Bongo Funhouse is a free-improvisation performance ensemble that explores the world of percussion and found sounds. Bongo Funhouse seeks to create a unique performance experience that blends elements of avant-garde and contemporary classical music. Taking influence from many types of music, literature, and nature, Bongo Funhouse travels through a wide variety of sound worlds and moods that at times will have your adrenaline pumping and at other times will have you drifting into an ambient trance. Having met at Indiana University through a shared interest in free improvisation, Bongo Funhouse is composed of Mitchell Beck, Stephen Karukas, and Paul Millette.

Based in Seattle, Mitchell Beck is an active performer, composer, and educator in the Pacific Northwest. He has performed internationally, had his works performed internationally, held the position of Visiting Assistant Professor of Percussion/Music Technology at Boise State University, and founded the Seattle Percussion Academy. Mitchell and Stephen are also co-founders of local percussion collective, Splinter Percussion.

Stephen Karukas is a percussionist and composer living in London, with interests in contemporary and improvised percussion. He also releases electronic music under his solo project, kmodp, as well as collaborations such as Traveling Boyfriend and Collected Works.

Paul Millette is a percussionist based in San Antonio, Texas, where he teaches at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He maintains an active career as an orchestral percussionist, improviser, chamber musician, composer, and educator.

Miles Friday is a composer and sound artist who aims to rethink how we hear and listen, drawing on sound as a site for community-building, critical exchange, and play. He is based in San Antonio, Texas, where he teaches music technology at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Samantha Boshnack reprises her jazz song cycle Uncomfortable Subjects at the Chapel Performance Space. A chamber orchestra of Seattle music luminaries will perform the full cycle live before recording it at London Bridge Studio; the thirteen-piece ensemble, conducted by Joshua Kohl (Degenerate Art Ensemble), features vocals by Grammy-winning singer Johnaye Kendrick (säje).

In 2020, Boshnack invited artist and activist Natasha Marin and Pushcart-winning poet Jane Wong to join her in a series of correspondences about “Uncomfortable Subjects.” Over the ensuing pandemic years the three artists discussed racism, climate crisis, mental health, fascism, and the tensions of making art, finding hope, and staying connected amid social upheaval. Boshnack wove words and themes from these conversations and struggles into a suite of seven compositions, debuting them with a thirteen-piece chamber orchestra at the 2024 Earshot Jazz Festival (co-produced with Nonsequitur and Cornish Music Department).

Johnaye Kendrick (voice) • Joshua Kohl (conducting) • Alex Guy & Alina To (violin) • Heather Bentley (viola) • Erika Fiebig (cello) • Carlos Snaider (guitar/percussion) • Julian Weisman (bass) • Chris Credit (tenor saxophone/bass clarinet) • Sarah Bassingthwaighte (flute) • Bhavani Kotha (oboe) • Greg Campbell (percussion/french horn) • Samantha Boshnack (trumpet/compositions)

This project was supported in part by a grant from 4Culture. Commissioning funds for Uncomfortable Subjects also come from Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music and Mutual Mentorship for Musicians (M³).

(photo: Lisa Hagen Glynn)

The University of Washington School of Music and the student-run Improvised Music Project (IMP) present IMPFest, featuring UW Jazz Studies students and faculty performing with renowned guest artists. The festival opens tonight at the Chapel with two student-led jazz and fusion ensembles:

Budapest, Cuongary is Henry Kelly, alto sax; Rohini Vrajmohan, trumpet; Alex Phelps, trombone; Rishabh McIntosh, trombone; Marko Vidich, guitar; Mira Santa Lucia, keyboard; AJ Marto, bass; Brayson Young, drums.

Riley Tobin Quintet is Riley Tobin, bass; Rory Somers, trumpet; Gus Scharler, tenor; Mira Santa Lucia, piano; Shane Ryan, drums.

Byron Westbrook presents a multichannel version of his acclaimed electroacoustic work, Translucents; Maria Thrän and Afroditi Psarra conduct real-time radio wave manipulations. 

Byron Westbrook
Translucents

First emerging from within New York’s experimental music scene nearly two decades ago and now based in Los Angeles, Byron Westbrook weaves intricate tapestries of sonority bridging the worlds of sound art, installation, avant-garde electronic music and synthesis. He works between immersive installation formats and music performance, utilizing a wide array of sound design, synthesis techniques and field recordings. Westbrook’s practice approaches sound in a structural way, where the architecture of a listening space becomes a key collaborator in his concerts. His work has been presented internationally at major institutions and festivals. Inspired by optical phenomena occurring while viewing the color panels of abstract painter Blinky Palermo, Translucents explores the concept of “audio after-image”. The work presents a series of audio scenes, with the intention of imprinting on the listener’s mind in order to influence the way each consecutive scene appears. It is a play with memory, presence, and with time, experimenting with dynamics between perceiving presence in the space where one is listening vs the perception of an external space or place. For this concert, Translucents is presented in an expanded immersive form that differs from its published release. “…his most mesmerizing album to date – a set of electroacoustic pieces that advances the rough blueprints laid out by legends like Maryanne Amacher, Bernard Parmegiani and Luc Ferrari…if you’re at all interested in electroacoustic music, ‘Translucents’ is just about as good as it gets.” – Boomkat

Maria Thrän and Afroditi Psarra
Live signals, live bodies (in conversation)

Through different embodied antenna systems — a swinging wire tuned to the electromagnetic field, and diy/handheld/wearable antennas — we receive and process transmissions at the Hertzian spectrum in real time. Our performance is a practice of co-tuning, interference, and spatial resonance; an improvisation with invisible fields — received through software-defined radios, and processed through live electronics and SuperCollider. Architecture, bodies, machines, and noise converge in a listening practice that resists control and invites uncertainty. 

Maria Thrän is a Berlin- and Seattle-based interdisciplinary artist, performer, and Ph.D. researcher in the University of Washington’s DXARTS program. Their immersive kinetic installations and performances integrate mechatronics, spatial sound synthesis, light, and video to explore rhythm, memory, and more-than-human communication. By transforming exhibition spaces into responsive perceptual systems, Thrän invites audiences to resonate with their own ecological entanglements and to consider how bodies, voices, and technologies can operate as instruments of memory, protest, care, and resistance. Their research-driven practice examines ecological interdependence, technological agency, and the poetics of signal and noise through speculative approaches to preservation. Thrän’s work has been presented internationally in solo and group exhibitions and developed through residencies around the globe.

Afroditi Psarra’s research focuses on the interweaving of art and science through the creation of artifacts with a critical lens. She sees the praxis of crafting technological artifacts as an act of resistance against black box systems. One that contains embodied knowledge and carries with it oral histories of intergenerational practices. One that can transcend cultural and ethnic boundaries, and can be transmitted through direct engagement with materials. Likewise, she sees the use of electronics, open software and hardware, and the act of creating collectively as means of cultivating digital commons that have the potential to empower individuals through shared knowledge. She believes that the ability to craft your own technology is a powerful tool for world building, one that enables you to speculate about alternative presents and plausible futures.

Sunik Kim is a musician, writer and filmmaker currently based in Los Angeles. Their recent work attempts to unfold problems of perceptual and temporal distortion through computer-generated sound. Their writing on subjects ranging from Korean communism to Conlon Nancarrow has been featured in The Wire Magazine, Pitchfork, and elsewhere. Their latest CD, Formenverwandler, was released on London-based label Feedback Moves in 2025. Tonight they will present Fragments from EVANESCENT SEQUENCE, in which music counts in other music, approximates an infinitesimal limit, and continues counting. Accompanied by a new long form essay on class struggle and cognition, to be distributed in-person.

Matt Carlson is a composer, synthesist, and pianist known for his work as Golden Retriever with Jonathan Sielaff. His work is influenced by the American experimental tradition, minimalism, electronic abstraction, and jazz. He is interested in music’s capacity to articulate ideas that have no equivalent in other forms or mediums. For this concert he will be performing a new composition for piano and electronics, emerging from a process of improvisation over shifting harmonic fields derived from layered string textures. Gradually, these materials coalesce into a set of interwoven themes, where acoustic piano gestures are refracted through electro-acoustic transformations, blurring the boundary between sampled ensemble and synthesized sound. The result is a work that balances structural clarity with textural ambiguity—at once intimate and expansive—revealing a more overtly lyrical and elegiac dimension than much of the artist’s recent output, while maintaining a continuity with the sensibility of earlier projects.

Curated by RM Francis for Nonsequitur’s NonSeq series.

Doors open 7:30; Performance starts 8 PM sharp.

bloodsugar is an event series full of connection & desire, an experiment in community through sound and movement that showcases multidisciplinary artists while prioritizing quality and accessibility. in each event, the audience is able to witness the incredible talents & artistic practices blooming within our community. when we see dance, music, & literature highlighted individually, it is impactful — but when we use different artistic mediums to highlight each other, it creates an experience only attainable when you allow multiple genres to heighten each other. Seattle overflows with talent in every inch of our community, from the harsh noise musicians to the contemporary dancers to the confessional poets, etc., and we are stronger when we play into each other’s unique abilities.

Till the Teeth is an interdisciplinary art collective founded by Jonathan Rodriguez and Sandesh Nagaraj. Grounded in the cultural and contested landscapes of the U.S.-Mexico border and southern India, Till the Teeth serves as a lens for framing sonic and spatial ecologies, using improvisation, ritual, and metamorphosis as central methodologies. Their practice embraces a rasquachismo ethic — making do with available resources — alongside experimental approaches that interrogate the boundaries of music, performance, and art-making. By activating found objects, field recordings, and re-imagined instruments, Till the Teeth explores sound as an unpredictable, ephemeral, and communal medium for resistance and renewal

Alethea is a Seattle-based dance artist and educator. Community, sensuality, care, effort and collaboration are central tenets of her creative work with dance partners human, object and sonic. She performs her own improvised, choreographed and installation-based works in collaboration with multidisciplinary artists in Seattle and nationally. Recurrent collaborators include Hannah Simmons, Dance Undercurrent, Adele Nickel, Rachael Lincoln, maia melene d’urfé and others. Her recent works have been supported by 4Culture, City of Seattle, the Kreielsheimer Foundation, Bellingham Repertory Dance, Cornish College of the Arts, and Sam Houston State University. Alethea is Co-Founder and Teaching Artist for Ballet Rituals, a Seattle-based community practice initiative. She additionally teaches community floorwork classes with Dance Undercurrent, and is is a Teacher as well as the Director of Training and Teacher Relations with Dance Church.®

maia melene d’urfé is a dancer and choreographer who creates movement as an expression of their sensations, convictions, and doubts. They dance with Seattle contemporary dance and House communities and their choreography has been presented internationally in Mexico City and Almada, Portugal, nationally in New York City, North Carolina, Maine, and in Seattle through Velocity Dance Center, Amy O’Neal, eXit Space, Seattle International Dance Festival, and their own independent productions. They find their voice through quality of movement, their language through physical facility, and flow through melody and rhythm, all to investigate facets of the human condition and how we respond to change within the self, our relationships, and wider culture.

Lydia Jewel Gerard is a Tacoma-based artist specializing in immersive ink painting and dance. As both a performer and visual artist Gerard is deeply interested in the creation of immersive environments. She draws inspiration from the spaces she works in, their proportions and energies influencing the ways her work is presented. Over the last few years, this interest in space has moved Gerard into working on a larger and larger scale. Her work often evokes feelings of being transported or looking into another world, one where ideas are undefined and malleable. Gerard hopes that her viewers will find in her work a space to examine their own thoughts and feelings with gentleness and empathy

Birdy Adler (they/them) was born in Colorado and began their dance training at the age of three at Canyon Concert Ballet. During high school, they developed a special interest in contemporary styles and attended summer intensives with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Alonzo King LINES Ballet, NW Dance Project, and Countertechnique. In 2021, they moved to Israel to study in the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company’s 10-Month Dance Journey Program, performing works by Rami Be’er and Mats Ek. In June 2022, they joined Kibbutz’s main company as an apprentice under Be’er’s direction. In 2023, they relocated to Seattle and joined Spectrum Dance Theater under the direction of Donald Byrd. In fall 2024, they performed with the Chamber Dance Company at the University of Washington. In spring 2025, they co-founded the duo Now That We’re Alone and premiered their first full-length show that July. They are currently in their third season with Spectrum. Keep up with their work @wigglyboy420.

Tshedzom is a Tibetan-American body-based artist working between dance, theater, durational performance, installation, and music. Her work has been presented by The Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, Marina Abramović Institute, On the Boards, Velocity Dance Center, CO-, Northwest Film Forum, Yakpo Collective, and Tibet Film Festival. She has performed with artists and companies including Alice Gosti, Fox Whitney, Sara Markovic, Boston Early Music Festival, The Merce Cunningham Trust, and HYBRIDMOTION Dance Theatre.

Lou Chow holds a BA in Dance and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Washington. Tracing transnational translations of culture, they untangle histories of coloniality to bring embodied knowledge to the surface of artistic practice. Researching the intersections of dance, community, care, and health, they cultivate community amongst Queer BIPOC populations. Working in mediums like dance, textiles, painting, photography, and writing, they endlessly seek new ways to expand their artistic practice. Aiming to pour knowledge back into their local communities to make the arts accessible to all. In 2025, they received the Husky 100 and Herring Phelps Scholarly Activism Award. Lou currently writes for Seattle Dances and teaches dance to kids and adults at the Miller and Montelake Community Centers.

raised in tennessee but rooted in seattle, sullivan forderhase works in the spine of poetry through word and movement. they are interested in desire, shame, dream spaces, the knife of grief, and the resistance of joy. they choose the question over the answer every time, allowing curiosity and tenderness to move them. you can connect with them on social media via @softservesully

a multi-disciplinary artist based in the northwest, rawivati is a forest of sound personified — the unknown made joyous and familiar.

A first-time convergence of six of Seattle’s most explorative improvisers and sound makers:

Alex Guy: violin; Neil Welch: saxophones; Rocky Martin: drums and percussion; Stephanie Richards: trumpet; James Falzone: clarinet, piano; Jessica Lurie: saxophones and clarinets

Carrie DeCunzo Mirande is a musician and multi-disciplinary artist who works in performance, video, installation, theater, and sound. She started making computer music in 2014 and over the last decade has released on Discreet Music, Hold Tapes, No Rent Records, and her own imprint, KSX Solutions. She received her MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College. Carrie will share music from her recent LP, My Shadow, released early this year on Discreet Music (Sweden). My Shadow was inspired by Carrie’s failed attempt to set the Book of Luke to music and deals with the beauty and frustration of imperfect expression. She will also debut music from Infinite Bliss, her forthcoming record of intimate songs and abstract electronics created over the past six years. 

Lebanese-American artist Nour Mobarak (b. 1985, Cairo, Egypt) lives and works between Bainbridge Island and Athens, Greece. Mobarak excavates violence and desire in organic and societal bodies – the compulsions, and glitches in a person or nation state. Her body and body of work acts, in voice, sculpture, sound, performance, writing and video, as one hybrid part under current geopolitical conditions. Her works have been shown at  the Museum of Modern Art, NY (2024-2025); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2024-2025); Miguel Abreu Gallery, NY (2025, 2021, 2019); Sylvia Kouvali, London and Piraeus, (2023, 2017); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge(2022); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2023). Mobarak’s work is currently included in both the 2026 Whitney Biennial, New York, and In Interludes and Transitions: the 2026 Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale in Saudia Arabia. She has performed at Western Front, Vancouver; the Hammer Museum, LA; Cafe OTO, London; Renaissance Society, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, SD; and elsewhere. Her music has been released by Recital (Los Angeles), Cafe Oto’s TakuRoku (London), and Ultra Eczema (Antwerp), and is included in the Whitney Museum Library’s Special Collections.

Curated by RM Francis for Nonsequitur’s NonSeq series.

A one-night-only live recording for The Westerlies’ Songbook EP series. Night 2 of Westerlies Fest 2026 features a live recording session at the Chapel, featuring brand new compositions from the group.

The Westerlies, “an arty quartet…mixing ideas from jazz, new classical, and Appalachian folk” (The New York Times), hold a singular space in modern music. From Carnegie Hall to Coachella, the GRAMMY-nominated quartet has upended presumptions of the brass tradition to create music that is “folk-like and composerly, lovely and intellectually rigorous” (NPR Music).

Comprising Riley Mulherkar and Chloe Rowlands on trumpet and Andy Clausen and Addison Maye-Saxon on trombone, the ensemble has relentlessly composed, arranged, adapted, recorded, and toured over the past fifteen years with the precision of a string quartet, the audacity of a rock band, and the charm of a family sing-along. Across ten critically acclaimed albums, The Westerlies have earned “a unique reputation for exploring the emotional textures of American music” (DownBeat), championing living composers and collaborators including Caroline Shaw, Nico Muhly, Conrad Tao, Bill Frisell, Wayne Horvitz, and Robin Holcomb.

(Photo: Kevin Condon)

Join The Sound Ensemble as they present beautiful recently composed works to celebrate ten incredible years of music making! Returning to where we started, the Chapel, we will perform a favorite oldie from our previous programs, a new composition for our Local Composer Fanfare Competition and a beautiful song cycle honoring the transformative history of contemporary music. You won’t want to miss out on this incredible performance and a chance to celebrate our decade of making music together.

Program:

A Wisdom Seldom Seen (6’) Sarah Bassingthwaighte
Life Must Go On (4’) Eldar Hudiyev
Moments Colorés (18’) Faye Chiao

       Intermission

Chamber Symphony (20’) Daron Hagen