An evening of improvised creative music featuring Seattle’s Neil Welch solo, Katie Jacobson & Greg Sinibaldi piano/reeds duo, and 1_lu_1, a sax/guitar/drums trio hailing from Eugene, OR and NYC.

Neil Welch is a Seattle-based saxophonist whose work is a menagerie of remnant musical styles, spanning avant-garde jazz, model composition, solo saxophone, North Indian Hindustani music, and electric sound processing. This show will feature his powerful solo saxophone approach to improvisation.

Katie Jacobson is a vocalist, lyricist, composer, and improvisor currently involved in the bands Tiny Ghost and Honey Noble and the interdisciplinary projects Command (CMD: Computers, Music and Dance) and Party Advice Collective. Inspired by a wide range of music and art, saxophonist/composer Greg Sinibaldi has developed a unique improvisational language, developing a virtuosic and rich sonic palette. Together they’ll explore electronic soundscapes incorporating words as sound, story, and improvisation. The duo is especially interested in creating long and complex ostinatos, using the human voice in its many capacities (e.g. speech, singing, sounds), and improvising with words. Greg will be playing EWI and Katie will be using her voice alongside vocal effects.

1_lu_1 is a bi-coastal collaboration featuring Brooklyn based Ben Cohen on tenor saxophone and Dustin Carlson on guitar with Oregon drummer Tim Cohen. Their music spans a wide range of musical territory from rock-inspired avant-garde to minimalism and noise. The music is largely improvised, with some composed elements whose purpose is to blur the line between the spontaneous and the preconceived. They arrive to their Seattle debut after a day in the studio recording their first album. 1_lu_1 is excited to present their music to the Seattle improvisation community.

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. Both novel and familiar sounds are juxtaposed in ways unique to each event. Breaking away from their usual “politburo” performance set up, group members will be spread (and in some cases moving) throughout the space, playing through small, localized sound systems to create a sonic environment made up of many smaller micro-climates, with the audience free to move through the space or sit if they wish.

David Wills (aka The Weatherman), founding member of experimental media collective Negativland, makes his first appearance on a concert stage in seventeen years to join recent Negativinductee Jon Leidecker (aka Wobbly) for an evening of fake electronics, microphone-activated iPhone apps, local baby room monitor interceptions and endlessly awkward questions for Alexa. Don’t take the risk that any of the sounds that occur on this evening are going to be recorded, every click-through agreement you’ve ever complied with to the contrary — this is going to be a live performance.

David Wills has been recording odd environmental sounds since the late 1960’s, creating unique electronic instruments such as the pure electrical feedback oscillator ‘The Booper’ since the early 1970’s, scanning unshielded police, cell phone and baby room monitor transmissions since the 1980’s, and living in Seattle since the turn of the millennium. He joined Facebook, Twitter and Instagram earlier this year. He is a co-founder of the experimental media collective Negativland.

Jon Leidecker has been producing music under the name Wobbly since 1990. Recent performances deploy a battery of mobile devices driven by their built-in microphones, reacting instantly with error-prone variations on the notes and sounds they believe they are hearing: a tightly-knit orchestra with inhuman reflexes, resulting in musical structures which the human performer influences more than controls. Wobbly’s live and studio collaborations with Negativland, Dieter Moebius & Tim Story, Matmos, Fred Frith, John Oswald, Thomas Dimuzio, Huun-Huur-Tu, Sagan and the Freddy McGuire Show compliment live mix media collages executed twice a month on Negativland’s Over The Edgeradio program on KPFA-FM.

What Happens If I Do Nothing – Field Recordings to improvise to

Sue Ann Harkey, prepared guitar & recordings, joined by Lori Goldston, cello and Greg Kelley, trumpet.

For years I have been collecting sound recordings. Sounds of wild dogs roaming the Goa night. Sounds of cicadas along the Woodstock stream. Sounds of receding waves over Brighton’s shingle beach. Sounds of the screeching Central Line between Bethnal Green and Liverpool Street stations. Calls of the Cockney barkers at Columbia Road flower market. And relics from my past – extracting the cut-up tape track from my 1985 recording The Green House Effect (what we called “climate change” 32 years ago). I took these recordings because they sounded like music to me. Ambience, rhythms, dissidence.

Blessed Blood is an electronics-based project by Seattle’s Rachel LeBlanc. Utilizing hardware effects to expand upon the natural resonances of singing, she processes harmonies into ecstatic hymns, wherein ethereal vocals glide above pulsations and sharp angles. The sound is informed by the artist’s life-long home of the PNW, traditional music forms and choral assemblies, and the exploration of history both personal and cultural, resulting in what is at once familiar and unsettling.

Jason M. McGill’s purposefully internal, oversimple, slow-moving guitar pieces are intended to directly induce a type of conscious, restful parasympathetic nervous system response. The point of these works is very direct – to calm the mind and provide a sense of consistency in the face of serious PTSD. While this music does successfully achieve this goal for the performer, the listener’s experience is anyone’s guess. Nevertheless, the music demands itself. In the words of Albert Ayler, music is the healing force of the universe; in those of Sun Ra, cosmic tones for mental therapy.

Directed and Performed by Neal Kosaly-Meyer

The premiere performance of Part I, Chapter 4 in Kosaly-Meyer’s ongoing Finnegans Wake Project. Presented with carefully considered sets, props, sound design, and with acute attention to musical detail. Chapter 1 is an overture, and follows the rules of music (more or less); Chapter 2 is fairly straightforward storytelling (mostly). Chapter 3 is a fog of dream and the unconscious, the proper realm and idiom of the Wake, Joyce’s book of the dark. Chapter 4, still a bit foggy, completes the first large structural cycle of the book.

A reckless carnage of harmonic versus melodic instrumentation; free jazz counterpoints music games in this “collidescope” of “nodal” perturbance, instigated by filmmaker/performance artist/composer Nadya Kadrevis.

David Haney studied composition with Czech American composer Tomas Svoboda. He has been a member of the Society of Oregon composers and his works have been performed throughout North and South America and Europe. Haney’s musical projects have included Roswell Rudd, Julian Priester, John Tchicai, Steve Swell, Roy Campbell, Bud Shank, Wolter Weirbos, Johannes Bauer, Daniel Carter, Han Bennink, Andrew Cyrille, Billy Martin, Bernard Purdie, Marvin Bugulu Smith, Gerry Hemingway, Buell Neidlinger, Dominic Duval, Adam Lane, Michael Bisio, Daniel Carter. As a leader, Haney has over 25 albums on CIMP-USA, Cadence-USA, SLAM-UK, NoSeSo-Argentina, La Gorda-Argentina, Canada Jazz Studio-Canada.

FHTAGN is an experimental chamber ensemble from Seattle, WA, led by composer/performance artists Blake DeGraw. Consisting of a rotating membership of musicians from various disciplines, FHTAGN explores alternative conducting techniques, aleatoric operations, gesturally generated works, extremes in spatial dispersion, and free improvisation. Since its formation in 205, FHTAGN has seen participation by more than 70 musicians, performing in combinations ranging from saxophone quartets to small string orchestras to mixed ensembles of 20+ musicians.

Read a preview in the Seattle Times.

Edward Hamel Gray Neon Life – Seattle Premiere
Pierre Alexandre Tremblay asinglewordisnotenough 3 (invariant) – Seattle Premiere
Alvin Singleton Argoru II – Seattle Premiere
George Lewis Not Alone – Seattle Premiere

Company is a state of being here, in a program which speaks in worlds. In Edward Hamel’s Gray Neon Life the cellist is his own companion, uttering words which are not so much spoken over the music as sprayed on and under it, made both surface and core: adornment and essence. This double figure – cellist and voice in one – is Seth Parker Woods, and the piece in both concept and execution is a vehicle for his co-creative input, ranging from the precise choice of pitch material to the derivation of the texted component from the SAMO© tag of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s and Al Diaz’s New York street art, of which Woods is an aficionado. What Hamel and the rest of the composers featured tonight make from it is a sort of manifesto for city life and city art, summoned into existence by a harmonic double stop which, recurring as a fourfold refrain, finally offers a tentative way out … or on.

On, at first, into a hall of mirrors. The three remaining works on this programme – two of them, like Gray Neon Life, written for Woods – surround the cello with spatial silence and electronically produced sounds, and in the first two, by Alvin Singleton and George Lewis, these sounds are derived in real time from the cello’s own material. In Pierre Alexandre Tremblay’s asinglewordisnotenough3 (invariant) the sound sources are more diverse, and yet the work’s worlds are again conjured forth by this lone yet multiple figure. Here he is at the center of it all: muse and master of ceremonies, devising it all for company. — John Fallas/SPW

Critiqued as “a cellist of power and grace” (The Guardian) and possessing “mature artistry and willingness to go to the brink,” Seth Parker Woods has established a reputation as a versatile artist straddling several genres. Outside of solo performances, he has performed with the Chineke! Orchestra (UK), Ictus Ensemble (Brussels, BE), Ensemble L’Arsenal (IT), zone Experimental (CH), Basel Sinfonietta (CH), New York City Ballet, Ensemble LPR and Orchestra of St. Luke’s (US). A fierce advocate for contemporary arts, he has collaborated and worked with a wide range of artists ranging from the likes of Louis Andriessen, Elliott Carter, Heinz Holliger, Helmut Lachenmann, and Liza Lim to Peter Gabriel, Sting, Lou Reed, Dame Shirley Bassey, Rachael Yamagata, as well as visual artists Vanessa Beecroft, Aldo Tambellini, Jack Early and Adam Pendleton.

Holding a Ph.D. from the University of Huddersfield, his principal teachers were Thomas
Demenga, Lucas Fels, Frederik Zlotkin, and Daniel Morganstern. In recent years he has given talks, workshops and performances at Royal Albert Hall (BBC Proms), Musée d’art Moderne et Contemporain (FR), Le Poisson Rouge and the Bohemian National Hall (USA), Cafe OTO (London, UK), Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK), Klang Festival (Durham, UK), INTER/ actions Symposium (Wales), ICMC-SMS Conference (Athens, GR), NIME Conference (London), Sound and Body Festival (Lille, Brussels), Instalakcje Festival (PL), Virginia Tech, La Salle College (Singapore), and FINDARS (Malaysia) amongst others. Recent awards and acknowledgements include Artist of the Month for Musical America, an Earle Brown/Morton Feldman Foundation Grant (USA), McGill University- CIRMMT/IDMIL Visiting Researcher Residency (CA), Centre Intermondes Artist Residency (FR), Francis Chagrin Award (UK), Concours [Re]connaissance – Premiere Prix (FR) and the Paul Sacher Stiftung Research Scholarship (CH). Read more in Strings and Musical America.

Presented by Nonsequitur.

Eveline Müller has been a drummer with the Swiss new wave group Hertz and has made appearances with the Swiss/US collaboration Pale Nudes and the US based group Imij. For the last 15 years she has been focusing on sound creations with her home-built instrument the Boeing. Consisting of sawblades, airplane washer, school bells and pan lids, the Boeing has contributed many sounds to a variety of projects — SIL2K, Bill Horist’s Springtrap Hum, Metal Men, Rollerball, Nous sommes des Enfants, and many more.

The Klang Quintet is Müller’s own project combining acoustic, electric, and electronic worlds into beautiful, ugly, scratchy, ringy, loud, quiet, tense and sparse soundscapes.
The Quintet features Eveline on the Boeing, Stuart McLeod on brainwave manipulator and various objects, Carl Farrow on electronics, Bob Rees on xylophone and percussion, the guests Jim Knodle on trumpet and Kole Galbraith on bass. Recording and transforming our sounds is James Drage that will treat the audience to a musical journey.

Opening up are Eveline and Vanessa Skantze with a sound and dance duo. They have both been collaborating in various other projects, namely with Tatsuya Nakatani and Noisepoetnobody, and harbor great respect and intrigue for each others’ work.

Inverted Space opens its 6th Season with an exploration of American music. Fred Frith’s Elegy for Elias and John Luther Adams’ Canticles of the Sky evoke a timeless quality and invites personal reflection. The Alabama Song by Kurt Weill is presented in an extraordinary reworking by Morton Feldman. Lou Harrison’s incredible Suite for Violin and American Gamelan is featured to end the program.

Gregg Skloff‘s contrabass playing, augmented by electronic effects and found objects, evokes swirling storms and sweeping vistas through the exploration of electro-acoustic ambient drone, encompassing composition and improvisation.

Cyclopsycho is an experiment by musician and vocalist Ashley Shomo wherein voice technique, words, syllables and electronic medium combine to manifest adventures into the wild.

Raica is Chloe Harris, electronic musician and co-founder of the Further label. Raica always improvises with the machines and boxes. The idea of never knowing what to expect and adapting to the room and surroundings is what drives this project. Analog and digital meet to marry a wall of sporadic and intermixed sounds.