NonSeq: Nakatani Gong Orchestra

Tatsuya Nakatani is a creative artist/percussionist originally from Osaka, Japan who has released over sixty recordings in North America and Europe. Residing in the USA since 1994, he has performed countless solo percussion concerts and has collaborated with hundreds of artists in international music festivals, university concert halls, art museums and galleries.

The Nakatani Gong Orchestra (NGO) is a large ensemble touring contemporary sound art project. Local musicians are trained in Nakatani’s technique for playing his adapted bowed Gong, and he conducts them in a performance of his original composition. In the last decade, the NGO has performed hundreds of concerts involving thousands of participants around the world in the creation of these transformative sound works. For each unique performance, participating NGO players (musicians) are selected by a local presenter. Nakatani gives a specialized rehearsal to the players in preparation for the performance. There is no expectation of previous experience playing a gong. Nakatani instructs the players in his unique techniques for bowing the gong and following his method of conducting. The ensemble tonight will consist of 16 people, including South Seattle College students and other community members.

Tatsuya Nakatani will open the show with a set of solo percussion improvisation.

Curated by Paul Kikuchi for Nonsequitur‘s NonSeq series.

Earshot: Sheridan Riley

Sponsored by BECU. Welcomed by 91.3 KBCS.

The first of three 2023 Earshot Jazz Festival Commission artists, Sheridan Riley is poised to make a difference on the local jazz scene. Not one to be limited by boundaries, Riley at a young age was inspired by the likes of Karen Carpenter, Led Zeppelin, the Jackson Five, ABBA, the Beatles, Deerhoof, Miles Davis and Elvin Jones. After high school they played as often as they could, performing in contexts ranging from touring indie rock acts, country bar bands, and the Long Beach community college swing band. As Riley notes “I was curious to experience music through as many lenses as possible.” More recently, Riley has performed in the bands ALVVAYS, a Juno Award-winning indie alternative band from Canada, L.A.–based band Dante Elephante and Seattle’s Zen Mother, as well as a duo project with trumpeter Ahamefule Oluo called Insect Revenge, and a solo project called Peg. A frequent participant in local avant-music series Racer Sessions, Riley has also collaborated with many artists including Lori Goldston, Wayne Horvitz, Haley Freedlund, Neil Welch, Cassandra Jenkins, Hand Habits, and Abbey Blackwell among others. Their most recent release was Participant (2022).

For this festival commission Riley explains, ”I am interested in exploring the sensation of memory and how it informs the way people move through their lives. For this commission, I would like to compose a durational piece with an emphasis on rhythmic cycles and and polyrhythm – sonic patterns which can serve as potent analogies for how people experience beginnings and endings. The final piece will take the form of a sonic collage, intended to prompt the listener to feel connected to their personal experience and invite questions of how their narrative might extend outward beyond the scope of the individual self.” Riley’s ensemble will include Mason Lynass (electronics), Ronan Delisle (guitar), James Falzone (clarinet), Marina Christopher (bass), and Wayne Horvitz (piano).

**Earshot Jazz COVID-19 Policy: Earshot recommends that all ticket holders be vaccinated. Policy subject to change. Full COVID policy here.

Sheridan Riley photo by Daniel Sheehan

Nat Evans & Joey Largent: Music from Dreams

Joey Largent will share an excerpt from the most recent version of his ongoing semi-improvised work for reed organ and voice, It Was in Dreams That We Knew Each Other. The current version features the recent addition of a new just intonation tuning paired with an extended field recording from the Washington Coast. The work weaves through gently drifting long tones amidst variations of emotional texture explored with the voice in a hybrid of Ragas Bhairavi and Darbari Kanada. Joey has been developing and revising this piece slowly since its inception in 2018.

A Dictation of Karmic Energy arose from a recurring dream Evans had. In this dream, a friendly light surrounded him and he would begin to hear some tones. As he continued to have the dream he began writing notes down whenever the dream showed up. Our consciousness is a stream of all experiences we’ve had in our lives – the world experiencing us and us experiencing the world – a vastness, a net, beyond comprehension. In the end, recording the notes from the dream is a sort of crude grasping at, and a dictation, of karmic energy. A field recording from Evans’ farm at dawn is the thread through all the music in the piece. Pianist Melanie Carter and percussionist Rebekah Ko will join Evans in this performance.

Joey Largent’s work focuses on exploring long-duration compositions and improvisations for acoustic ensembles and solo performance. Beyond generating music alone, his goal is to offer a space for introspection, releasing from attachment, beauty, and connection. Through site-specific work and field recording, he seeks to connect daily experience more profoundly with the impermanent harmony of the natural world. He has collaborated with numerous dancers, musicians, and interdisciplinary artists over the years, and has studied North Indian Classical singing with several disciples of Pandit Pran Nath, primarily Michael Harrison and Rose Okada.

Nat Evans is a composer and artist based in Seattle. His interdisciplinary works range from site-specific events and installations to chamber music, scores for dance and film, conceptual works based in ecology and social practice, to meditations on everyday life. His work is regularly presented across the United States, as well as internationally. Evans has received numerous commissions including The Henry, Odeon Quartet, San Francisco MOMA, Seattle Art Museum, The City of Tomorrow, Portland Cello Project, ALL RISE, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, among others. Works and events by Evans have been featured on WNYC’s New Sounds and BBC3, as well as in LA Weekly, WIRED, The New York Times, VICE, Tiny Mix Tapes, The Believer and numerous other publications. His work has appeared at galleries such as Interstitial, SOIL, The Frye Art Museum, Greg Kucera, as well as Mediate Art Soundwave Biennial, Aqua Art Miami, NEPO 5k, and other festivals. He studied music at Butler University with Michael Schelle, Craig Hetrick and Frank Felice.

Kogut Butoh & friends

An evening of butoh, live music and film with Joan Laage/Kogut Butoh and musicians Bill Horist, Michael Shannon, David Stanford, Joey Largent and special guest Katrina Wolfe

Dance for 9 Corpses 
Joan Laage/Kogut Butoh & Katrina Wolfe with Michael Shannon, David Stanford & Joey Largent 

Manhattan October (2022)
Film by Michael Shannon

Piercing Heart
Joan Laage/Kogut Butoh with Bill Horist

Known as Kogut Butoh, Joan Laage has been performing, teaching butoh and collaborating with area and international performers since she settled in Seattle in 1990 after studying butoh with masters Kazuo Ohno and Yoko Ashikawa and performing in Ashikawa’s second company Gnome in Tokyo. Her group Dappin’ Butoh was well-known in the Seattle Fringe Theater Festival for 10 years and spawned many area butoh artists. Joan is a founding member of DAIPAN butoh Collective which produces an annual butoh festival. In spring 2023, Joan had a 3-night run in New York City and will return to perform in En Chair et En Son Acousmatic Festival in Paris for the second year in November.

Joey Largent’s work focuses on exploring long-duration compositions and improvisations for acoustic ensembles and solo performance. Beyond generating music alone, his goal is to offer a space for introspection, releasing from attachment, beauty, and connection. He has collaborated with numerous dancers, musicians, and interdisciplinary artists over the years, and has studied North Indian Classical singing with several disciples of Pandit Pran Nath, primarily Michael Harrison and Rose Okada.

Bill Horist has been making guitar music from the fringes of experimental technique to the pop/rock/jazz mainstream.  He has performed throughout Europe, Japan, North /Central America and has appeared on over 100 recordings.  His work also finds home in film, dance, and video games. Bill and Joan performed Piercing Heart in DAIPAN’s Summer Fest: Shimmer last June at YAW Theater.

Michael Shannon offers performance and recordings of his discoveries into the nature of sound’s ontology through the use of strings and wind instruments (Asian, African, and western), electronics, field/studio recordings, and sound objects. Further research into innately occurring abstraction is presented in films and video.

Originally from Massachusetts, David Stanford’s musical creations include soundtracks, Electronic and Classical. He studied at Cornish College of the Art. David has played with Brendan Murray, Jason Lescalleet, Animist Orchestra, Eye Music, and Gyre along with Michael Shannon and Carl Liermann, an experimental electronics trio formed in January 2012, which has performed for Joan’s Wandering & Wondering event in the Seattle Japanese Garden and Kubota Garden.

Katrina Wolfe is a performer and visual artist primarily focused on the practice, teaching and performance of Masukhuma: a movement therapy, dance, and performance art technique that Katrina has developed from her experience in Butoh, visual arts, and her daily practice of Vipassana meditation. Katrina’s most in-depth Butoh study occurred between 2012 and 2014 with Joan Laage and Atsushi Takenouchi. She integrates her visual art with her performance work by creating installations and costumes made from organic and recycled materials, and by capturing the practice of Masukhuma through photography and filmmaking.

Noel Kennon

An evening of music : 

sounding :  to reenact mist or steam

Noel Kennon presents new music for solo contrabass clarinet. 

The structure of the work is a rendering of cognition; this activity is a result of biofeedback between sounding and listening. The intention of this work is to memorialize Paul Hoskin. ]

Noel Kennon is local artist, line cook, and enthusiast of the moon and its relation to our orbit.”

NonSeq: Leanna Keith

Rice, Blood, Sugar is a piece in three parts that explores the experience of heritage language loss through language as food, language as lineage, and language as delight, performed upon the occasion of the Mid-Autumn Festival, a festival of family and ancestral reunion. The composition and soundings utilize homophones in Mandarin Chinese throughout to amplify the somatic experience for the audience of the attempts towards reaching the perfect tones and pronunciation of a mother tongue, sometimes landing just short, sometimes overshot. The performance will interrogate these accidents of sounding as both composing a bodily diasporic loss and also how these mistakes can generate new meanings and possibilities for the future.

Composer/performer/artist Leanna Li Keith teams up with poet/writer/artist Jenne Hsien Patrick to dream up this experience of sound and language. Both with shared backgrounds as mixed-Chinese Americans, Keith and Patrick have been discussing their experiences with heritage language for the past four years. Rice, Blood, and Sugar is the result of that ongoing conversation and process. The performance of the piece features Keith as flutist/vocalist/conduction artist, Kaley Lane Eaton as vocalist/pianist/banjo player, Heather Bentley as violist/cellist, and Alina To as violinist. Additionally, the performance will be opened by a reading of works by Omar Willey.

Curated by Michaud Savage for Nonsequitur‘s NonSeq series. This project was supported, in part, by an award from 4Culture.

TAP 4.0: The Nyxology Sessions

Social, 7 PM; Music, 8 PM. Donations accepted as cash or via Venmo, Square Cash, Zelle or PayPal to wcsartanddesign@yahoo.com.

TAP 4.0: The Nyxology Sessions are high-level experiments in the art and craft of designing and presenting simultaneous, multi-participant and multi-discipline live performances, or “art-theater”, that inhabit a venue’s on and off-stage spaces and feature the live-scores of The Antenna Project as the core audience experience.

GUEST PERFORMERS
Garth Stein, the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Art of Racing in the Rain and Matt Southworth, the co-creator of the hit ABC TV series Stumptown based on his comic book series of the same name, team up for the action-packed coming of age story about a mutant from the Pacific Northwest, The Cloven! Garth will be pontificating on the origin of this mutant species while Matt will be drawing via projector, for all to hear and see… precisely what they present will remain completely unknown until it’s happening!

Bring a yoga mat, bring a pillow, bring your favorite dance shoes, bring a pencil and sketch pad, bring a camera, bring a friend or lover, bring a deck of cards, bring a book, bring your favorite armchair I don’t care. Just allow yourself to focus on being Present and the experiment will doubtless be an authentic success on every level.

Founded in 2002, Christopher Hydinger‘s The Antenna Project provides Instrumental Live-scores (improvised context-specific audio compositions) for all variety of experiences. Amplified electric guitar, an effects pedal and various methods of interfacing are used to create full-registered music ranging from subdued waves of droning minimalism to exuberantly celebratory maximalism. The project’s mantra is Devoted to the Present, a double nod to both the “present” as current moment and as gift.

Luke Fitzpatrick / entr’acte

Experimental violin and piano duo entr’acte presents Zombies. Formed by violinist Luke Fitzpatrick and pianist Laure Struber, entr’acte was created with the goal of expanding the sonic possibilities of the violin and piano duo. Zombies was written to recontextualize older melodies into a meditative exploration of sound colors. The piece uses an extensive amount of inside the piano techniques and emphasizes the resonance of the instrument. 

Opening the concert will be The Tomb: the complete works for adapted viola and intoning voice by Luke Fitzpatrick. As a long-time member of the Harry Partch ensemble, Luke has written and performed an extensive amount of music for the combination of adapted viola and intoning voice. His complete works are presented here for the first time.

With This Very Body I Enter Hell

An audiovisual dispatch from a world of purple mountains and pornographic websites. Featuring Gabe Fabens (electronics), Sage Folkins (guitar), Charlie Fwinkins (creative direction), Ian Gwin (synths).

Under the direction of enigmatic auteur, Charles Fwinkins, WTVBEH has produced videos such as “I Saw Jesus Die,” “Fresh Kills” and “The Lantern’s Gone Out, The Lantern’s Gone Out.” Examples of their work can be viewed on the streaming zine Wordo. 

Bit Graves / Benjamin Marx / Mason Lynass

Bit Graves, Benjamin Marx, and Mason Lynass perform contrasting sets of dystopian drone music, generative electronic music, and songs for guitar, cello, and viola.

Bit Graves is an experimental electronic duo. Dave Segal of The Stranger describes them as “utter masters of their dystopian domain [who] excel at suspense-building dynamics and creating a sense of perpetual ascension”. They’ll play a series of drone duets from their recent album Murmur, which makes use of the Chapel’s natural reverb.

Benjamin Marx is an American composer, producer, and songwriter. His latest work, feynman diagrams for percussion, synthesizer and samples, premiered in May 2023 at Octave 9 under the auspices of the Seattle Symphony. He’ll be performing selections from his upcoming record On the Benefits of Staying in One Place (While Your Lover Moves Away), featuring Rose Bellini, cello, and Erin Wight, viola.

Mason Lynass is a performing musician and computer programmer living in Seattle, WA. Mason has engaged in musical work as a drummer & percussionist, composer, producer, engineer, and sound designer, and currently enjoys making generative electronic music, controlling digital instruments through MIDI in Ableton Live. His recent musical output explores themes of quantum listening, personal introspection, and human connection to nature and technology.