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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

Vancouver-based pianist Lisa Cay Miller presents a night of solo improvisations and combinations with local Seattle players Greg Campbell (drums and percussion), Heather Bentley (viola), Leanna Keith (flutes), James Falzone (clarinet), and Bonnie Whiting (percussion).

Lisa Cay Miller (she/her) lives and makes music on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations. She has performed with many great musicians all over the world, including Ken Vandermark, Nicole Mitchell, Butch Morris, Ingrid Laubrock, John Dikeman, Ig Henneman, Michael Moore, Wilbert de Joode, Jasper Stadhouders, Vicky Mettler, Kenton Loewen, Dylan van der Schyff, Peggy Lee, Joshua Zubot, NOW Orchestra, NOW Ensemble and many more (Vancouver). Miller is the Artistic Director of the New Orchestra Workshop Society (NOW), proudly presenting Vancouver improvisers in regular concerts and workshops. She has released recordings on the greenideas (Sleep Furiously, Q, waterwall) and Trytone (682/281) record labels. Miller’s compositions have been premiered internationally by mmm…(Tokyo), L’Ensemble SuperMusique, le GGRIL, Quatuor Bozzini (Montreal), Vancouver New Music, Standing Wave, Turning Point Ensemble, Rachel Iwaasa, and Hard Rubber Orchestra, among others.

(photo: Cristina Marx)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Addict is a string trio composed by Jackie An that explores the undercurrents of addiction.  

This work is my first foray into graphic and text-based notation, as I have historically used dance choreography as a visual score or a loop pedal for composing. Using acoustic string performance, found sound, sound object, and fixed media tape, I’m sharing my reflections on how I moved through the world as a young person. My addiction recovery has taught me that the past will request an audience until it becomes a demand. As I’ve learned to meet this demand by bearing witness to my past, I have created this work as a portal for the fearful and dissociated. May you have safe passage into the future, may your path be gentle.

For Friends of Bill

This  drowning in a glass of water
Is  dependent on every breath held
A  tidal surge so mean even friendly otters lose their grip
First  the silica molecules bubble apart
Step  on sand
Share  a shipwreck

Community Care 

Please wear a mask; some masks will also be provided at the door.  

Resources from Peer Seattle will also be available at the door. There will be a talkback with the composer and ensemble after the performance at 8:45, moderated by Jesse Roth.   

Jackie An (they/them) accompanies their audience through the themes of life, death, horror and delight through the many voices of the violin. Like a bowerbird, they have collected learnings and experiences from across their lifetime in order to construct a nest for community healing to hatch. Jackie is also a Somatic Educator in the Tradition of Thomas Hanna, guiding people back home to their bodies.

Lori Goldston is a cellist and composer from Seattle. Her voice as a cellist draws connections between far-flung idioms and explores timbral thresholds of her instrument, driven by a restless curiosity and informed by a long, widely varied history of collaborations with bands, ensembles large and small, composers, film makers and choreographers.

Seattle-based violist and composer Heather Bentley has trailblazed a career as one of the West Coast’s most visible improvisatory musicians, specializing in creating evocative atmospheres and textures. Relentless in her pursuit of creativity, she continues this work as co-founder of Kin of the Moon, a 501(c)3 organization which fosters collaboration between artists in service of creating unique art.

Jesse Roth (she/her) is a writer, theatre artist, and dramaturg. She is the Communications Manager for The Williams Project, a living-wage theatre company. Her essay Good Housekeeping for the Sick has been published by Bitter Bill Press.

Curated for Nonsequitur’s NonSeq series by Michaud Savage.