Kestrel is the musical duo of trumpet player Greg Kelley and guitarist Bill Horist. Both artists push the tonal and sonic possibilities of their instruments with extended techniques and improvisation. They will be joined by local butoh dancer Vanessa Skantze.

Olympia’s long-running experimental guitar and synthesizer duo, LA LUNGS, combine ethereal tones and airy textures enough to refresh anyone’s senses. They have released albums on Debacle records and have preformed around the region.

Blessed Blood – Seattle’s Rachel LeBlanc – carefully and meticulously weaves vocal layers together with her modular synth to create expressive pieces that are full, uplifting, and haunting.

Kole Galbraith and Matt Pollack will exhibit recent microtonal compositions for prepared guitar and bass.

Melissa Heath and Christian Asplund will perform an eclectic mix of American, European, and Canadian works for soprano with piano and viola by Cage, Ligeti, Ives, Messiaen, Webern, Lutosawski, as well as a new work by Asplund and a song by Seattle’s Jarrad Powell.

The Heath-Asplund duo has performed a fair amount of the standard lieder and operatic repertoire as well as Asplund’s sacred music. They have lately been investigating lesser known solo vocal works by well-known composers, especially those not known for song.

The program will include mysteriously lyrical songs by Ligeti and Lutoslawski, an early cycle by Messiaen, characteristically laconic selections from Webern’s Op. 12 cycle, and a Javanese tinged-song by Powell. Asplund’s piece will be a characteristically eclectic mini-opera.

University of Washington DMA candidate Daniel Webbon presents an evening of recent compositions and collaborations. His work ranges from traditionally notated modern classical composition to freely improvised experimental music and draws on ideas from contemporary literature and continental philosophy.

The concert will feature works for piano and voice, solo flute, and string quartet, as well as a collaboration between drummer Matt Carr and dancer Alethea Alexander. The evening will conclude with the premier of Daniel’s most recent work, This vast southern empire; a sprawling improvisational score for mixed ensemble and voice that draws on academic and historical texts dealing with Southern reconstruction and identity.

Inverted Space Ensemble presents works that feature the Cimbalom and Beyond. The concert will feature works by György Kurtág for the cimbalom, including Scenes From A Novel. The concert will also include Lou Harrisons’s Music for Violin and Various Instruments, European, Asian, and African. Finally, the concert will explore James Tenney’s Quintext, a work that pays homage to many of Tenney’s influences, including Morton Feldman and Harry Partch.

* Seating will be limited, so advance purchase is recommended. Any remaining seats will be available at the door for a $5 – $15 suggested donation.

A Sonic Lighthouse is a one of a kind device invented by Jimmy Johnson that spins a highly focused beam of sound around a horizontal plane. The experience of sound emitted from this device depends entirely on the space you are in, the speed of rotation, and the type of sound input. At slow rotation speeds in a rectangular room, it sounds like there is an invisible speaker sliding itself around the surfaces of the room and then suddenly loud when pointed at you. As you speed it up it becomes an enveloping cloud with a rhythmic pulse. The end result is spatially mesmerizing and phenomenologically paradoxical. Favorite comment so far “..I think you’ve broken sound”

This performance of The Synchronized Rotations of Sounds in Spaces is tailored to the unique acoustics and geometry of the Chapel. It will feature live musicians, synthesized sound and field recordings played through several sonic lighthouses, a second type of rotating reflector (also invented by Jimmy), and traditional multi-speaker holographic sound system for virtual rotations. These three systems will be networked together in ways that make musical tempo-based sense and can interact with each other, FX parameters, synths, MIDI, and of course the musicians. The performance will feature improvisations by Cristin Miller, Eric Muhs, and special guests. Original compositions and interpretations of the music of Billie Holiday, Emily Howell, Maryanne Amacher, Bette Midler and the original NBC TV series Knight Rider will be heard.

Jimmy Johnson is a composer, artist, scientist and engineer; in that order, both chronologically and vocationally speaking. He has composed music for feature film, television, dance, new media installation and has had music released on Astralwerks, Moonshine, Virgin, Domestic and Fragrant Music. His artwork has been installed in the Getty Center, LACMA, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Henry, the EMP and is included in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art. As a scientist he studied the role social learning plays in the developmental and echolocation calls of E. fuscus, the big brown bat. Most recently employed as a research scientist/engineer at the University of Washington, he graduated from the North Carolina School of the Arts where he studied classical guitar with Aaron Shearer, earned a Bachelor’s degree in Sonic Creation and Perception from the University of Washington, and a Bard MFA.

Multi-instrumentalist and modern music rabblerouser Peter Nelson-King presents an eclectic program of individualist piano music from the 1980’s. The international cadre of composers presented wrote these works in a time of unprecedented pluralism and freedom in classical music, and whether they were beginning their careers or nearing the end each work speaks from a personal and vital musical language. Featuring works by Robert Beaser, George Benjamin, Fulvio Caldini, David Chaitkin, Edmund Rubbra, Peter Sculthorpe, John Tavener, Augusta Read Thomas and Charles Wuorinen.

Peter Nelson-King is the founder of Cursive, a modern chamber ensemble specializing in performing hidden gems of 20th- and 21st-century classical music with a modular ensemble. A King County native, he got degrees at University of Puget Sound and Boston University before returning to the Seattle area to perform in a variety of groups and capacities. He is a trumpet player, pianist, vocalist and composer, and is a regular member of Brass Band Northwest, the Lake Washington Symphony Orchestra, the Ensign Symphony and the Paper Puppet Opera.

(artwork: “Blossom”, by Sandford Biggers)

Seattle artist Jason McGill assembles an evening of four sets of music for one, two, and three:

a. Jason McGill, solo alto saxophone
b. Andrew Olmstead, solo piano
c. Great Bliss: Jason McGill and Tom Scully, electric guitars
d. all of the above

Jason McGill is a Seattle-based (New England born) lifer within sundry less-popular-musics communities. His music of the past few years has mainly explored attention, paradox, love, space, and natural logic. Tonight brings together a few streams of his thought and practice, beginning with solo alto saxophone improvisations: entries to what he calls (and visualizes to be) “tone rooms” – spaces of perfect tonal logic where anything can happen, but only once.

Next, pianist Andrew Olmstead will present a collection of very short songs, documented and available in a book of sheet music. In a tradition dating back to the 16th century, these will incorporate all twelve major and minor keys. These are songs in the sense of Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte (Songs Without Words). Mendelssohn wrote: “What the music I love expresses to me is not thought too indefinite to put into words, but on the contrary, too definite.” An active part of the Seattle music scene since 2010, Olmstead focuses on intermedia, improvisation, songwriting, and humor. In addition to performing solo, he has explored these subjects in multiple groups, including Spooky Action, Honey Noble, and netcat.

McGill will also present a new guitar piece, I of II, for his revolving-membership group project Great Bliss. This time he will be joined by the Seattle guitarist Tom Scully. The piece, dedicated to the late artist Pauline Oliveros, explores one of the two six-unit whole tone scales (in western temperament) at great length, stretching six notes out to saturated resonance.

Originally from Charleston, SC, Tom Scully moved to Seattle after completing studies in jazz composition and guitar performance at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. He is also guitarist in the experimental rock / free jazz duo Macaw.

Finally, these three will improvise together, as is right and fun.

An Evening of Improvised Sound and Movement
Created and Curated by Alia Swersky and Tom Baker

What happens when musicians and movers come together to create variable durations of structured improvisational performance?

These performance events will consist of a varying selection of curated musicians and movement artists who will be brought together in intentional improvisational collaboration. Artists will know their collaborators in advance and be given the opportunity to score and rehearse their piece in accordance with the “chance style” of meeting one another, the evening’s themes, and the convening of their shared interests. A goal is to connect artists in different disciplines, bridging diverse improvisational aesthetics. They are asked to merge structured scores with the unknown spontaneity of improvised performance.

Volume 1:

An evening of scored improvisation consisting of 6 musician/dancer pairings exploring the theme of time and duration. Each pairing will perform for roughly the same amount of time, but arranged into unconventional time configurations. Some pairs will perform one piece over a continuous period of time, where others will perform fragmented sections throughout the evening. Pairings will also consider where in space these uneven time frames will take place, creating an evening of environmental compositions.

In August 2017 musician and artist Matt Shoemaker took his own life. Performing in his honor are long-time friends and collaborators:

Climax Golden Twins
“Timeless super-freaks and masters of suspension” (Doug Haire, Sonarchy Radio). Climax Golden Twins emerge from hibernation for this special show, their first in many years.

Jim Haynes
Internationally exhibiting visual and sound artist, Jim Haynes sums up his work with the phrase: “I rust things”. He does indeed, creating work of strange, abstract and visceral beauty. He runs the Helen Scarsdale Agency, which has released many seminal audio works of experimental, noise and sound art.

Jesse Paul Miller
Jesse Paul Miller is an artist who travels to Southeast Asia, often returning to Indonesia (Java, Bali). He is inspired by what he sees and hears, gathering audio, photography, video, and making paintings and art books during and after these trips. Looking For Number 23 / Masa (Epoch) is a short film inspired by his friendship with Shoemaker.

Dave Knott
Improvisor, string specialist and music therapist.

Eric Lanzillotta
Eric Lanzillotta is the founder of Ri Be Xibalba, Eye Music and Anomalous Records, one of the finest and most uncompromising distributors and labels devoted to experimental music and sound art.

For nearly two decades Matthew Thomas Shoemaker (Born 1974, Seattle, Washington, USA) created unfolding compositions of depth and intensity, reflective of his unique but troubled vision of the world. His audio work has been released on such labels as Trente Oiseaux (Germany), Helen Scarsdale Agency (USA), Ferns Recordings (France), Elevator Bath (USA), and Masters Chemical Society (USA). His presence in the musical world of the Pacific Northwest will be sorely missed.

In conjunction with this performance, an installation of Matt’s paintings and audio will be on view at Seattle’s Jack Straw New Media Gallery, from April 13-May 18 under the title Brain Goreng.

An evening of music and discussion with Seattle composers:

Jay Hamilton, My Muse, & Equal Temperament, cello and pre-recorded dialogue
Gavin Borchert, Three songs, for baritone and piano
Peter Nelson-King, The Magpie’s Shadow, for solo piano
Jeremiah Lawson, Prelude and Fugue in G major, for solo guitar

The Seattle Composers’ Salon fosters the development, performance and appreciation of new music by regional composers and performers. At bi-monthly, informal presentations, the Salon features finished works, previews, and works in progress. Composers, performers, and audience members gather in a casual setting that allows for experimentation and discussion. Everyone is welcome!