tiny Vipers. Her upcoming full-length record is scheduled for release in 2025.

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED.

Doug Russell is a guitarist and improvisor based in Seattle. He studied music at Wesleyan University under Alvin Lucier, Anthony Braxton and Ron Kuivila before forming the Los Angeles-based free noise group Open City with Peter Kolovos and Andrew Maxwell. Open City operated from 1997 to 2006.

Kirill Nikolai is a Seattle-based composer. He has released both solo and collaborative works on Tonefloat (NL), Fluid Audio (UK), Apollolaan Recordings (UK), Reverb Worship (UK), and Ho Hum Records (UK). 

They will be presenting experimental music for electric guitar in solo and duo configurations, including solo improvisation, a guitar based microsound and spectral piece, an original composition for two guitars and oscillator, and a performance of Alvin Lucier’s “Criss-Cross”. 

TEXTURES is an improvising trio exploring that idea, the timbre and fabric of sound, nuance and undulation, getting past note into the sound itself. As a group, we come to this project with no specific preconceptions or dialogue, no mapping it out, and so the work will be as spontaneous as possible, with structures of amoebic movement. As some musicians have noted, music is a listening art, and so with improvisation the element of trust is bolstered, the value of Ear consciousness is brought into a more present focus.

Lu Evers (clarinet) is a veteran of the 1970s Seattle avant jazz scene, with Al Hood’s Jazz Workshop, and a founding member of Holus Bolus. Lu spent a few years in New York with his own trio, and stellar accordionist Victor Prieto.

Domenic Chiaverini (bass) has toured and recorded throughout the United States and Europe. He has played in all styles of music and has performed and/or toured with Wally Shoup, Ed Petry, Moraine, Alex Dimartino Trio, Semaphore, Gotham, and others. He is currently Currently teaching and performing in the NYC tri-state area after having lived in Seattle and the Northwest.

Tom Scully is a Seattle-based guitarist, improviser, and teacher. He currently plays in the improvised noise-rock duo CSTMR.