Musicians (of any style or genre!) with too much physical product on hand: Bring in your unsold media to the Chapel Performance Space and convert it to someone else’s music via the magic of swapping! Organized by Levi Fuller.

Rules (as I currently envision them):

1) Bring a bunch of your own unsold music product (ideally CDs or vinyl).
1a) Know how many items you have brought.

2) Walk around, chat, take a copy, leave a copy.
2a) No one-way interactions! If someone wants to take one of your things, you must give them one of yours, and the other way around.

3) Leave with the same number of items you came with.

There are a limited number (10) of 3′ x 6′ folding tables available to use.

RSVP if you’re in, and spread the word!

Metal Mother (LA), enereph (SEA), Terror Apart (PDX), and Alien Angel (LA) present a night of heart-wrenching and tender electronic music, bathed in visual splendor. Video synthesis by Arabella Bautista (SEA) on soft sculpture installation and sumi ink on mulberry scrolls will enliven the space, melding with a cornucopia of sounds to deliver a glittering sensory trip.

Audience members are invited to bring floor pillows or other implements to create cozy nesting spaces other than the provided chairs.

Outlaw Space will patiently improvise toward serene and blazing melismatic compositions to “color the mind”, erase time, and astonish everyone. Stephen Fandrich, piano; William Monteleone, saxophone; Kirill Polyanskiy, violin; Noah Colbek, percussion; special guest Greg Campbell, percussion.

Incredible skill, orchestral richness, and an eclectic playfield of musical influences are the foundation of this quartet led by acclaimed pianist/composer Stephen Fandrich. Expect a mysterious, evocative and brilliant development of tonal and rhythmic boundaries into melismatic compositions increasing from serene spaciousness to blazing intensity. Mahavishnu Orchestra, Keith Jarrett, Steve Reich, late Russian Romantics, Javanese karawitan and Hindustani classical are major musical influences of Outlaw Space.

Outlaw Space formed in 2015 as the “House Band” for Spite House, an acclaimed DIY venue and curated musical event, at the home of Stephen Fandrich in Seattle. Outlaw Space incubated at Spite House for eight years into the virtuosic quartet that it is today, and has finally reached out to perform in other venues only within the last year.

 “Outlaw Space is a high-energy post-jazz quartet that defies genre labels and adjectives.”- Scott Schaffer, Right Brain Records. 

Austin Larkin (New Haven, CT) is a composer focusing on elements of tone within the interstices of fields, asymmetries, and patterns. His performance and practice is informed by research into dimensions of vibrating bodies. Tonight he’ll perform acoustic in the mode and philosophy of his recent record Violin Liquid Phases. This work focuses on the psychoacoustic possibilities of the violin – harmonic tuning, rhythmic phasing, spectral bowing; as well as emotional dimensions and landscapes of energy – catharsis, ekstasis.

Seattle cellist Lori Goldston and drummer Ruby Lucinda (Chicago) open with a set of improvised duets.

Ruby Lucinda is a Chicago born and based multi instrumentalist, composer and performer. With an extensive background in a wide variety of music, Ruby is currently focusing her time on her solo project, Ruby Lucinda, and her band NÜDE. She is also playing with Tacoma’s Skull Kat and composing for New York’s Club Shamoun dance company.

Lori Goldston is a cellist and composer from Seattle. Her voice as a cellist draws connections between far-flung idioms and explores timbral thresholds of her instrument, driven by a restless curiosity and
informed by a long, widely varied history of collaborations with bands, ensembles large and small, composers, film makers and choreographers.

Arrington de Dionyso integrates ancient soundmaking techniques with trans-modernist inquiries into the nature of consciousness. His propulsive improvisations utilize voice and reeds (primarily bass clarinets and his invention the Bromiophone) as multiphonic tools in the navigation of liminal spaces between shamanic seance and rock and roll ecstasy. Tonight his chosen vehicle will be solo piano improvisation.

Piano was actually the first musical instrument I ever played. At three years old I would sneak up to it after church and pound the keys until a responsible adult would remove me from the holy milieu. Maybe they only heard a child making noise, but I could hear rich symphonies of dancing dragons, rain storms, circus performers and talking trees. For a short time I was “forced” to take lessons which I hated, because it was mind numbingly boring and only about learning the names of notes on the paper, not about unleashing torrents of ecstatic, all-consuming sheets of sound with the massive power of 88 tuned drums.

I stepped away from the instrument for years as I sought to create music that represented a total rejection of everything I associated with the norms of “Western Civilization” and the piano by virtue of fixed intonation became Enemy Number One, representing the epitome of the oppression I sought to tear down. The spacing and division of the notes the way they are on a piano isn’t “natural” in terms of creating purely intuitive music, and there is a structure determined by the instrument itself that is impossible to completely break away from without significantly altering the instrument itself.

Of course at the same time maybe that is all total nonsense: I’ve had countless life-changing experiences listening to and sometimes even playing with some of the greatest pianists alive, who seem to effortlessly imbue this instrument of “Saturnine structure” with life-affirming creativity and imagination. I gradually came to appreciate the LIMITATIONS of the piano forte, discovering that at least in some hands it had a massive potential for delivering the listener into higher realms of boundless wonder and emotional catharsis. Total freedom? My idea of what that means is always evolving, I sometimes feel immense musical freedom inside the states induced through repetition of deceptively simple motifs that shift one direction gradually, another direction quite suddenly. 

In my “Piano Trance Concerts” (examples here and here) I attempt to work with the limitations of the instrument (no special avant-garde “preparations”) as well as my own limitations in ability to play it. I touch the piano as a life-force conductor and conjure up some Hoodoo that hearkens a little bit to Stravinsky and Don Van Vliet, along with all those ancient tilting planets of blues, jazz, classical, post-classical and the far-flung moons of post-free 60’s minimalist potentialities… I also bring in the rich years of experience that delivered me to the center of the horse-trance dances of East Java, the blaring pipes and pounding drums of Jajouka, down the raspy throats of the fire-breathing shamans of Tuva… like those famous mycelial threads on the forest floor, structures are built by connecting points between fragile cells, sometimes falling apart, sometimes changing directions, sometimes making a mess and picking up the blood-stained pieces out of the mud.

The quasi quintet presents a rearrangement of space using poetry and sound to deflate the stage/audience format for something re-inquired — a singular point — imagine brains holding light as eyes grip luminal sound.

Poets happening:

Ankober Yewondwossen is Seattleite, poet and community support specialist at Hugo House. 

Niccolo Bechtler is from central New Jersey, recipient of Grayston Poetry Prize, his work investigates the intersections of technology, nature and myth.

Emma McVeigh (she/her) is queer writer originally from Anchorage, Alaska. Her work explores the intersections of place and responsibility and experiments with sounds, film and performance.

Anne Lesley Selcer works in the expanded field of language. Their writing on, with, around, and underneath art has created a book of essays called Blank Sign Book, a book of poems called Sun Cycle, and a multitude of multiform publications, performances, and moving pictures.

Eric M Acosta unfolds lacuna.

Sounding:

Ceremonial Abyss is a sound designer and writer based in Portland, OR. Their work taps into a current that is not a reflection but a well of innumerable schema, anti-depth in that without, not a certain point or counterpoint, but direction. Ceremonial Abyss has spent nearly all of 2023 touring the US by bus and commuter rail. 

Solo percussionist Mark E Kaylor visits us from Olympia, followed by extended/harmonic/stasis/sounding from local string duo Noel Kennon and John Teske.

Mark E Kaylor has spent most of his life immersed in the world of percussion. Starting with school band and orchestra, followed by various punk, rock, pop and jazz outfits Mark eventually succumbed to the allure of improvisation, which has been the focus of his musical endeavors for the last 20+ years. 

Mark’s interest lies in rhythm and raw sound/texture in equal measure. The two are not seen as separate worlds but areas that flow in and out of one another. He devotes copious amounts of time to investigating both new and old ideas/techniques as well as just “listening” with intent to all the sounds that are around us in everyday life.  

Over the years Mark has collaborated with numerous musicians and has appeared on dozens of recordings. Past projects include Cex Fucx,  Hammer of Hathor, Haiku Ambulance, Cells, Thee Oregon Artificial Limb Co, Tat Vamasi, Htoo Trio, Kinetic Harpoon. There are also several long term collaborations with JP Jenkins, Bryan Eubanks, and Kelvin Pittman.

Seattle-based composer and double bassist John Teske writes contemporary concert music for soloists, chamber groups, chamber orchestra, and “any ensemble.” John’s music has been performed across the Americas, as well as in France and Russia, and has been supported by the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, the Jack Straw Foundation, and the City of Seattle. 

Noel Kennon is a violist, composer, and artist living and working in Seattle. His work often is in reference to the physical qualities of sound such as the mathematical (or theoretical) forms of pitch space in relation to the harmonic series, difference tones, and the sonority of volume or rather the sonority of space both enclosed and open (on any scale) as well as nominating the socio/environmental effects and phenomenon of sounding in space such as the purpose and politics in engaging strangers along with other unhelpful pursuits.

Leanna Keith presents Ink Aloud, a program of works which were composed based on books of a variety of genres, from sci-fi to speculative fiction to autobiographical poetry. Leanna uses their flute, voice, and looper in tandem to create transportive soundscapes which attempt to embody the heart of these literary works. 

In addition to Ink Aloud, Leanna will also be facilitating a performance of her newest work “To Grasp” – an interactive experimental performance art piece which asks the audience to quite literally grab a hold to participate in the sound creation. 

Multi-instrumentalist and composer Peter Nelson-King returns to the Wayward Music Series to present No Place To Go, a large-scale improvisation cycle based on the poetry of Ishikawa Takuboku (1886-1912). Takuboku wrote in tanka and free verse formats, and much of his work addresses modern malaise in an arrestingly contemporary way. No Place To Go uses piano, electronic keyboard and voice to explore 11 translations of Takuboku’s poems made at the University of Washington nearly a century ago, bringing the poems and genreless improvisation into new territory. Also featured are Aaron Keyt’s 8 Pieces for Melodica, receiving their world premiere, as well as transportative pieces by Richard Cameron-Wolfe, Robert Carl and Aaron Kirschner.

Peter Nelson-King is an active performer and teacher on trumpet and piano, and plays regularly with multiple orchestras and large ensembles in the Seattle area. A King County native, they earned degrees from University of Puget Sound and Boston University, returning to the Seattle area after freelancing in the Northeast. They are a longtime member of Lake Washington Symphony Orchestra and Brass Band Northwest, and a frequent recurring member of the experimental jazz group Scrambler. As a solo and chamber performer, they specialize in promoting works by composers who have unjustly fallen into neglect, and have revived major works by dozens of these composers for Seattle audiences.

Ben McAllister shares his explorations in notation and improvising, trying to break out of the repetition we so often fall into playing with loops and computers.  He’ll be playing both solo, and with his frequent collaborator, the drummer Neil Wilson. 

When I create, I like constraints – I like limitations. What are some things in 4s? Vertical and Horizontal: 4 beats to a bar, 4 on the floor, 4 tracks to record with. The first time I got a 4-track recorder, in the same breath I heard “The Beatles recorded Sgt Pepper on a 4-track”, which was tantamount to being told “you can do anything on this machine.” But: even if you bounce things from track-to-track, you still have to plan ahead.

This planning ahead has been on my mind with every group I’ve played with. How to shape and steer the group toward the piece I’m hearing, without burying them in a page of something they always must read? This night is about exploring a line between planning and spontaneous. The first half will be solo work on various instruments using the notation frames you may have seen at my last show in October. In the second set, drummer Neil Wilson and I will play with the elasticity these frames afford.

You’ll see some visuals that may help you see where my heads is at while I play. In the second half, we’ll switch gears as I guide you through a little bit of my thinking in notating and organizing sound, then we will use a few of these guides to make some music as a group.