The SPU perform in collaboration with clarinetist James Falzone in an evening of field recordings and wind instruments.

The Seattle Phonographers Union have been improvising solely with unprocessed field recordings since 2002. As a group, we will continue to explore using this incredibly vast resource of field recordings as our means of expression. This event is an attempt to explore how we, as a unit, can collaborate with other entities while maintaining our approach. In that spirit, we have invited noted clarinetist James Falzone to join us for an evening of improvised sounds. The Phonographers will set up smaller, localized sound systems throughout the space, creating a rich tapestry of sounds that will allow Falzone to wander through the space and respond.

James Falzone is a clarinetist, composer, and improviser whose work in the jazz and creative music scenes has won him international acclaim. A veteran contemporary music lecturer and clinician, as well as an award-winning composer who has been commissioned by chamber ensembles, dance companies, choirs, and symphony orchestras around the globe, Falzone leads his own ensembles (Allos Musica and The Renga Ensemble), and has released a series of critically-acclaimed recordings on Allos Documents, the label he founded in 2000.

Triptet is a meeting of minds and spontaneous electrical impulses between Michael Monhart (saxophones and percussion), Tom Baker (guitars and effects), and Greg Campbell (percussion and cheap electronics).

Anne La Berge’s passion for the extremes in both composed and improvised music has led her to storytelling and sound art as her sources of musical inspiration. Her music gathers the elements on which her reputation is based: ferocious and far-reaching virtuosity, microtonal textures and melodies, and her unique array of percussive flute techniques, all combined with interactive electronic processing and text.

This show will bring together these musicians as a new quartet exploring the liminal space of each other’s sound and the amazing space of the Chapel.

Join us for post-solstice solace in the long night by way of a solo performance by A.F. Jones, songs of death and love from Rachel LeBlanc, and a new work for chamber ensemble by Noel Kennon, featuring Neil Welch (saxophones), Amelia Coulter (alto trombone), and Dave Abramson (percussion).

A. F. Jones (Dallas, TX, USA, 1971) is a Washington-based audio engineer, composer, and performing musician. He has spent collective years underwater analyzing, studying and monitoring the acoustic environment of the world’s oceans. This critical analysis and experience greatly influenced his concepts of music and archival methodology. He has engineered audio and advised for numerous regional and international musicians and performing ensembles as Chief Mastering Engineer at Laminal Audio, which specializes in audio mastering, in addition to sound design and post audio for film. He also runs the Marginal Frequency performance series and record label of the same name.

A former booking agent and improv musician, Rachel LeBlanc has spent the last few years coming into her own as a vocal-based composer under the alias Blessed Blood, as well as a practiced artist in Matriarch and as RN White. To hone her voice and to study folk techniques, she’s been utilizing old traditionals. For tonight’s special appearance, LeBlanc will treat us to a handful of these pieces a capella.

Noel Kennon is a violist, dishwasher, record collector, instrument builder and composer living in Seattle.

Young Scientist, Seattle’s original electronic music group, formed in the 1970’s, reunites for an evening of immersive modular and computer based electronic music ambience — with Marc Barreca, celebrating the release of his latest CD, From the Gray and the Green.

Marc Barreca, veteran Seattle electronic music composer, will be performing electro-acoustic loop-based compositions with modular synthesizer, MIDI keyboards and computer. He has been making electronic music in Seattle since the mid-1970s, releasing a number of projects over the years on the Hawaii-based Palace of Lights label. His most recent releases include the solo CDs From the Gray and the Green, Shadow Aesthetics, and a vinyl collaboration with K. Leimer, Chains of Being on the Spanish label, Abstrakce Records.

Young Scientist was formed in Seattle in the mid-1970’s by James Husted, Roland Barker and Marc Barreca, performing for several years with analog synths, tape loops and keyboards. Following re-releases of 1970s material on the German labels Bureau B and Vinyl on Demand, the group has reunited for a recording project with Marc and James joining forces for this performance of evolving, transportive electronics.

Dangerknife is Seattle based band made up by Nico Sophiea (somesurprises) and Brad Rouda (Leviathan Worship Service) with special guests often sitting in. Focusing primarily on providing improvised soundtracks for silent and/or short films in a live and unsettling setting. Often focusing on the silent films of the early and mid 1920’s, we have decided to return to our roots of playing to our homemade short films. These shorts are comprised of painted and stressed out film/slides and ambient footage showing the slow passing of time. Please join us for an evening that is sure to boggle the minds of venture capitalists.

Three rabid sonic explorers join forces for a night of electricity fueled deep dives to power wash your nervous system for the coming of the new year.

Don McGreevy is a Totalist-minimalist, American-Primitivist composer and multi-instrumentalist who will be performing select pieces from his forthcoming new album INSOUCIANCE using guitars, amplifiers, effects, looping devices, and percussion. Don has worked with drone legends Earth and psychedelic mayhem purveyors The Master Musicians of Bukkake. His SULPHURIC ensembles have performed in varying capacities ranging from duos to small orchestras.

SKERIK will be performing a new solo sax piece with electronics, inspired by the Six Marimba compositions of Steve Reich and the 1977 Dickie Landry album 15 Saxophones. Instead of a tape-based stereo performance, SKERIK will utilize digital delays and a quad surround speaker set up to achieve the different delay time settings.

Crystal Beth uses wailing vocals, amplified clarinet, beat-boxing and electronics to weave a sonic universe all her own. This will be an evening of improvised/intuited aural rituals that ricochet between meditation and a full body purge.

Longtime avant garde jazz conceptualist Lu Evers branches out into word art, presenting a performance piece centered around a poetry reading format. The willowy and stoic Jo Anderson is featured as the reader on several pieces, with Keith Eisenbrey performing piano support composed by Evers, who also picks up the clarinet here and there, and presents the pieces he reads with a variety of characters. Humor, incisive criticism, surreal imagery and dark drama etch the landscape in this engaging new work.

Doors at 7 PM; Performance at 7:30 sharp.

The final installment in 2019’s Finnegans Wake series is also this year’s premiere, Part I, Chapter 6. In the form of a quiz of 12 questions and answers, James Joyce also described Chapter 6 as a picture gallery of the novel’s characters.

Composer Neal Kosaly-Meyer’s ongoing Finnegans Wake project is an unprecedented undertaking: to commit to memory and perform all of James Joyce’s final novel, one chapter per year over seventeen years, with acute attention to the work’s musical detail. Meticulous attention has also been given to the presentation, including liturgical and theatrical elements, and unique approaches to lighting and sound, all deeply informed by the singular language and vision of Finnegans Wake. The striking personality of the Chapel Performance Space itself provides a perfect, and quite Joycean, setting for these performances.

Excerpt from Mexico City Joyce Symposium performance:

Read an article by Charles Mudede in the Stranger.

An evening of sustained sounds and silence over long durations. This new evening length work ‘dreams of willows and thresholds’ for viola and double bass uses the harmonic series a foundational element of its structure. The music is concerned with implementing rational structures that correspond to actual phenomenon found (observed) in natural (actual) sounds in search for new (lost) shapes , places , and resonant fluctuations that are often overlooked . . This interaction with tone is meant to quiet and sober the mind; both rational structure and intuitive process . .

The music will be presented in 2 parts .

{ dreams:

willows – viola / double bass

(intermission)

thresholds – viola / double bass

}

Presented and written by Noel Kennon, joined by John Teske.

Noel Kennon is a violist, dishwasher, record collector, instrument builder and composer living in Seattle, WA.

These three multi-faceted artists draw equally on mainstream and outside, giving birth to the new:
Kathy Moore is a go-to guitarist ranging from rock to funk to jazz and beyond. She is a studio musician, arranger, multi-instrumentalist and teacher who performs in many theater projects, and local bands: Thaddeus Turner (Maktub), Mike McCready (Pearl Jam, Mad Season, Flight To Mars), the band Brad, Crystal Beth and the Boom Boom Band, Shawn Smith, Kim Virant, Wayne Horvitz to name a few. In her solo incarnation,, she brings experiments in song using electronics, guitar and voice.

Ben McAllister’s Guitar Cult: Not a Fripp or Branca situation: Guitars have mass and volume in Ben McAllister’s compositions for the Guitar Cult. They are utterly unique, indisputably cutting edge and most importantly — effective.

Crystal Beth uses wailing vocals, amplified clarinet, beat-boxing and electronics to weave a sonic universe all her own. She has been described as “world music from an imaginary planet..quite compelling & magical” (Seattle Times), ”a supremely versatile and virtuosic maverick” (The Stranger), and “one of the most fearless and innovative musicians in the city…” (Earshot Jazz). Known for crafting aural rituals that encompass industrial chants, alien disco breaks, heart gushings, and robot love songs, Crystal Beth redefines the possibilities of the voice and clarinet in tight experimental pop songs and undulating, cathartic noise cries.