Composer/pianist Amy D. Rubin enjoys mixing notated music and improvisation with words to create new ways of telling stories. A number of her works are published and recorded by the Music Research Institute in the “Anthology of Keyboard Music from Africa and the Diaspora.” Amy’s music has been recorded on CRI, Mode, Koch International and Con Brio Recordings. She has been commissioned by Seattle Chamber Players, World Music Institute, and Quintet of the Americas, among others, and has collaborated with many Seattle musicians including clarinetist Laura De Luca and pianist Dawn Clement. She is always looking for new collaborators. Many of her performances, lectures, and collaborations can be seen on YouTube.

Here she is joined by her friends Esther and Dass, whose voices you’ll hear in combination with Amy’s improvisations using acoustic piano and synthesized sounds. Included as well is her improvisation for piano and synthesized sounds, Winter Solstice, and a new piano piece in progress, Jamaican Sunset. Amy was a Fulbright professor in Ghana, and you’ll most likely hear some West African influences in her melodies, sounds and rhythms. When she asked her collaborators to choose their poems there were no stated themes in mind. What does emerge is a tapestry which reflects our landscapes, our hopes to create beauty, and our fears about love, loss and devastating upheaval.

Esther Neeser immigrated to the Northwest from Switzerland but stays in touch with the Europe she loves through poetry and politics. She is reading “The Sigh” in German by Christian Morgenstern and “How to Paint the Portrait of a Bird” in French, by Jacques Prevert.

Gordon Dass Adams works and walks outdoors when possible, reads poetry, and stabs at watercolors while listening to the rain. He is reading two poems by the Pacific Northwest writer Gary Snyder, “1980: Letting Go,” and “Beneath My Hand And Eye The Dis­tant Hills, Your Body.”

0:00 – Introductory Remarks
1:52  – How to Paint the Portrait of A Bird (French #1)
4:52 – Jamaican Sunset
9:53 – How to Paint the Portrait of A Bird (English)
12:34 – Beneath My Hand And Eye The Distant Hills, Your Body
16:40 – The Sigh (English)
18:36 – Better Times Ahead
20:58 – 1980: Letting Go
23:24 – The Sigh (German)
25:20 – Winter Solstice Improvisation

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.

Kyle Hanson has created music for dance, film and theater. He co-led the Black Cat Orchestra from 1990 to 2006, and wrote songs and performed with Mirah and Spectratone International.

This evening’s songs were created and performed spontaneously on the accordion with a new bellows technique of my own invention. I thank Steve Peters and Nonsequitur for the opportunity to present this music, and am grateful to be a part of this community of performers and listeners.

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.

Since 2007, A.F. Jones (Tracyton, WA) has been engaged and interested in collecting and selectively compiling site-specific recordings, from the polar ice cap to parking garages in need of routine maintenance. Camera lucida is the third protean composition from Jones, preceded by Apparatchiks (2013), and X Malfeasant, Appropriating Y (2013).

Camera lucida (for Barthes, Sontag, Morris) (2020) is a protean composition for one recordist and one acoustic space or soundstage.

The recordist creates a sound image, of any length, of a selected space or soundstage using the walls and other physical boundaries within the space as filters with an intent to expand or close-in on specific features unique to the space. The acoustic space/soundstage may be left alone or altered, specific to the desires of the recordist.

Camera lucida is for the listener that engages with it. The listener should consider the concept of studium/punctum (Barthes), that “allows discovery of the operator” within the aural image. The composition is intended for any musician, writer, composer, or any communicator, under any circumstance, actively or subconsciously thinking about what might be conveyed in their subject or message.

The following terms are offered for consideration in performing or listening to any version of Camera lucida:

• Photogeny — the practice of bringing an image to light. Also an antiquated synonym for photography. Or more literally, producing an image with light, physically, chemically, and aesthetically.

• Audiogeny — the producing of a mental image by way of sound.

• Acoustogeny — the shaping of aural images by way of the traits of acoustic spaces.

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.

Steve Fisk is an American composer and record producer, born 1954 in Long Beach, CA. While he is widely regarded as one of the midwives of the Northwest Grunge Music scene, he has been writing and releasing his own work since 1979. He currently lives in Tacoma with his wife, artist Anne Marie Grgich.

Be The First To Like B-83 (for Gordon Mumma) was commissioned by the Frye Art Museum in 2015 as part of their Genius/21 Century/ Seattle. It is an homage to Gordon Mumma’s Megaton, for William S. Burroughs. Both “Megaton” and “B-83” are concerned with the limitations of thermonuclear bombing.

Reflections on Berkeley in a Time of Plague (2020) is a text setting of Jack Spicer’s poem Berkeley In A Time of Plague. It is read by Fisk’s frequent collaborator Richard Denner/Jampa Dorge, who was a student of Spicer’s.

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.

Bit Graves is an experimental electronic chamber duo that explores the shifting boundaries between the physical universe and the digital multiverse. Their music takes the form of dense drone landscapes which range in character from ambient to abrasive. By blending the coarse, unpredictable voltages of plain circuitry with the rigid, precise calculation of digital programming, they depict sonic worlds which are both organic and artificial.

We recorded this concert as a set of three duets for KORG MS-20 synthesizer and SuperCollider live processing. Each duet was constructed as an improvisation on the theme of opposing analog and digital forces. We use different digital models to deconstruct the synthesizer signal and piece it back together in real time, with unreliable and somewhat unpredictable results.

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.

Rahikka is Seattle-based electronic ambient artist Carson Rennekamp. His most recent LP, Abstract Elegies, was released on Stereoscenic Records on November 6, 2020. Rahikka’s work is inspired by abstract expressionism, experimental film, and subconscious escape.

James Lee is a guitarist based in the Seattle area. His playing is inspired by a variety of genres ranging from pop, electronic, to metal.

Composed of synthesizers, guitar, and electric kalimba, this is the second take from a semi-improvised performance recorded in Seattle on December 5, 2020. The goal of the recording was to create a seamless, dreamlike atmosphere; a juxtaposition to the uncertain and chaotic times we’re currently living in. Looped sequences, lush pads, and effected guitar flow throughout the recording in a structureless composition to evoke ethereal landscapes. The recording is dedicated to our late friend and amazing musician, Kevin Bontrager.

Rahikka (electronics, kalimba)
James Lee (guitar)

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.

Tom Baker is a composer, guitarist, improviser, and electronic musician, active in the Seattle new-music scene. His compositions, from operas and avant-jazz to chamber and electronic music, have been performed across the US, Canada, and Europe. As a performer and improviser, Tom specializes in fretless guitar and live-electronics. His band TRIPTET recently released its fourth album, Slowly, Away, on Engine Records. His electronic-interactive-arts collaboration with visual artist Robert Campbell, was featured in the MoxSonic Festival in 2019 and the Currents Virtual Festival in 2020. Tom is a Professor of Music at Cornish College of the Arts where he teaches composition, music theory, and electronic music. (photo: Jessa Carte)

The four pieces that make up this recording are part of a series of works entitled Traces. One might consider them ghost stories. In my youth I was obsessed with Harry Houdini, especially his interactions with Sir Conan Doyle, and their arguments about spiritualism and the paranormal. From there I stumbled onto the practice of EVP (electronic voice phenomenon). As a young person with an obsessive relationship to sound and access to a reel-to-reel tape recorder, this seemed to give my life a purpose: to find and record “invisible” sounds and otherwise unheard voices. These four works for performers and interactive electronics are a remembrance of that period in my life, each a meditation on loss, grief, and memory. They are a search for what remains in the absence of known things, real things, loved things. They each began as an incantation, a conjuring, giving voice to the inaudible and form to the imperceptible. What emerges are traces and remnants of people, spaces, and memories – requiems for things lost. These works were to be performed at the Chapel Performance Space in October 2020 in a live performance (which was lost to Covid-19). They are now actualized here on the Wayward in Limbo series. “Traces:Sarah” was commissioned by Melissa Achten.

(00:00) Traces:Sarah – Melissa Achten, harp
(12:19) Traces:Henry – Tom Baker, bowed mbira
(20:48) Traces:George – Tom Baker, electric guitar
(29:09) Traces:Nellie – Lily Shababi, viola; Madison LaVigne, cello

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.

Greg Sinibaldi is a saxophonist and composer living and working in Seattle and New York.

This music is a partial diary of 2020, comprised of improvisations recorded over the course of the last eight months. The pandemic, our country’s political situation, protests in the streets, and my personal struggles with depression have left me feeling emotionally raw. I’ve been profoundly affected by the state of the world, moving from sadness, despair, confusion, and longing for hope. These pieces are my reactions to these times. Each piece is accompanied by the date created, a newspaper headline of that day, and the total number of deaths due to Covid-19 as of that date, or a combination of these elements. Together, they represent a snapshot of the complexity of that day in 2020.

Digital album available to purchase on BandCamp.

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.

China Faith Star is an auto-didactical, overly practical, visual trickster, sound/word mixer. Born in Los Angeles to Punk Flower Children and raised in a world of diverse interactions, she fled to the woods to bathe with trees. She writes poetry, occasionally. Mostly she conjures ideas, transmuting socio/political/emotional concepts into aesthetically visceral maps/translations: popping color, repetitious pattern, dimensional texture, expressionistic, meditative. Her medium-diverse visual artwork, animation, theatrical, word-smithing and musical performances have been exhibited in 25 cities nationally / internationally and her work has been added to public and private collections.

Arrington de Dionyso synthesizes the iconoclasm of No-Wave Punk with the primordially potent universalities of Albert Ayler-era Free Jazz. Founder of Olympia-based experimental rock groups such as Old Time Relijun, Malaikat dan Singa, and the ecstatic protest-jazz band This Saxophone Kills Fascists, he has also performed alongside many luminaries of the decentralized global music scene including collaborations with Senyawa, the Master Musicians of Jajouka, Maher Shalal Hash Baz, and many ensembles of Jathilan trance music throughout Indonesia. In 2019 he was the international headliner at the Khöömei in the Center of Asia Festival, in Kyzyl, Tuva.

Hindsight 2020 is an aleatory composition in 13 fragmented movements: trepidation, determination, isolation, observation, integration, breathing, anxiety, reaction, duration, injustice, overwhelm, hopefulness, and the unknown. Performed here by Arrington de Dionyso (bass clarinet, Indonesian lalove flute) and composer China Faith Star (soprano saxophone, electronic components), the piece includes samples submitted from across the globe of various artists breathing, field-collected recordings of protests and responders, nature, and electronically composed themes from sourced content. More than a chronological document, the work seeks to create a mood of sustained catharsis in an allegorical response to the experience of living through the year 2020, the drastic shifts and imbalance, the visceral emotive and pensive moments, and the opportunities to capture field recordings of the myriad social reactions to a year rife with death and injustice, anxiety and political clashing, police response and the chorus of nature amplified in times of shutdown.

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.