Paris-based composer and clarinetist Carol Robinson has a multifaceted musical life. Equally at ease in the classical and experimental realms, she performs in major festivals and concert halls the world over (Wien Modern, RomaEuropa, MaerzMusik, Huddersfield, Archipel, Musica, Festival d’Automne, Musica Contemporanea, etc.). In addition to working closely with composers, she pursues the new in more alternative contexts, collaborating with video artists, photographers, and musicians from diverse horizons.

She began composing by writing for her own music theater productions, subsequently receiving commissions for concert pieces, installations, radio, dance and film productions. Described by Derek Horton as “warmly sensuous but deeply cool”, her work often combines acoustic sounds with electronics, and her musical aesthetic is strongly influenced by a fascination for aleatoric systems.

In a rare Seattle appearance, she will be performing her recent works for basset horn, electronics and voice.

Presented by Nonsequitur.

Join sound and visual artists Yann Novak and Robert Crouch as they kick off their west coast tour with their first performances in Seattle since 2012. They will be joined by a special guest.

Robert Crouch is a Los Angeles-based artist and curator who works across a wide range of media including photography, sound, installation, video, and sculpture. He has exhibited in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and London, and performed at venues including the Art Center College of Design, Human Resources, the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Stone.

Yann Novak is a sound and visual artist living and working in Los Angeles. Through the use of sound, light and space, he explores how these intangible materials can act as catalysts to focus our awareness on the present moment and alter our perception of time. His performance works have been experienced internationally at sound art/electronic music festivals including the AxS Festival, Pasadena; Decibel Festival, Seattle; Forward Festival, Washington, D.C.; Mutek Festival, Montreal; Resonant Forms Festival, Los Angeles and at art venues and museums including the Human Resources, Los Angeles; LACMA, Los Angeles; Machine Project, Los Angeles; Oboro, Montreal; The Stone, New York; among others.

The special guest‘s experiments in modern audio vary from stark minimalist tones to densely complex textures with a sound palette that incorporates elements of field recordings, radio frequencies, hand-drawn waveforms, raw data, and digital sound synthesis. Focused on researching psychoacoustics, the perception of sound, spatiality, waveform anomalies, and various audio phenomena discovered while exploring the frequency spectrum, his compositions are excursions in abstract electronic music with influences including ambient, lowercase, microsound, noise, glitch, and drone.

For more than 40 years, Steve Griggs has expressed his feelings through saxophones. Improvisation provides Griggs the freedom to explore ideas and emotions in the moment with audiences. Formally trained in classical music performance, skilled in composition, and seasoned in jazz rhythm, Griggs delved deep into free-form music with modern dancers. Although there are no dancers on this event, the performance reveals a long hidden side of Griggs’ muse that can be glimpsed in his more refined mainstream projects. With no written score and an empty stage, a blank slate awaits for audiences to witness the process of sculpting serenades with a saxophone (A serenade is music sung to a lover for the whole community to hear). 

Yesod is a meeting of Middle Eastern and Middle Western musical influences where pure musical impulses flux between sound explorations and accessible improvisational hooks. Dynamic and bold percussion mix with intricate intertwining stringed instruments creating a foundation for voice, violin, clarinet and other melodic instrumental experimentation. Yesod dissects, digests and reshapes their individual influences and experiences into a uniquely familiar musical sum to create rich, living soundscapes.

Formed in Seattle in 2010 by multi-instrumentalist Bill Wolford and Kurdish percussionist Ahmad Yousefbeigi, Yesod were intent on creating improvisational music that conveyed their thoughts, emotions and heritage through a sincere and honest musical vocabulary. Bassist Ray Clements joined the group this year, completing Yesod’s core lineup. Lighting designer David Verkade is a Seattle artist who takes a multimedia approach to his work incorporating light, image projection, and sound for concerts, theater, and other major events.

In March of 2011, Yesod released the first installment of their Improvisations series; an ongoing collection of live performances, recorded at Wolford’s own, Vividsound Studios. They have performed live sets to enthusiastic audiences at the Alki Arts Festival, Lucid Jazz Lounge in Seattle and recently collaborated with the Cabiri, a Seattle-based non-profit aerial dance theater company that specializes in folklore and mythology.look forward to meeting and sharing our music with music lovers all around the world.

Watch videos here.

Venerable Seattle flutist, professor at Cornish, and Seattle Chamber Players member Paul Taub is one of Seattle’s best-known proponents of contemporary music, prominent nationally and internationally through his work with the Seattle Chamber Players. For this independent project, he has invited five composers to write new chamber works to be performed by some of Seattle’s finest “new music” instrumentalists.

Composers Tom Baker, Andy Clausen, David Dossett, Jessika Kenney, and Angelique Poteat have been chosen to participate in this project because of the high artistic quality of their work, the diversity of their styles, the varied stages of their career trajectories, and above all, because their music truly speaks to the public.

The variety of musical styles is a key element of the project. Baker and Kenney are well-established “mid-career” composers, with impressive resumes and works that have been played internationally. Poteat, in her late 20s, is emerging as a significant voice in the Seattle and national music world, with recent pieces commissioned by the Seattle Symphony. Emerging composers Dossett and Clausen (whose band The Westerlies has taken the jazz world by storm), are recent college graduates (Cornish College of the Arts and the Juilliard Jazz Program). The composers’ musical styles are varied and contrasting, with influences as diverse as jazz, electronics, Persian modes, classical music and improvisation.

The new works will be for various combinations of flute, clarinet, cello, contrabass, piano and percussion, written for Taub along with stellar instrumentalists Laura DeLuca (clarinet), Walter Gray (cello), and Joe Kaufman (contrabass), members of the Seattle Symphony; and Cristina Valdes (piano) and Matthew Kocmieroski (percussion), who are leading Seattle-based American interpreters of contemporary music.

Presented by Nonsequitur with assistance from Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and Second Inversion.

A dozen composers from the Seattle area plus four instrumentalists rally around the theme of 17 x 3. Nominally a celebration of one of the instrumentalists’ 3rd 17th birthday (go on, do the math), the intriguing musical possibilities suggested by 17 x 3 were too enticing to pass up. Hence, an evening of new works inspired by a simple equation will be presented. The musical implications could be mathematical, metrical, structural, nostalgic, numerological…or…?

The instrumentalists are Paris Hurley, violin; Heather Bentley, viola; Beth Fleenor, clarinet/bass clarinet, and Steve Schermer, bass. Composers are (in no particular order) Amy Denio, Jim Knapp, Ben Thomas, William Hayes, Alex Guy, Michael Owcharuk, Nat Evans, Michaud Savage, Evan Flory-Barnes, Tim Carey, Ivan Arteaga and John Coons.

There will be cake, and that is not a lie.

Judy Dunaway performs avant-garde compositions and free improvisations on amplified latex balloons played as musical instruments. She is known internationally as a “virtuoso of the balloon.” She plays a variety of shapes and sizes of balloon instruments, each with it’s own special qualities, pushing the extremes of both pitch range and artistic limits. Her large rubbed “tenor” balloon gives Jimmy Hendrix’s guitar a run for the money and her giant balloon pulsates into the depths of the subaudio. Her abstract music and sounds are difficult to equate with other forms, depending upon the perception of the individual like the images seen in fire or clouds.

Dunaway has presented her balloon works at many major venues, festivals, museums and galleries internationally. She has performed as a balloon player in compositions by John Zorn and Roscoe Mitchell, and in improvisations and/or collaborations with the FLUX Quartet, performance artist Annie Sprinkle, vocalist Jennifer Walshe, visual artists Nancy Davidson and Ken Butler, percussionist John Hollenbeck, Fluxus sound artist Yasunao Tone, and numerous others. CDs of her works for balloons have been released on the CRI (Composers Recordings Inc) and Innova labels, among others.

Watch video of Judy Dunaway.

Seattle treasure Susie Kozawa performs using her trademark collection of homemade instruments, toys, and found objects, joined by subtle flutist Esther Sugai.

Presented by Nonsequitur

FHTAGN is an experimental spatial sound ensemble from Seattle, WA. Consisting of a rotating membership of musicians from various disciplines, FHTAGN explores alternative conducting techniques, aleatory music operations and free improvisation from everywhere in the room.

Tonight FHTAGN will present a program of controlled improvisation sessions directly inspired by selected works of Charles Ives, whose dense, polytonal style has been a primary inspiration for the ensemble’s creation and sound.

Opening up the evening will be noisepoetnobody’s Drifwood Orchestra, who has retrieved pieces of driftwood from the Cascade Mountains and fit them with metal objects found to have complementary acoustic properties. Small contact microphones will be utilized for capturing the voice of a forest under constant strain from civilization.

Review at I Care If You Listen.

After a two-year hiatus, American sound artist Matthew James Manowski returns to live performance with a re-imagined vision of what contemporary composition can be.

This is the first program in his new series of genre-bending sound performances. Sources of Light: Phase One, is devoted to exhibiting national and regional sound artists ambitious in creating new works for a live setting. The guest artists include:

Minneapolis arts professor and composer David Means, and Seattle-based Jazz trombonist Daniel Ruiter. David Means will perform a site-specific performance and the premiere of The Seattle Spirals 3: new Mylar score sheets for amplified graphic scores and live electronics. Daniel Ruiter brings his expertise in jazz performance, and trombone composition for new spatial approaches to tonality. Manowski will be performing new compositions for cassette loops, voice, and other instruments, channeling a wide array of extended textures.

In celebration of this event and Manowski’s return, he is releasing an album that captures his efforts and collaborations over the last two years.

Inverted Space opens its 2015-2016 season with 4 world premieres by Seattle composers, taking their inspirations from the contemporary world into contemporary music. Taking from artists such as Tupac, Harry McClintock, and Prince, these works both exploit and mend gaps between genres, and the ideas of “high” and “low” art.

Luke Fitzpatrick, 24x
Kevin Baldwin, voiceless, [this body] is filled
Jacob Sundstrom, the piece formerly known as boring formless nonsense
Kaley Lane Eaton, karma repair kit

But wait! There’s more!

Jacob TV, GrabIt
Frederic Rzewski, WHANGDOODLES

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.

Special thanks to Parfait Ice Cream for their sponsorship of this event. Taste some of their great flavors both at our concert, and by visiting their store in Ballard at 2034 NW 56th Street, Seattle, WA 98107.