Tom Varner is a composer, French horn player, recording artist, band leader, and teacher, who plays on over 75  recordings, and has 14 recordings of his own as a leader/composer. His recent CD “Nine Surprises” is available at Apple Music.

The Sound Vespers project grew out of a series of concerts at the Good Shepherd Center Chapel combining instrumental improvisers and members of the Seattle Phonographers Union. In August 2019, I assembled a nonet (6 brass, percussion, and 2 phonographers) and recorded a series of improvisations similar to what we had done at the Chapel Space. I hope you enjoy them.

Samantha Boshnack & Greg Kelley, trumpet; Ray Larsen, cornet; Jim Knodle, flugelhorn; Haley Freedlund, trombone; Tom Varner, French horn; Greg Campbell, percussion and tuba; Steve Barsotti & Steve Peters, field recordings/electronics.

Recorded live (no overdubs) at Jack Straw Studios by Steve Ditore. Special thanks to the Jack Straw Cultural Center.

00:00 – Section 2
15:52 – Section 6
30:49 – Section 8
42:18 – Section 9

(photo: Michelle Smith-Lewis)

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of previously unreleased material.

Jarrad Powell is a composer and performer. He is professor emeritus of music at Cornish College of the Arts and director of Gamelan Pacifica. He is the third-generation descended from Montana homesteaders and grew up on Absáalooke land in south-central Montana, former site of the Sundance Sea, an epeiric sea of the mesozoic era.

LAND (2020)

Sounds from three different sources – biophony (sounds of animals), geophony (sounds of weather and other natural elements), and anthrophony (sounds created by humans) – interpenetrate and are mediated by minimal electronic signal processing to yield a soundscape. Like a landscape, it is somewhat static, but also changing, with subtlety or suddenness. Through recordings we preserve the sound environment to use and study, even as we destroy that very environment by various means, leading to degradation and extinction.

This composition is a soundtrack recently completed for a film by noted photographer David T. Hanson. The film features the work from his Waste Land series, a master photographer’s meditation on the country’s most dangerously polluted places. The sociologist Andrew Ross wrote, “Hanson’s Waste Land series is a stunning documentary of a century of organized state terrorism against the North American land, its species, and its peoples.” The film will premiere July 1 – July 31, 2021 at ICON (Iowa Contemporary Art) as part of EXTRACTION: art on the edge of the abyss.

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of previously unreleased material.

Kenny Mandell is originally from Brooklyn, NY. He has been performing, producing, organizing, composing and recording In the Seattle area and beyond for 40 years. Kenny is also a private instructor and educator who has directed many small workshop bands.

The music performed here is all improvised and dedicated to Kenny’s main inspirations in the greater musical world:

00:00 – 1. for Edgard Varèse (flute)
08:38 – 2. for Anthony Braxton & Eric Dolphy (alto sax)
17:00 – 3. for Sam Rivers (tenor sax)
24:21 – 4. for Thelonious Monk & Steve Lacy (soprano sax)

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of previously unreleased material.

Paurl Walsh is a composer of electro-acoustic, modern classical, rock, and experimental music. Writing and performing throughout the US, Canada, and Europe, in addition to works under his own name, he has been a core member of Degenerate Art Ensemble, Implied Violence, Saint Genet, Medina/Walsh, X-Ray Press, and others. He has scored many stage and installation works for choreographers and theater artists such as Kyle Loven, Ezra Dickinson, Peggy Piacenza, and Paige Barnes. Paurl was also the Seattle 2018 Fremont Bridge Composer in Residence and premiered a new musical work as such at Town Hall Seattle. He is an engineer/producer for many bands and experimental musicians, working primarily at his studio, ExEx Audio.

This is an homage to the inimitable 2001 album Anima by the criminally underappreciated electronic musician Vladislav Delay. Instrumentation: Digital and analog synthesizers, drum machines, contact mics, various forms of metal and wood, and old fashioned dub-style fx and mixing techniques.

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of previously unreleased material.

Garrett Fisher has created more than a dozen opera-theatre productions in the US and Europe that have “combined elements of opera, dance, Indian raga, Japanese Noh theater and more into fusions that have both a ritualistic intensity and an improvisatory freedom…a groundbreaking hybrid…a strong, unified and strikingly individual utterance of unambiguous beauty” (The New York Times).

GraceANN Cummings is a pianist known for her concerts and CDs that take listeners INSIDE the MUSIC which she has been presenting throughout the United States since 1994. Her repertoire in these concerts spans the centuries since Bach to premiere performances by living composers, designed to give audiences a deeper listening experience with the relationship of silence that moves amidst the sounds.

Raga Études for Piano – Book 1: Winter

Composed by Garrett Fisher
Performed by GraceANN Cummings, piano

Up until now I’ve mainly created large scale opera-theatre productions, and these piano works are the first real pieces I’ve written for a solo instrument. In my operas I weave in “ragas” – improvisatory frameworks inspired by Indian classical music – that intentionally disguise my own inspiration in order to encourage performers to discover their own. This freedom is foreign to most western musicians, and requires great trust and extensive practice. It also yields performances that are fresh and alive as we never know what the performer is going to come up with. With these piano ragas, I stepped out of the world of theatre and entirely into the world of sound.

As I was beginning to flesh them out, I came across a video of GraceANN playing Prokoviev’s “Toccata in D minor.” I thought she was a fearless performer, and I knew immediately she was the one meant to bring these to life. Thankfully, she was as into it as I was. Unlike my work with opera-theatre, where the pieces are developed through an intensive rehearsal process, GraceANN and I have had no rehearsals, only trust which was established within minutes of our first meeting. She’s been as silent as my blueprints, and as with you, this performance is the first time I’ve heard the full series live. It’s an exciting new direction. On to Book 2!

[0:00] 1: Winter Solstice – Night
[2:25] 2: Winter Solstice – Dusk
[5:40] 3: Mid Spring – Dawn
[7:15] 4: Mid Winter – Morning
[8:33] 5: Mid Fall – Dawn
[12:58] 6: Late Fall – Afternoon
[15:31] 7: Late Summer – Morning
[18:10] 8: Fall Equinox – Noon
[21:06] 9: Late Spring – Noon
[23:40] 10: Mid Summer – Dusk
[26:12] 11: Late Winter – Afternoon
[29:53] 12: Spring Equinox – Night
[32:04] 13: Summer Solstice – Noon
[33:37] 14: Late Winter – Dawn
[34:38] 15: Mid Winter – Dawn
[37:27] 16: Mid Summer – Dawn
[40:39] 17: Summer Solstice – Dawn
[42:24] 18: Late Fall – Noon

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of previously unreleased material.

A spirited, wide-ranging improvisation involving longtime associates Dennis Rea (guitar), Seattle Jazz Hall of Famer Wally Shoup (alto saxophone), and Monktail Creative Music Concern core members John Seman (bass) and Mark Ostrowski (drums), recorded in 2017. The expeditionaries traverse rugged sonic terrain encompassing thickets of mutant jazz, quiescent geothermal pools, and tectonic overthrust zones.

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of previously unreleased material.

Alex Guy is a Seattle-based violinist, violist, singer and composer, and is the leader and principal songwriter of Led To Sea, a magnetic trio that fuses classical, pop and experimental music. Alex has also composed extensively for film, theater, and dance, and has performed and collaborated with a virtual who’s who of bandleaders, composers, improvisers and jazz musicians in the Pacific NW and beyond, including Angel Olsen, Thao and the Get Down Stay Down, Wayne Horvitz, Mirah, Sera Cahoone, Jherek Bischoff, Ahamefule Oluo, Laura Veirs, Amanda Palmer and many more.

These seven solo viola improvisations were recorded at the Chapel one evening this fall. When I work on recordings I typically get into a critical and perfectionist mode. In contrast, when I’m improvising it often brings out in me a deep sense of freedom and trust in my own voice (on a good day anyway!). During the isolation of COVID, my goal has been to discover a more genuine version of myself in relationship to other people, and these pieces have become part of that challenge. I took the recording of the session home intending to make modifications and corrections. As I kept listening to the pieces, I decided that their peculiarities and imperfections (including the sounds of the room itself) were some of my favorite parts – spontaneous and true to the moment, so I left the tracks mostly untouched. I hope you enjoy them!

1 – 0:00
2 – 5:48
3 – 10:01
4 – 12:46
5 – 16:51
6 – 20:32
7 – 24:24

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of previously unreleased material.

Amelia Coulter is an alto trombonist and experimental sound artist. She enjoys discovering new, messy, and uncomfortable embodiments for the trombone using alternative techniques, modifications, and integration with analog electronics. She has a bachelor of music from Cornish College of the Arts. She would like to acknowledge that these sounds were produced on the unceded traditional land of the first people of Seattle, the Duwamish People past and present, and to honor with gratitude the land itself and the Duwamish Tribe.

This recording is a live solo improvisation for alto trombone amplified via mixing board with two channels of feedback. Inspired by the dueling feedback loops of anxiety and depression, the goal is to embrace the closed loop system by plugging outputs back into inputs to become something more powerful.

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of previously unreleased material.

Tiffany Lin is a classically trained pianist and designer who has a love-procrastinate-hate-melancholy relationship with playing and performing music. Therefore, tiflin’s scant time on the instrument is usually bookended by both angst and joy, lately inspired by the folklore of tactile skills, always an investigation in comfort. Let her know how you’re feeling. 

Table of Contents:

1. (00:00) Wishing this was a familiar gospel tune which I could sing to.
2. (11:13) A small song guided by the mantra, this is an improvisation, here I am improvising.
3. (15:09) This is a rhythmic ear break.
4. (16:39) We Can Be Pretty, a love song for this Baldwin. I never owned a piano until 2020 – this damn thing is so expensive – yet (in a f-ing tragic year) the stars aligned and I have so much gratitude.

(photo: Tracy Cilona)

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of previously unreleased material.

Josh Medina is an electroacoustic composer and performer from Seattle. His work reflects a variety of styles and genres, combining elements from electronic music, ambient, folk, free improvisation and drone. In 2014, he began playing as a duo with sound artist Paurl Walsh, releasing an EP shortly thereafter, followed by their subsequent LP Vault of Angels released via Debacle Records. Medina is also a member of shoegaze/dream rock outfit somesurprises.

Recently, and as a result of the loss of live music, Medina helped establish a collectively run label, OBSCURE & TERRIBLE, releasing his own music along with other local experimental musicians from the Seattle community. 2021 will see the release of his debut solo album Drifting Toward the Absolute from Eiderdown Records, a collection of ecstatic pre-pandemic cassette recordings for manipulated guitar and synthesizer.

For his contribution to the Wayward in Limbo series, Medina crafted a trio of long form ambient pieces utilizing field recordings, analog synth, guitar, electronics and tape. Through the power of repetition, Medina seeks to transform the listener’s perception and create an intentional environment for contemplation. The result is a meditation on stasis, solitude, the Pacific Northwest bioregion and the past year spent largely at home.

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of previously unreleased material.