A spirited, wide-ranging improvisation involving longtime associates Dennis Rea (guitar), Seattle Jazz Hall of Famer Wally Shoup (alto saxophone), and Monktail Creative Music Concern core members John Seman (bass) and Mark Ostrowski (drums), recorded in 2017. The expeditionaries traverse rugged sonic terrain encompassing thickets of mutant jazz, quiescent geothermal pools, and tectonic overthrust zones.

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of previously unreleased material.

Alex Guy is a Seattle-based violinist, violist, singer and composer, and is the leader and principal songwriter of Led To Sea, a magnetic trio that fuses classical, pop and experimental music. Alex has also composed extensively for film, theater, and dance, and has performed and collaborated with a virtual who’s who of bandleaders, composers, improvisers and jazz musicians in the Pacific NW and beyond, including Angel Olsen, Thao and the Get Down Stay Down, Wayne Horvitz, Mirah, Sera Cahoone, Jherek Bischoff, Ahamefule Oluo, Laura Veirs, Amanda Palmer and many more.

These seven solo viola improvisations were recorded at the Chapel one evening this fall. When I work on recordings I typically get into a critical and perfectionist mode. In contrast, when I’m improvising it often brings out in me a deep sense of freedom and trust in my own voice (on a good day anyway!). During the isolation of COVID, my goal has been to discover a more genuine version of myself in relationship to other people, and these pieces have become part of that challenge. I took the recording of the session home intending to make modifications and corrections. As I kept listening to the pieces, I decided that their peculiarities and imperfections (including the sounds of the room itself) were some of my favorite parts – spontaneous and true to the moment, so I left the tracks mostly untouched. I hope you enjoy them!

1 – 0:00
2 – 5:48
3 – 10:01
4 – 12:46
5 – 16:51
6 – 20:32
7 – 24:24

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of previously unreleased material.

Amelia Coulter is an alto trombonist and experimental sound artist. She enjoys discovering new, messy, and uncomfortable embodiments for the trombone using alternative techniques, modifications, and integration with analog electronics. She has a bachelor of music from Cornish College of the Arts. She would like to acknowledge that these sounds were produced on the unceded traditional land of the first people of Seattle, the Duwamish People past and present, and to honor with gratitude the land itself and the Duwamish Tribe.

This recording is a live solo improvisation for alto trombone amplified via mixing board with two channels of feedback. Inspired by the dueling feedback loops of anxiety and depression, the goal is to embrace the closed loop system by plugging outputs back into inputs to become something more powerful.

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of previously unreleased material.

Tiffany Lin is a classically trained pianist and designer who has a love-procrastinate-hate-melancholy relationship with playing and performing music. Therefore, tiflin’s scant time on the instrument is usually bookended by both angst and joy, lately inspired by the folklore of tactile skills, always an investigation in comfort. Let her know how you’re feeling. 

Table of Contents:

1. (00:00) Wishing this was a familiar gospel tune which I could sing to.
2. (11:13) A small song guided by the mantra, this is an improvisation, here I am improvising.
3. (15:09) This is a rhythmic ear break.
4. (16:39) We Can Be Pretty, a love song for this Baldwin. I never owned a piano until 2020 – this damn thing is so expensive – yet (in a f-ing tragic year) the stars aligned and I have so much gratitude.

(photo: Tracy Cilona)

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of previously unreleased material.

Josh Medina is an electroacoustic composer and performer from Seattle. His work reflects a variety of styles and genres, combining elements from electronic music, ambient, folk, free improvisation and drone. In 2014, he began playing as a duo with sound artist Paurl Walsh, releasing an EP shortly thereafter, followed by their subsequent LP Vault of Angels released via Debacle Records. Medina is also a member of shoegaze/dream rock outfit somesurprises.

Recently, and as a result of the loss of live music, Medina helped establish a collectively run label, OBSCURE & TERRIBLE, releasing his own music along with other local experimental musicians from the Seattle community. 2021 will see the release of his debut solo album Drifting Toward the Absolute from Eiderdown Records, a collection of ecstatic pre-pandemic cassette recordings for manipulated guitar and synthesizer.

For his contribution to the Wayward in Limbo series, Medina crafted a trio of long form ambient pieces utilizing field recordings, analog synth, guitar, electronics and tape. Through the power of repetition, Medina seeks to transform the listener’s perception and create an intentional environment for contemplation. The result is a meditation on stasis, solitude, the Pacific Northwest bioregion and the past year spent largely at home.

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of previously unreleased material.

To honor the recent passing of composer Harold Budd, this special edition of Wayward in Limbo features a live recording of a very special concert by Harold and Seattle bassist Keith Lowe.

The performance took place at the Good Shepherd Center Chapel in Seattle on June 11, 2009, to celebrate the release of Harold’s book of poetry, “Colorful Fortune.” It was co-presented by Nonsequitur and publishers Heavenly Monkey Editions (Vancouver) and MoonLiner Books (Seattle). Thanks to Rob Angus for the beautiful recording, and to Keith Lowe for agreeing to share it with us.

And thank you, Harold, for gracing this world with your beautiful music. You are appreciated and missed.

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of previously unreleased material.

RM Francis is an artist living in Seattle who works with computer-generated sound. His most recent releases are A Taxonomy of Guffaws, on ETAT, and Nth White Dot, on Conditional.

Jack Callahan is a composer and sound engineer based in New York. Since 2013 he has been primarily working under the moniker die Reihe, taken from the journal edited by Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He runs Bánh Mì Verlag, an imprint dedicated to contemporary experimental music and culture. His music has been called “unbelievably bad,” “tiring,” “unsurprising” and “boring,” in one case all by the same person.

Jeff Witscher is a musician who currently manages his own custodial and maintenance company, Vincent’s Expert Cleaners in Portland, OR. He has recorded under many different names, Rene Hell perhaps being the most known. He focuses primarily on sound composition as well as video works for his live performances. Recent solo recordings include Approximately 1,000 Beers (2018), Fy Monkey Sisaj Kura (2017), Cob Music (2016), Bifurcating a Resounding No! (2014) and Vanilla Call Option (2013).

In Every Single Person Has Some Muscle RM Francis reinterprets Jack Callahan and Jeff Witscher’s 2019 composition What Happens on Earth Stays on Earth as an abstract drama of entropy set in the uncanny valley of artificial speech. The six human voices of What Happens on Earth Stays on Earth have been replaced by machinic proxies synthesized from the speech of the original performers. Vestiges of the organic appear briefly to comment on their own retreat from the realm of the audible before withdrawing to the edges of speech, out of which their inchoate vocalizations obtrude intermittently on the unfolding narrative. Whereas the original work was indebted to Robert Ashley’s spoken operas, Every Single Person Has Some Muscle redeploys the iterative strategy of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room in the domain of machine listening, in which the transcription errors of commercial dictation software replace acoustic reverberation as the means by which the human voice is eroded, yielding a compositional logic based on phonetic drift and semantic refraction. Featuring the voices of Josh Haringa, Daren Ho, Madalyn Merkey, Colleen O’Connor, Nihal Ramchandani, and Asha Sheshadri. Mastered by Jack Callahan.

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of previously unreleased material.

Christopher Icasiano is a Filipino-American percussionist and composer from Redmond, WA. Based now in Seattle, he has been performing and touring professionally for over 15 years. His specialization in free-improvisation and experimental music combined with his vast experience with pop and rock have made him a highly sought after collaborator in all genres of music. He co-founded the grassroots arts organization Table & Chairs, as well as the Racer Sessions, a weekly performance series and free-improvisation jam session. He is committed to anti-racist and anti-sexist organizing within Seattle’s DIY and art communities in order to create more accessible and safer spaces.

Solo acoustic drums, sticks, cymbals, room, hands, fingers, nails, feet.

(Photo: Haley Freedlund)

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of previously unreleased material.

Mark D. Cooper is MFA graduate in electronic music and recording media from Mills College. He is a member of the Seattle Phonographers Union, and the songwriting project Cooper-Wetstone.

Quintessence

A few years ago, I embarked on a project of organizing field recordings and sonic experiments loosely under the idea of the four “classical” elements: water, air, earth, and fire. The first two, H2O and AIR had their debut in the amazing Good Shepherd Chapel space. I had planned the third, Terra Cognita, to be a part of the Wayward Music series in the Chapel in November 2020. However, a certain virus, Covid 19, intervened as a “fifth” element. This had me thinking about that fifth element: aether, or what comes out of the unknown, invisible, inaudible. It is always there, in some form, speculated in modern physics as “axions.”

These recordings of quintessence as I know it include field recordings from Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France, the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, U.S.A. and Cleland Wildlife Park, South Australia.

(00:00) Asteroid 1
(03:27) Exosphere
(09:37) Oort
(17:20) Axion
(26:38) Orbits
(32:16) Eridanus
(37:15) Asteroid 2

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of previously unreleased material.

Kaori Suzuki is a Tokyo-born composer and artist who uses high-droning modified acoustic instruments, intensely high register electronics, tape, and other handmade elements necessary to spin her auditory transmissions. She holds a diverse background in electronic music having designed and produced vintage-inspired electronic instruments (Magic Echo Music) from 2009-2015. Previously based in Seattle, she is currently on faculty at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College. When she’s not performing her solo or collaborative works, she is playing drums in the Oakland-based minimalist psych-punk group Night Collectors, and bowed guitar/cello in the Ecstatic Music Band. Her works are published on independent labels in Germany and the U.S. and soon on Beacon Sound.

rose flames dance on a spiral staircase is a live, loud iteration of a composition using an amplified adapted melodica, oscillators, and real-time processing. Central to the music are the breaths of a re-tuned melodica which was modified to be played with foot pumps, allowing for the sustained excitation of its reeds. Its close-miked amplification interacts with the drifting frequencies of analog oscillators and time delays, the results producing transient harmonic variations and slight auditory distortions in a voluminous echo of an empty concert hall. Various iterations have been performed in small clubs, galleries, and at least once in a concrete munitions storage magazine, and has since been called a performance which “rewards endurance with transcendence”. An offering for the new year.

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of previously unreleased material.