An evening of forward-looking experimental electronic composition featuring solo performances from Portland’s Matt Carlson (of Golden Retriever), Warsaw, Poland based Piotr Kurek, and Seattle’s own Kaori Suzuki. All three artists mine varied and virtuosic takes on electronic music; timeless and yet very contemporary, often turning the idea of “electronic music” inside out, going against expected tropes.Three perspectives unified by uncompromising, singular approaches.

Matt Carlson is a staple of Pacific Northwest experimental music. He is one half of the synth/bass clarinet duo Golden Retriever, and aside from that band’s success he has carved out an equally impressive solo path. Carlson’s music calls to mind in part a combination of the classic minimalist systems music of David Borden, or the freewheeling bliss of Alvin Curran’s early forays into synthesis, but wrapping everything in his uniquely tweaked approach. Seemingly repetitive patterns give way to confounding and impossible rhythms as his nimble hands dart across the keyboard with pin-point precision. The utilization of obscure scales and tunings further bring the sound into more complex and strange realms.

Piotr Kurek is a world-traveling modern composer. He utilizes modular synthesizer and organ, often punctuated by vocal flourishes and concrete tape manipulation. His recent albums have firmly established him as one of the more interesting international wizards of electronic sound. Kurek’s music offers a rare elegance and sophistication that is reminiscent of early the electronic pioneers and classic minimalism, bringing with it an entirely new and unique approach for the sampler age. For this tour, he comes to North America with generous assistance from The Polish Cultural Institute New York.

Kaori Suzuki is an instrument designer and composer of electronic music who lives and works in Seattle. Her music is generated from analog synthesis, hand-built electronics and field recordings.  She has collaborated for film and live performance at the Berkeley Art Museum. With her company Magic Echo Music she produces custom synthesizer interfaces, including digital hybrid controllers and semi-modular units.

Presented by Nonsequitur.

Negativland founding member Mark Hosler takes a break from his band duties to perform solo for the first time ever in his 33 years of making music. Using various homemade one­-of­-a­-kind electronic noise-making devices (including two of Negativland’s original “Boopers”), he creates an engaging and musical soundscape performance. Designed to create a non­linear dynamic “living” system of sound to interact with, it ends up being a performance dynamic where the musician is a fellow collaborator with the devices, encouraged to converse instead of merely transmit. The Boopers used in this show go back to 1975, when Negativland co-founder David Wills added multiple transistors to a simple FM radio receiver, sending its output back into its input. Various knobs control the amount of signal through the transistors, but the sound that emerges remains wildly variable. Using multiple Boopers (all based on Wills’s original design) and other homemade electronics, Hosler manipulates and augments the raw sound sources into a choral rainforest of pure electronic ear candy, erasing any easy distinction between the machine and the human.

Opening is electronic keyboardist Noel Brass, Jr. The founder of Seattle psych-soul trio Afrocop steps out to do his solo thing, crafting his signature improvisational ambient soundscapes inspired by film noir, Gospel, jazz, and psychedelia.

Pianist Keith Eisenbrey performs his 1990 opera for solo piano, A Cat’s Life, with special guest Olivia Sterne, narrator. Also, J. K. Randall’s Green Nickel 2, Aaron Keyt’s Sonata (2012), and Doug Palmer’s Attitude.

Founded by director and drummer Jen Gilleran in 2011, GRID has collaborated to set music to the films of Maya Deren, Ilya Chaiken, Alan Lomax, and Pete Seeger. Last August at the Henry Art Gallery, GRID performed an original score for Metropolis to a sold out audience. For this performance, we will choose selections from Metropolis to be experienced without the film. Neil Welch, sax; Simon Henneman, guitar; Christian Pincock; Sean Lane and Erica Carlson, percussion.

After meeting in a studio with many of Seattle’s best drummers, Gilleran felt an immediate connection to the collaborative experience of the sound and the cinematic qualities were undeniable. It was a natural transition to use film to ground the work – offering pointed inspiration for the collaboration. Each film has different needs and has allowed Gilleran to choose from an exciting roster of local and non-local musicians for both recorded and live work such as drummer/percussionists Allison Miller, Gregg Keplinger, Sean Lane, Andrew Rudd, Don Berman and Erica Carlson; saxophonists Neil Welch, Kate Olson and Dick Valentine; trombonist Christian Pincock; keyboardists James Han and Aaron Otheim; guitarists Simon Henneman, Rob Price, Jamie Mefford and CJ Stout; cellist Martina Grbac, and bassist Joe Malcomb.

Seattle choreographer Christy Fisher partners with Sharon Mansur (Washington D.C.) with Cocoon, a dance-installation with video by Caterina De Re, music by Garrett Fisher, flute by Esther Sugai, and costumes by Deb Shannon. This project is the beginning of a larger cross-country collaboration that incorporates the internet as a platform for movement-based dialogue. Each choreographer will inhabit a dress based around the 19th century “bustle”, which extends into an eight-foot “cocoon” that also serves as a video projection screen. Through sound, visual imagery, and the metaphor of the bustle/cocoon, we explore the emotional content of social and personal memory. Each artistic collaborator serves as both witness and catalyst as memories ignite, crystallize and then dissolve back into a common dream.

Seattle composer Kenneth Lawrence and Soju Projekt present Shikhandi/Amba, a Noh- and gamelan-inspired dance-drama with a plot abstracted from one of the central stories of the great Indian epic Mahabharata. In the story, a young woman, Amba, is kidnapped on her bride-choice day. Incapable of avenging her humiliation, she throws herself into the flames of a sacrificial fire in order to be reincarnated as a man and confront her kidnapper. The instrumentation provides the essence of the two traditional forms that inspired it, Noh drama and the Wayang Kulit shadow puppet theatre of Bali and Java. The ensemble is comprised of Western and Eastern instruments, including western flute, gamelan (tuned percussion), Indian harmonium, Himalayan healing bowls, toy piano and Japanese taiko drums.

Presented by the Fisher Ensemble.

This evening explores the work of the early 20th Century icon Erik Satie, who was known for merging humor with a classical sensibility in a way that was both original and avant garde for his time, and which proved to be an influence for the minimalist movement and the Theatre of the Absurd. Mark Hilliard Wilson’s offerings tonight include works by Satie that he has adapted for guitar, as well as some original compositions inspired by the eccentric French composer. Gary Zinter and Nicole Truesdell bring to theatrical life Satie’s Sports et Divertissements, a series of short works for piano that are played to monologs that explore the droll world of the French upper class. Beginning with what Satie has titled an “Unsavory Chorale” (“Chorale Inappétissant”), the series of pieces takes on pastimes the bored rich: yachting, tennis, golf, and more. Presented by the Fisher Ensemble.

Presented by Nonsequitur.

Doug Wieselman has been an integral part of a number of different and occasionally overlapping musical worlds – from playing in New York’s “downtown scene” of the 1980s and 1990s – notably with Anthony Coleman, Wayne Horvitz, Robin Holcomb, Butch Morris, Marc Ribot, Eyvind Kang, Bill Frisell, The Lounge Lizards; to composing and arranging for theater productions by Robert Woodruff, Robert Wilson, Athol Fugard, The Flying Karamazov Brothers; to accompanying and arranging for singer/songwriters such as Martha Wainwright, Iron & Wine, Antony and the Johnsons, Victoria Williams, and musical icons Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Marianne Faithfull, and Yoko Ono. He has also been involved in many projects with producer Hal Willner. Tonight he performs music from his recent album From Water. The pieces are inspired by melodies Wieselman has been hearing from bodies of water – ocean beaches, streams, hot springs, as well as wind. “These melodies sound to me like a chorus of exuberant voices. Each melody is specific to the place. If I return to a beach, even after many years, I hear the same song. I think this has something to do with what the earth can tell us, if only we can take the time and patience to listen. This is an attempt to share what I have been hearing, through the filter of my perception, from water.”

Opening the show is the contemporary improvised chamber music duo Syrinx Effect (Kate Olson, soprano sax/electronics and Naomi Siegel, trombone/electronics). They got their start curating the Racer Sessions and have gone on to perform prolifically in the Seattle area, collaborating with many of the mainstays of the Northwest jazz and improvised music scenes. They make music that is authentic and expressive, employing everything from simple folk melodies to abstract, ambient noise. Each piece is a meditation, an exploration, and sometimes a romp.

The Box is Empty presents new works by Seattle composer Nat Evans, and New York-based composer Leaha Villarreal.

Evans has collaborated with writer Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and a team of lens-based artists to create a new work for chamber ensemble, field recordings, spoken text and a series of videos. More Comfort explores the evolution of our relation to different screens in our lives, mobile devices and televisions as a hearth place, and the nature of our contemporary interactions and language. The videos presented are by artist Rodrigo Valenzuela with additional video curation by Interstitial Theatre’s Julia Greenway. Valenzuela’s video will also feature live manipulation of the video – a performative version of the use of our hands with the multitude of devices in our every-day lives.

Villareal presents a series of works for strings: a quartet originally written for the JACK Quartet, a septet, and a new trio. The quartet is inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. Seattle artist Erin Elyse Burns will present a new video work along with Villarreal’s music. In addition to composing, Villarreal is also the artistic director of Hotel Elefant, which regularly presents contemporary music across New York City.

Lori Goldston plays solo cello, amplified and/or acoustic, improvised and not.

Improvising electronic musicians Ann La Berge and Tom Baker perform three short sets – a solo each and then a duo. The two have been working on a new album to be released this year, with performances and recordings in Amsterdam and Seattle.

Anne La Berge’s career as flutist/improviser/composer stretches across international and stylistic boundaries. Her most recent performances bring together the elements on which her international reputation is based: a ferocious and far-reaching virtuosity, a penchant for improvising delicately spun microtonal textures and melodies, and her wholly unique array of powerfully percussive flute effects, all combined with electronic processing. Many of her compositions involve her own participation, though she has produced works intended solely for other performers, usually involving guided improvisation and text. She also uses these compositions that work with a flexible combination of imposed musical situations and electronics where performer/improvisers are an integrated part of the music making process as material for workshops and masterclasses.

Guitarist 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). Tom performs on fretted and fretless guitars, and has worked with many innovative musicians, including Stuart Dempster, William O. Smith, Christian Asplund, Chinary Ung, Ellen Fullman, Gino Robair, and Henry Threadgill. He has recorded seven albums, including two solo albums. His most recent release, SAVE, with his band the Tom Baker Quartet, has garnered much attention and critical acclaim. Tom has received many grants and awards for his work, including honors from the Seattle Arts Commission, Meet the Composer, Artist Trust, and Jack Straw Productions. His compositions have been performed throughout the United States and Canada, as well as in Holland and England.