THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO SNOW. STAY TUNED FOR UPDATES ON THE REST OF TODAY’S SCHEDULED EVENTS. WE ARE NOT READY TO CANCEL EVERYTHING YET AND WILL BE MAKING DECISIONS AS THE DAY GOES ON.

Presented as part of the 34th Seattle Improvised Music Festival.

Odeya Nini is a Los Angeles-based experimental vocalist and composer with work spanning solo voice to chamber music and collages of musique concrète. As a vocalist she is devoted to redefining vocal interpretation and song through an exploration of extended vocal techniques, and how they resonate with the physical body’s language and space.

The Voice is an instrument that radiates from the soul, resonates in the body, and is pure energy and touch. Harnessing the energy of the Voice is a strength that is felt deep within ourselves and heard loudly outside of ourselves.

This two-hour workshop at the Good Shepherd Center Chapel in Wallingford is dedicated to Vocal Expression, sensing the voice, feeling and understanding the physicality of sound, freeing our minds of preconceived ideas of song, and realizing the transformational healing effects we have on ourselves and others when we use our voice with intention and love. Both through introspective work and outward playfulness, we will explore the voice as an instrument that radiates from the imagination, body and movement, not limited to conventions of language, but rather able to convey myriad forms of communication.

Come play, shift, listen, explore and Free The Voice!

To assure your place in this workshop, pre-registration is strongly suggested – please contact Odeya directly to register.

Odeya Nini has collaborated extensively with dancers, visual artists, filmmakers and theater directors as both a composer and soloist and has worked with and appeared in works by artists and ensembles such as Meredith Monk, Butch Morris, Lucy & Jorge Orta, wild Up and The Industry. Her work has been presented at venues and festivals across the US and internationally, such as The Hammer Museum, REDCAT, Joyce Soho, MONA and Art Basel Miami, from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv, Australia, Mongolia, Madagascar and Vietnam. Odeya holds a BFA from the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music and an MFA in composition from California Institute of the Arts. She has lectured on contemporary vocal techniques and composition at the university level and leads workshops exploring the creative and healing qualities of voice and movement.

UPDATE: Tonight’s SIMF show at the Chapel will go on, but starting at 7 PM instead of 8, so folks can get home before things ice over. Come on out, brave souls!

Taking place Feb. 6 – 10, the Seattle Improvised Music Festival (SIMF) is the longest-running festival in the US dedicated solely to music that is completely improvised. This is truly “music of the moment,” allowing artists from diverse musical backgrounds to meet in an atmosphere of spontaneity, intuition, playfulness, and discovery. See the complete festival schedule here.

Tonight:

duo: Haley Freedlund, trombone + Tom Varner, horn
duo: Andria Nicodemou, vibes + Marc Seales, piano
trio: Kenny Mandell, sax + Kelsey Mines, bass + Odeya Nini, vox/movement
featured solo + ?: CK Barlow, electronics (photo: Karen Milling)

David Watson is an experimental guitarist, bagpiper, improviser and composer. Originally from New Zealand, he has lived and worked in New York City since 1987. As a guitarist he has been featured in John Zorn’s Cobra, and in groups with Ikue Mori, Christian Marclay, Zeena Parkins, Fred Lonberg-Holm, and Tipple. In the early 90’s he added Highland bagpipes. He has worked to create a new vocabulary for the instrument, pushing the limits of space, sound and timbre. Phill Niblock has created the piece Bag, using Watson’s pipe sounds as source material, and performed it many times internationally. Watson founded and organizes the music performance series WOrK, which is predicated on exploring what “experimental” means today and has presented over fifty concerts since 2015.

John Krausbauer is a composer/multi-instrumentalist/improviser currently living in Oakland. A long time purveyor of the ur-drone and trance-psychedelia, his work involves audio transmissions for TOTAL/immersive sensory experience. Transcendence through repetition, duration, alternate tunings, maximum volumes, and (often) stroboscopic lighting. His current music projects include the Ecstatic Music Band (a 10+ member-collective of strings players); solo music for voice, violin, and synth; his collaboration with partner, Kaori Suzuki, with bells, voices, strings, tape; the Minimalist psych-punk group Night Collectors; his systems-based phase compositions; and ongoing collaborations with the Kentuckian steel bodied resonator guitar player, R. Keenan Lawler, NYC bagpipe player, David Watson, and Tokyo based guitarist, Tetuzi Akiyama.

Seattle guitarist Bill Horist is an improviser/composer/performer in a wide array of genres including rock, jazz, contemporary chamber, avant-garde, folk, new music and several subgenres within each. He has appeared on over 100 recordings and has performed hundreds of concerts throughout North and Central America, Europe, and Japan. Over the past two decades, Bill has collaborated with a long list of notable musicians from around the world. He has toured and recorded with a number of bands including Master Musicians of Bukkake, Six Organs of Admittance, Kinski, Jessica Lurie, Nobodaddy, Phineas Gage, Axolotl, UnFolkUs, Zahir, Tablet, Nervewheel, Ghidra, Rollerball and the Paul Rucker Ensemble in addition to extensive solo activity.

Amelia Coulter plays the alto trombone. She works mainly with alternative techniques, including modified/prepared trombones and vocal-, text-, location-, and object-oriented performance, with a focus on the Gregorian chant tradition. She has: a bachelor of music from Cornish College of the Arts, and a cat named Hippo.

Long-time musical partners Wayne Horvitz and Sara Schoenbeck (WHSS Duo) perform compositions and improvisations for bassoon, piano and electronics, exploring music from the obscure to the sublime. Plus special guests Ray Larsen and Abbey Blackwell.

Sara Schoenbeck (bassoon) and Wayne Horvitz (piano, electronics) first met as performers at the Company-style improvisation festival Time Flies in Vancouver B.C. in 2000. They have been frequent collaborators ever since in the Gravitas Quartet, Some Places Are Forever Afternoon, and numerous improvised collectives and performances. They are dedicating their long-time collaboration to duo spaces of original music and improvisation. A study of the crossroads where texture and extended technique meet with and support the expression of melody and song.

Engaging in collective improvisation using only unprocessed field recordings, the Seattle Phonographers Union explores the ways in which we recognize, differentiate, map and navigate our sonic environment. Our intent is to move beyond habitual experience of sound and uncover what is foreign in the familiar and familiar about the foreign; to explore what we hear and relearn what we know. Some sounds will be familiar; others less so. Both novel and familiar sounds are juxtaposed in ways unique to each event. Our intent is to investigate and enrich both our intuitive and analytical relationship with sound. The goal is not to excite, confuse or entertain per se, but to attend to the world, which is much more detailed and diverse than any one person’s perception of it.

Sacramento-based free-improv banjoist Mike Marlin returns to Seattle to team up with co-
conspirators in a series of duets, trios, and ensemble with music to set a backfire against the raging inferno of ridiculosophy and abandonment of reason.

Mike Marlin approaches the banjo as a melodic, atonal, and percussive instrument to be shaken, stirred, beaten, plucked, and even strummed. With an ear toward sonic exploration and a nod to his grandfather Ted Marlin, who played tenor banjo in swing bands in the 1920s and 30s, Mike has adopted the banjo and focused primarily on free improvisation, including Dubious Duo, a 35 year collaboration with Boston trumpeter Eric Dahlman.

In Seattle from 1990 to 2005 Mike played solo and in a variety of settings and groups such as Plutopolis (with Angelina Baldoz, Jeph Jerman, and the recently departed Paul Hoskin) and Pulp Ensemble (with Jim Knodle, Troy Grugett, Jesse Canterbury, Mark Collins, and Bob Rees). In 1997 Mike co-founded The Tentacle magazine and with his cohorts provided a free, journalistic outlet for the Pacific Northwest creative music scene for many years. Mike has also performed with his wife Debra Scott as folk duo Haggis’ Revenge and as free improv duo Sympathetic Toe.

This evening will feature duets, trios, and an ensemble piece to round out the set of loosely
constructed and completely free improvisations. The theme will be a sonic purge to exorcise demons ideally leading to a positive, temporal shifting of civic space. The lineup includes Mike on banjo and prepared objects, Eric Dahlman and Jim Knodle on trumpets, Tari Nelson-Zagar on violin, Keith Eisenbrey on piano, Debra Scott on voice, Carl Juarez on guitar and miscellaneous percussion.

The Sound Ensemble is committing itself to bringing new and vibrant music to you. In the orchestral world, only about 300 pieces are regularly performed, compared to the thousands that have been composed, not to mention the abundance of sumptuous and engaging pieces being written as we speak. We have committed ourselves to include music from underrepresented composers, such as women and people of color, in all of our programs. As a celebration of this, we are presenting an entire program of music by women of our region – Angelique Poteat’s Morning at the Sound, Kaley Lane Eaton’s Sacred Geometry, Carly Ann Worden’s San Juan Sinfonietta, and a world premiere by our very own Sarah Bassingthwaighte!

Reviled for his “shapeless sonic tinkering” by the Los Angeles Times, Matt Ingalls is a composer, clarinetist, concert producer, and computer music programmer based in Oakland. Often incorporating elements of improvisation, his music is heavily influenced by his long involvement in computer music. His composerly solo improvisations explore extended clarinet techniques that interact with the acoustic space, often as combination tones. Matt is the founder and co-director of sfSound, a new music series, ensemble, and internet radio station devoted to new ideas and traditions of experimental music, performance art, live electronic music, Bay Area composition, and the various facets of contemporary improvisation.

Greg Kelley has performed throughout North America, Europe, Japan, Argentina & Mexico at numerous festivals, in clubs, outdoors, in living rooms, in a bank, and at least once on a vibrating floor. He has collaborated with a number of musicians across the globe performing experimental music, free jazz and noise, appearing on over 100 recordings in the process. He constantly seeks to push the boundaries of the trumpet and of “music.”

FHTAGN is an experimental chamber ensemble started by Blake DeGraw in 2015. Since its inception, the group’s amorphous lineup has been joined by over 70 musicians from a wide variety of musical backgrounds. Primarily employing non-traditional means of scoring and conduction, FHTAGN has performed as a string orchestra, surround-sound choir, saxophone quartet, and many other formats.

“The combined sound of [FHTAGN] could be described as if Charles Ives had access to psychedelic mind-altering substances.” – Icareifyoulisten.com

FHTAGN will present two original works for electric guitar ensemble: Study I for Strings & Low Frequency, and The Eternal for Ten Guitars.

Driftwood Orchestra is a collective of artists who create improvised music using modified & amplified pieces of driftwood gathered from the Cascade Mountains. Driftwood Orchestra is not concerned with perfection or standards of artistic success. Driftwood Orchestra is interested in creating a way to communicate with the forest with the intent to somehow, someday, apologize.

Live visuals by Citrus Sheila.

re•create percussion was founded by Rebekah Ko and Storm Benjamin. Rebekah is a virtuosic marimbist originating from LA. Her artistic vision is highlighted by a steadfast commitment to high quality, artful music. Storm Benjamin is a native of Washington who’s commitments lie in using percussion music to enrich the culture of the Northwest. This performance is an exercise within the collective’s artistic sensibilities and ideas, using prepared piano, marimba, vibraphone, and triangle. Storm and Rebekah will be collaborating with Ben Marx and Kevin Blanquies. The musics of Ben Marx are simple rhythmic improvisations on percussion instruments that will mingle with pre-determined electronic sample-base sounds (mostly from symphony orchestra source material) to create unique and varied soundscapes. Also featured is Toccata, a virtuosic piece written for vibraphone and marimba by Anders Koppel.