Originally from Seattle, Caroline Kraabel is a London-based improviser, saxophonist, artist and composer. She conducts and plays with the London Improvisers Orchestra (LIO). Sometimes she improvises solo while walking in London and elsewhere (broadcast over several years on Resonance
104.4 FM as Taking a Life for a Walk and Going Outside). She releases ephemeral solo pieces as part of Lonely Impulse Collective and works with many other excellent improvisers, including Robert Wyatt, Maggie Nicols, John Edwards, Louis Moholo, Cleveland Watkiss, Hyelim Kim, Pat Thomas, Susan Alcorn, Sarah Washington, and Charlotte Hug.

During 2020-21 Kraabel performed live (off- and on-line) and while walking through London; made and shared many recordings of duo and solo live improvisation; made a piece of performance art for APT Gallery; created a number of socially distanced large-group pieces for the LIO; was artist-in-residence at UNCOOL in Poschiavo, Switzerland; and worked on her 40-minute music/film piece about lockdown London (London 26 and 28 March 2020: imitation: inversion), which received its avant-première at London’s Café Oto on 25 February 2021, is available on the Jazzed app, and won the 2021 Ivor Award for Sound Art Composer.

Tonight she’ll perform a solo set, followed by a set of conducted improvisation with an ensemble of local improvisers: Abbey Blackwell, bass; Haley Freedlund, trombone; Kayce Guthmiller, viola; Leanna Keith, flutes; Susie Kozawa, objects/homemades; Carol Levin, harp; Ebony Miranda, cello; Kate Olson, soprano sax.

Presented by Nonsequitur. (Photo: Giuseppe Tamponi)

Caroline Kraabel will also be performing at Cafe Racer for the Racer Sessions on April 10.

COVID-19 PROTOCOLS: For the safety of all present, audience members are asked to show proof of vaccination and wear masks covering nose and mouth.

Láthalom Gi Matan Guma’! Welcome to the Face of the House 

MALI’E’ is a Matao-CHamoru performance research project re(k)newing the spirit of embodied musicality as oral history and prophecy. Three locally-based Matao-CHamoru multi-disciplinary artists – roldy aguero ablao, Lourdez Puti’on Velasco, and Dakota Camacho – explore new expressions of the ancestral practice of exchanging memorized and improvisatory verses called MALI’E’ and kantan chamorrita, sharing an insight into the MALI’E’ creative process through a multi-disciplinary ritual activation, improvisatory verses, chant compositions, and sonic choreographies. 

The artist-researchers are blessed to be working working with a steward of fino’ håya, Jeremy Cepeda, who has provided his original chant compositions as guiding material for sonic choreographies that tell the artists’ family stories. Cepeda has spent years under guidance by his mañaina (elders) in his family and wider community, while also conducting his own personal research into the language. He has composed a series of original chants that contain teachings from his elders and the findings of his research.

Dakota Camacho is a multi-disciplinary artist / researcher working in spaces of indigenous life ways, performance, musical composition, community engagement, and education. Camacho holds a Masters of Arts in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Bachelor of Arts in Gender & Women’s Studies as a First Wave Urban Arts and Hip Hop Scholar. Camacho is a chanter, adjunct instructor, and core researcher for I Fanlalai’an Oral History Project based at the University of Guåhan. 

​Camacho co-founded I Moving Lab, an inter-national, inter-cultural, inter-tribal, and inter-disciplinary arts collective that creates community and self-funded arts initiatives to engage and bring together rural & urban communities, universities, museums, & performing arts institutions. Camacho has worked at festivals, universities, and community organizations as a public speaker, facilitator, composer and performer across Turtle Island (USA), Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, Sweden, and South Africa.

Curated by Leanna Keith for Nonsequitur’s NonSeq series.

COVID-19 PROTOCOLS: For the safety of performers and audience, all audience members will be required to show proof of vaccination and wear masks covering nose and mouth.

Workshop + Concert: $15 (Register for workshop)
Concert only: $5 – $15 sliding scale

WORKSHOP (6 PM): Compositional Work with the New Pulsar Generator (nuPG)

The focus of the workshop is composition with a digital audio technique called pulsar synthesis and its instrumental incarnation the New Pulsar Generator (nuPG). The nuPG program is a standalone (Mac OS) application implemented in SuperCollider 3 programming language that incorporates a graphic as well text-based (live-coding) control over synthesis parameters. After introducing a brief historical and technical context of the technique of pulsar synthesis, the central theme of the workshop will be the compositional application of the New Pulsar Generator and its various extensions. We will look at the structure and function of essential elements of the program (pulsars, envelopes and sequences) and their combination, as well as extended compositional methods (e.g., Xenakian sieves, parameter modulation, LPC and Wavelet based cross-synthesis with other sound sources).  

The participants will get a copy of the software with the documentation to install on their machines (Mac OS 12.14 or earlier only).

CONCERT (8:30 PM sharp): A solo set by Marcin Pietruszewski featuring work using the New Pulsar Generator application, with a short opening set by RM Francis who will present two sections from AToGRNN Prism, a multichannel work featuring 45 MIR-based machine-listening agents voicing divergent interpretations of a single sonic event..

Marcin Pietruszewski (born 1984) is a composer and researcher engaged in sound synthesis and composition with computers, exploring specific formal developments in the tradition of electroacoustic music and contemporary sound art, as well as extra-musical domains of auditory design, computational linguistics and psychoacoustics. He works across performance, multimedia installation and radio productions probing the dynamics between formalism of synthetic sound and its material realisation. He has collaborated extensively with musicians and composers — e.g.,  Jan St. Werner, Florian Hecker, Marcus Schmickler, Tristan Clutterbuck, Jules Rawlinson and Lauren Sarah Hayes — as well as graphic design company NORM, philosopher Chris Schambaugh, choreographer/dancer Agnes Cebere, and the Laboria Cubonics Collective.

RM Francis is an artist working with computer-generated sound in Seattle. His work has been released on ETAT, Conditional, and CO-DEPENDENT, among other labels; his most recent release, Every Single Person Has Some Muscle, for six synthetic voices, was released on FLEA. He is also a member of the collective/label $ pwgen 20. 

Portland-based composer Brian Fergus merges the ukulele with electronics, presenting his solo arrangements of soundtrack music written by the German composer Florian Fricke for the Werner Herzog films Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Heart of Glass (1976), and Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979).

Seattle electronic music veteran Rob Angus will perform his own compositions for Mirage sampling keyboards, loopers, and digital processing.

Brian Fergus is a lifetime musician and music educator. He earned his Masters Degree in Electronic Music composition in the 1980s at Mills College, where he studied with David Rosenboom and Anthony Braxton, and took classes with Lou Harrison, David Tudor, Conlon Nancarrow and Fred Frith. Fergus is professor emeritus of City College of San Francisco, where he taught Electronic Music, Composition, and Music Theory for more than twenty five years. In 2014, stepping down from his job at CCSF to move to Portland, Oregon, he opened Woodstock Ukulele Studio, a venue for rehearsal, recording, and private and group instruction. Brian’s book of arrangements of classical and traditional music for ukulele solo and duet, Ukulele Adventures, was published by Empire Music in 2018.

Rob Angus studied electronic music at the Boston School of Electronic Music, and music composition and film at Penn State, where he met Brian. He has performed in improvising duos and trios, bands, performance pieces and dance pieces, in clubs, festivals, galleries and museums.

COVID-19 PROTOCOLS: Masks are optional for this event.

Lori Goldston and percussionist Dave Abramson perform new and improvised solos and duos.

Lori Goldston has performed prolifically throughout the Pacific Northwest for decades, and tours throughout the US, Mexico, Canada, Australia and Europe. Her work is emotionally charged and nuanced, drawing connections between far-flung idioms, and exploring timbral thresholds of her instrument. She collaborates with a wide range of composers, actors, film makers, bands, writers and choreographers, including Earth, Nirvana, Jessika Kenney, Eyvind Kang, Mark Mitchell, Duane Linklater, Stuart Dempster, Vanessa Renwick, Lynn Shelton, Embryo, Jim Fletcher, Lonnie Holley, Steve Von Till, Ellen Fullman, Mirah, and many, many more.

Dave Abramson is a drummer and percussionist. He grew up playing in the hardcore and metal scene on the east coast and studied visual arts in upstate New York, where he began to play improvised and experimental music. Since moving to Seattle in 2002 he has recorded, performed and/or toured with folks such as Eyvind Kang, Secret Chiefs 3, Wayne Horvitz, Climax Golden Twins, Lori Goldston, Paul Hoskin, Wally Shoup, Greg Kelley, Boredoms, etc. Abramson is a member of the bands Master Musicians of Bukkake, Diminished Men, Spider Trio, Telescoping, and has composed music for the Maureen Whiting Dance company since 2004. He has toured throughout the U.S., Europe and Canada and can be heard on albums released by Tzadik, Sub Pop, Drag City, Abduction, Conspiracy, Web of Mimicry, and Important Records.

COVID-19 PROTOCOLS: For the safety of all, please wear a mask covering nose and mouth to this event.

FOREST FEST brings a NYC/San Diego-based, collective percussion quintet, The Forest (Gustavo Aguilar, Leah Bowden, Andrew Drury, Lesley Mok, and Michael Wimberly) to Seattle for two nights of sonic exploration with percussionist Bonnie Whiting, clarinetist James Falzone, and the UW Percussion Ensemble. Using drums as wind instruments, dustpans played with violin bows, and inspiration from Ed Blackwell, M’Boom, Contemporary New Music, Asian percussion traditions, and more, FOREST FEST challenges 21^st century musicians and listeners to find new pathways to a habitable future in a forest of possibilities.

April 1 Program:

Sound Field 1 (world premiere)
composed by The Forest (Debut Performance)

(D)ruminations for Edward Blackwell: Mu First Part & Mu Second Part (world premiere)
composed by Andrew Drury, with guest performers James Falzone (clarinet), Bonnie Whiting (percussion)

Presented by Continuum Culture & Arts, FOREST FEST was instigated by Seattle native Andrew Drury in collaboration with Bonnie Whiting and James Falzone. Since moving from Seattle to New York in 1998 Drury has been called “one of most innovative and bold drummers on the modern music scene” (All About Jazz), and “a phenomenon to watch perform as his playing often transforms the instrument itself” (Free Jazz Blog). Both nights utilize timpani, mallet instruments, gongs, drum sets, concert bass drum, hand drums, piano, small percussion instruments, and found objects.

This event is made possible with the support of Continuum Culture & Arts, a non-profit organization, and Jazz Road, a national initiative of South Arts, which is funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with additional support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This event is also supported by the University of Washington Music Department, Cornish College, and Common Tone Arts.

COVID-19 PROTOCOLS: King County & WA State have lifted their mandate requiring masks and proof of vaccination. Masks are recommended but optional for this event.

FOREST FEST brings a NYC/San Diego-based, collective percussion quintet, The Forest (Gustavo Aguilar, Leah Bowden, Andrew Drury, Lesley Mok, and Michael Wimberly) to Seattle for two nights of sonic exploration with percussionist Bonnie Whiting, clarinetist James Falzone, and the UW Percussion Ensemble. Using drums as wind instruments, dustpans played with violin bows, and inspiration from Ed Blackwell, M’Boom, Contemporary New Music, Asian percussion traditions, and more, FOREST FEST challenges 21^st century musicians and listeners to find new pathways to a habitable future in a forest of possibilities.

March 31 Program:
Trio (Bonnie Whiting, Lesley Mok, Leah Bowden)
UW Percussion Ensemble
Solo (Andrew Drury)
Duo (Bonnie Whiting, James Falzone)

Presented by Continuum Culture & Arts, FOREST FEST was instigated by Seattle native Andrew Drury in collaboration with Bonnie Whiting and James Falzone. Since moving from Seattle to New York in 1998 Drury has been called “one of most innovative and bold drummers on the modern music scene” (All About Jazz), and “a phenomenon to watch perform as his playing often transforms the instrument itself” (Free Jazz Blog). Both nights utilize timpani, mallet instruments, gongs, drum sets, concert bass drum, hand drums, piano, small percussion instruments, and found objects.

This event is made possible with the support of Continuum Culture & Arts, a non-profit organization, and Jazz Road, a national initiative of South Arts, which is funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with additional support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This event is also supported by the University of Washington Music Department, Cornish College, and Common Tone Arts.

COVID-19 PROTOCOLS: King County & WA State have lifted their mandate requiring masks and proof of vaccination. Masks are recommended but optional for this event.

Emerge from the chill of winter to the promise of spring: 1 butoh dancer, 1 grand piano, 2 electric guitars, 2 sets.

For this evening’s performance, butoh dancer Joan will be joined by Randy Shay on piano for the first set in a homage to her teacher butoh master Kazuo Ohno. After intermission, Michael Shannon and David Stanford lay down tracks of ambient sounds for a reprise of the second butoh piece she created and performed in Tokyo in the late 1980s.  

Known as Kogut Butoh, Joan Laage has been performing and teaching butoh and collaborating with area and international performers since she settled in Seattle in 1990 after studying butoh with masters in Tokyo. Collaborations include Amy Denio, Rob Angus, Noisepoetnobody, Stephen Fandrich, Jeff Greinke, Scott Adams and Seattle Kokon Taiko. Her group Dappin’ Butoh was well-known in the Seattle Fringe Theater Festival for 10 years. Joan is a co-founder of DAIPANbutoh Collective (since 2010), which produces an annual butoh festival. Her background includes contemporary dance, traditional Indian and Indonesian dance and music and yoga. Her work is influenced by her years of practicing Tai Chi and her profession as a gardener. This past two summers Joan has been performing free outdoor events with Michael Shannon, David Stanford, Joey Largent and others on area beaches and in public and private gardens. She also created the Keeping Afloat Project with dancers performing on our lakes’ docks and swimming platforms.

Randy Shay, a Seattle resident for over 20 years, is a versatile composer/singer/songwriter whose main instruments are piano and guitar, but also bass, mandolin, viol, and zither. He plays original solo compositions at art openings and meditation/dance events and has played in groups such as African music band Spirit of Ojah, folk & blues with Jimmy Free as Acoustic Snacks, and the multi-genre duo Tones with Kirk McNaught. A few influences are: Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Paco De Lucia, Ali Akbar Khan, Ravi Shankar, Bob Marley, Ralph & Carter Stanley, Bill Monroe, JS Bach, Dominico Scarlatti, Ray Charles, Robert Johnson, BB King, Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, John Lennon. Joan and Randy have been neighbors for 15 years during which Randy has attended all of her Homestages and other performances. Now he’s  looking forward to their first collaboration of many.

Michael Shannon is a Seattle based musician/performer active since 1979 who has worked with groups in San Francisco such as Plateau Ensemble, Lethal Gospel, < < < (pronounced ‘ku ku ku’), Aquarium Music, Joyo, Kahunas, Earnerve, Blue World, Appliances, Wish Radio, Broken Mask, Trigram and in Seattle with the Animist Orchestra, Aono Jikken Ensemble in addition to producing solo material. He has also composed for and worked as a sound designer for a number of Seattle-based modern dance choreographers. His solo work has been released as a series of cassettes by Joy Street Studios (his own label), and on many cassette/CD compilations around the world. He is featured on the CDs, Meander by Blue World, and Coincidentiae Mirabiles with Jeph Jerman, Dave Knott, Susie Kozawa, and Miroslaw Rajkowski, as well as releasing a solo LP, Laguz, on Anomalous Records. His work involves improvised interactions of East Asian, North African, Middle Eastern, and western instruments, with tape, field recordings and electronics that result in unique compositions of quiet, stately beauty. 

Originally from Massachusetts, David Stanford’s music includes creating soundtracks, electronic and classical. He studied at Cornish College of the Arts. David has played with Brendan Murray, Jason Lescalleet, Animist Orchestra, Eye Music, and Gyre. 

COVID-19 PROTOCOLS: Following current mandates from King County & WA State public health officials, all audience members at this performance will be required to wear masks regardless of vaccination status. Proof of vaccination status and/or recent negative COVID test result will be required for entry. Windows will be open, weather permitting. Given the constantly changing nature of the pandemic, all events are subject to cancellation on short notice. Check back here on the day of the show for updated info.

Violinist and composer Luke Fitzpatrick presents an hour-long solo work entitled The Dreamer.  Stemming from the anxiety of our current time, The Dreamer is an experiential piece that explores the themes of isolation, longing and duality.  Audience members are encouraged to move around the space during the performance. 

For the continued safety of all present, audience members are required to wear a mask covering nose and mouth for this event.

Spätzer is a creation from multi-disciplinary artist Aiken Bömers-Muller. Living through generative-based compositions, Spätzer’s sound designs balance the formalist approach of traditional ambient music with a tumultuous underbelly of chaotic sensibilities. Coming from a theater background, Spätzer focuses on storytelling through his music and performances. Some have called this post-ambient, some have remained silent. Muller is a part of REALMOREREAL and the artistic director of Radio Brennpunkt, a station focused on showcasing creative commons music.

wiley soule is Clayton, a Seattle based electronic musician, sound designer and voice artist who explores the infinitely rich, often tumultuous emotive open space at the nexus of noise, ambient, goth-industrial, bass, musique concrète and electroacoustic music. In his waking hours he also pursues a career in social work, fully committed to the healing and growth of others while chasing art as life through-theme. His debut EP, Been Midnight, can be found on Bandcamp and all other major platforms. His upcoming EP, Like Kaiju Vermin, will descend this spring, 2022.

The Force of Listening is a concert series hosted by REALMOREREAL sharing sounds and musical explorations of the potential of listening. This series shifts the focus from music as an end-point, to music as a dialogue for practicing the future. This dialogue begins with the artists’ investigation of a communal topic and continues as they “report” their findings through sound performance. File under experimental, avant-garde, and shit’s getting real. 

In this performance, we invited Spätzer and wiley soule to explore the homeless epidemic in our nation, and Seattle specifically.  

Spätzer took the hyper-focused route of studying and incorporating the works of Bill Jarboe, a Seattleite and musician who died unhoused in 2020. 

wiley soule offers an aural meditation on the constraints common to the state of homelessness: the steady denial of access, the gauntlet of casual judgement cast by often still-housed peers, the losses that cascade in at a gale’s pace. This piece is an appeal to empathy, a casting about for the space where the outpaced grief can be shared and hope fashioned into something like real tenderness. 

Curated by Omar Willey for Nonsequitur’s NonSeq series.

COVID-19 PROTOCOLS: King County & WA State have lifted their mandate requiring masks and proof of vaccination. Masks are optional for this event.