A sound artist, Fulbright scholar, and Guggenheim fellow, Robert Millis has authored or co-authored books (Indian Talking Machine and Victrola Favorites) produced compilations and documentaries for the Sublime Frequencies record label, (including Paris to Calcutta: Men and Music on the Desert Road and This World is Unreal Like A Snake in a Rope), composed for radio (“The Gramophone Effect” for Documenta14) and film (the cult horror film Session 9), and released numerous recordings as a solo artist, as Climax Golden Twins, as Telescoping or as Idol Ko Si. Recently he was part of A Slightly Curving Place at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

This work is about wind up gramophones, Victrolas and Edison cylinder players. I use them as chambers for feedback resonances alongside deconstructed fragments of 78rpm records, and reconfigured surface noise. Related to my Related Ephemera LP, recently released on the Helen Scarsdale Agency, it’s about fragility, overtones, texture, and memory; an insomniac falling asleep.

A few found sounds, a Japanese sho, and a guitar make appearances, but otherwise all the sounds were derived from old phonographs and recordings. Some sections were performed live, and some assembled in my studio. Ko Ishikawa played the sho.

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.

Doug Haire lives on NoBeHi and is generally associated with music.

Here are three pieces inspired by our lives in 2020. The first is a complex drone soaked in an ether bath. I’m finding that all the elements of drone music say the most when the nights grow long. The second track is about all that can happen between 11 beats per minute. It’s this larghissimo thinking that I bring to the Oregon desert. And finally, the sound of the end of town. A place where the street dead-ends and the countryside returns. A place where you find yourself just thinking about stuff. The local and the cosmic.

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.

Joshua Limanjaya Lim is an experimental, electronic artist who uses modular and hardware synthesizers to create ambient / lofi music. He embraces minimalism, as well as the beauty contained within a sound’s imperfections.

This 3-movement piece makes use of sounds both natural and synthetic – from pianos, oscillators, and wind chimes. Elements are mangled and stretched to create slow-moving and meditative soundscapes, while melodies interweave and blend into interesting harmonic relationships. This minimal ambient improvisation acts as a guide through self-reflection and contemplation.

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.

Bonnie Whiting performs new experimental music, seeking out projects that involve the speaking percussionist, improvisation, and non-traditional notation. Her second solo album, Perishable Structures launched in 2020 and places works for speaking percussionist within a context of storytelling. 2021 brings the premiere of Through the Eyes(s): an extractable cycle of nine pieces for speaking/singing percussionist collaboratively developed with composer Eliza Brown and nine incarcerated women, and the world premiere of a new percussion concerto by Huck Hodge with the Seattle Modern Orchestra. She is Chair of Percussion Studies and an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Washington.

Control/Release (2020) is a companion to my piece Control/Resist (2017). The earlier work is a musical expression of two sides of political action: the private daily work of sustained resistance and the less frequent acts of public demonstration/shared experience. It is punctuated by crowdsourced recordings from the Indianapolis Women’s March on 1/20/17 and eruptions of cathartic white noise. In the days after the 2020 election in the US, relieved and exhausted, I was compelled to think about how long-term, sustainable political action might evolve in the coming months. Control/Release (2020) explores a near-continuous soundscape of gradually-shifting, purely acoustic white noise punctuated by various bells/resonant pot lids, extending the cathartic moments from the earlier work to become constant, noisy, ambient drones.

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.

Faith Coloccia is an artist and musician who works under the names Mamiffer and Mára. Her recordings have been released on SIGE records, Karlrecords, Room 40, Hydra Head and Touch. She is the co-founder of the experimental music label SIGE Records.

Voice III Continuum

Halfway through the shutdown and the pandemic I started going through all of my cassette field recordings from when my son was first born. The current state of our collective consciousness was layered on top of the sounds recorded before I knew that the events and hungry ghosts of 2020 were even a possibility. I couldn’t unhear the “Before” and “After” of this year. Recordings of the past are now laced with a heavy urgent present.

The work I have been doing with the recordings corresponds to my son learning language, first abstractly and now more concretely, as he learns individual letters removed from their subjects. How does communication develop if sounds are missing, or if time or limitations take a consonant away? What if you cannot be heard, or if someone has forgotten how to listen? Communications through click and vibration. There is a window of time where language can take root in a child, along with ideas that the language carries. How does this information become a story, passed down through families? In making this song, I was reaching for a sound antidote, and a lineage prayer.

Source material: cassette field recording of Needle Creek on Vashon Island while walking with my then 2 year old son, 2018.

Voice and Organ recorded and mixed at home August-October 2020 by Faith Coloccia. Mastered by Kevin Ratterman.

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.

Blake DeGraw is an experimental composer and bandleader. His works explore extremes in spatial dispersion and alternative methods of scoring and conduction.

for Orchestra, Slath, and for Viola are from a cycle of works exploring self-conducting scores: for Orchestra is guided by an aural score, to which the performers listen through headphones during performance, while Slath and for Viola are guided by a side-scrolling video/graphic score. Six Vowels and Mensuration Canon for looped voice are vocal experiments in forming and manipulating equal-tempered twelve-tone clusters.

(00:00) for Orchestra
(9:39) Slath
(11:24) for Viola
(19:24) Six Vowels
(27:34) Mensuration Canon for looped voice

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.

S. Eric Scribner was born in Seattle and has also lived in Japan and the San Francisco Bay Area. A long-time fan of experimental music, his own excursions into the field are lengthy catalogue-type pieces, usually graphic scores, for piano, prerecorded electronics and field recordings, and various other instruments.

SoundScroll XII: Visio Tnugdali consists of Three movements for piano played over prerecorded electronics.

Electronic sections: A realization of my graphic score SoundScroll II, here for (processed) sounds recorded in several public buildings in the Seattle area (including Good Shepherd Center) before the pandemic.

Piano sections: A catalogue of noise sounds from the piano, and improvisations on a set of predetermined pitches.

The title recalls an experimental novel I’ve been writing, where the (fictional) protagonist finds himself repeating the story told in a (real) Medieval vision narrative.  There is no actual connection except that the music unfolds in uncertain time and otherworldly space.  The visions, if present, are out of order: we’re all working through our own version of our dream narrative during COVID times.

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.

Seattle-based composer and clarinetist Angelique Poteat has had her music hailed by the New York Times as “engaging, restless.” In addition to being principal clarinetist with the Yakima Symphony, she also performs regularly with the Seattle Modern Orchestra and the Saratoga Orchestra, among others. She is currently the Director of the Seattle Symphony’s Merriman Family Young Composers Workshop.

In this recording, Angelique is joined by Ryan Hare on bassoon and Josiah Boothby on horn, together performing as the trio Artemisia Winds to present a program of original compositions by members of the trio. The pieces cover a broad range of influences, from popular music in some of Angelique’s works, to neo-Romanticism in Ryan’s “Harkening,” and guided improvisation in Josiah’s “Sound, Flight, Touch.” This concert is recorded in the acoustically gratifying Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd.

(0:00) – Melisma by Angelique Poteat
(6:18) – Sound, Flight, Touch by Josiah Boothby
(14:22) – Under the Sun by Angelique Poteat
(22:23) – Tales for Three by Ryan Hare
(31:22) – Harkening by Ryan Hare
(36:54) – You Are Home by Angelique Poteat

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.

Hailed by Gramophone as “an artist of commanding and poetic personality” and described as “staggeringly virtuosic” by The Strad, violist/composer Melia Watras has distinguished herself as one of her instrument’s leading voices. Watras has helped expand the viola repertoire through composing, commissioning, and debuting new works. Compositions written for Watras include Shulamit Ran’s solo viola piece “Perfect Storm,” duos by Garth Knox and Cuong Vu, and a viola concerto by Richard Karpen, which Watras premiered with conductor Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony. As a composer, her works have been performed throughout the United States and in Europe. Her music has been heard on National Public Radio’s Performance Today and can be found on Planet M Records and Sono Luminus. She is currently Professor of Viola at the University of Washington School of Music.

Violinist Michael Jinsoo Lim has been praised by Gramophone for playing with “delicious abandon,” and lauded by the Los Angeles Times as a “conspicuously accomplished champion of contemporary music.” Concertmaster and solo violinist for the internationally acclaimed Pacific Northwest Ballet, Lim is featured as soloist with the company in concertos by Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bach and others, and has toured with PNB to Paris and New York City. For two decades, Lim toured with the Corigliano Quartet, a group he co-founded and with whom he appears on over a dozen albums. Among the final pupils of the legendary Josef Gingold at Indiana University, Lim has served on the faculty of the Banff Centre, taught at Indiana University as a guest professor, and currently serves on the faculty of Cornish College of the Arts.

Melia Watras’s The almond tree duos is a collection of works for violin and viola, or for two violas. The title references the symbol of hope and new beginnings in Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost. In this concert, Michael and Melia perform 12 pieces from this series in the beautiful Chapel at the Good Shepherd Center.

(photo: Michelle Smith-Lewis)

(00:00) The almond tree
(02:32) Ancient memory
(07:48) Cirque à cordes
(13:43) The almond tree 2
(15:56) Nothing to prove
(18:00) Vex
(19:43) Perlucere
(22:21) The almond tree 3
(23:46) An orca, a nuthatch and a cat walk into a bar…
(30:56) Dahlia
(35:40) The almond tree 4
(38:38) Amaranth

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.

Originally scheduled for March 2020, the 35th annual Seattle Improvised Music Festival rises from the ashes of COVID-19 in the form of two streaming video programs on September 27 and October 4.

STREAM TONIGHT’S CONCERT HERE AT 7 PM PACIFIC TIME!

Esteemed visiting artists – clarinetist Ben Goldberg (Berkeley), New York saxophonists Joe McPhee and Sam Newsome – perform featured solo sets, mixed with a small but mighty sampling of Seattle artists representing several generations and a wide range of musical activity.

Presented by Nonsequitur, with generous assistance from 4Culture and the Raynier Institute & Foundation. We are especially grateful to the Royal Room for providing a venue in which to record our video programs.

• Ben Goldberg, clarinet (Berkeley)

• Galin Hebert, drums; Laurel Evers, clarinet

• Sam Newsome, saxophones (Brooklyn)

• Thomas Campbell, drums; Dick Valentine, flutes, sax; Tamara Zenobia, voice

• Joe McPhee, sax (Poughkeepsie)