To honor the recent passing of composer Harold Budd, this special edition of Wayward in Limbo features a live recording of a very special concert by Harold and Seattle bassist Keith Lowe.

The performance took place at the Good Shepherd Center Chapel in Seattle on June 11, 2009, to celebrate the release of Harold’s book of poetry, “Colorful Fortune.” It was co-presented by Nonsequitur and publishers Heavenly Monkey Editions (Vancouver) and MoonLiner Books (Seattle). Thanks to Rob Angus for the beautiful recording, and to Keith Lowe for agreeing to share it with us.

And thank you, Harold, for gracing this world with your beautiful music. You are appreciated and missed.

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.

RM Francis is an artist living in Seattle who works with computer-generated sound. His most recent releases are A Taxonomy of Guffaws, on ETAT, and Nth White Dot, on Conditional.

Jack Callahan is a composer and sound engineer based in New York. Since 2013 he has been primarily working under the moniker die Reihe, taken from the journal edited by Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He runs Bánh Mì Verlag, an imprint dedicated to contemporary experimental music and culture. His music has been called “unbelievably bad,” “tiring,” “unsurprising” and “boring,” in one case all by the same person.

Jeff Witscher is a musician who currently manages his own custodial and maintenance company, Vincent’s Expert Cleaners in Portland, OR. He has recorded under many different names, Rene Hell perhaps being the most known. He focuses primarily on sound composition as well as video works for his live performances. Recent solo recordings include Approximately 1,000 Beers (2018), Fy Monkey Sisaj Kura (2017), Cob Music (2016), Bifurcating a Resounding No! (2014) and Vanilla Call Option (2013).

In Every Single Person Has Some Muscle RM Francis reinterprets Jack Callahan and Jeff Witscher’s 2019 composition What Happens on Earth Stays on Earth as an abstract drama of entropy set in the uncanny valley of artificial speech. The six human voices of What Happens on Earth Stays on Earth have been replaced by machinic proxies synthesized from the speech of the original performers. Vestiges of the organic appear briefly to comment on their own retreat from the realm of the audible before withdrawing to the edges of speech, out of which their inchoate vocalizations obtrude intermittently on the unfolding narrative. Whereas the original work was indebted to Robert Ashley’s spoken operas, Every Single Person Has Some Muscle redeploys the iterative strategy of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room in the domain of machine listening, in which the transcription errors of commercial dictation software replace acoustic reverberation as the means by which the human voice is eroded, yielding a compositional logic based on phonetic drift and semantic refraction. Featuring the voices of Josh Haringa, Daren Ho, Madalyn Merkey, Colleen O’Connor, Nihal Ramchandani, and Asha Sheshadri. Mastered by Jack Callahan.

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.

Christopher Icasiano is a Filipino-American percussionist and composer from Redmond, WA. Based now in Seattle, he has been performing and touring professionally for over 15 years. His specialization in free-improvisation and experimental music combined with his vast experience with pop and rock have made him a highly sought after collaborator in all genres of music. He co-founded the grassroots arts organization Table & Chairs, as well as the Racer Sessions, a weekly performance series and free-improvisation jam session. He is committed to anti-racist and anti-sexist organizing within Seattle’s DIY and art communities in order to create more accessible and safer spaces.

Solo acoustic drums, sticks, cymbals, room, hands, fingers, nails, feet.

(Photo: Haley Freedlund)

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.

Mark D. Cooper is MFA graduate in electronic music and recording media from Mills College. He is a member of the Seattle Phonographers Union, and the songwriting project Cooper-Wetstone.

Quintessence

A few years ago, I embarked on a project of organizing field recordings and sonic experiments loosely under the idea of the four “classical” elements: water, air, earth, and fire. The first two, H2O and AIR had their debut in the amazing Good Shepherd Chapel space. I had planned the third, Terra Cognita, to be a part of the Wayward Music series in the Chapel in November 2020. However, a certain virus, Covid 19, intervened as a “fifth” element. This had me thinking about that fifth element: aether, or what comes out of the unknown, invisible, inaudible. It is always there, in some form, speculated in modern physics as “axions.”

These recordings of quintessence as I know it include field recordings from Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France, the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, U.S.A. and Cleland Wildlife Park, South Australia.

(00:00) Asteroid 1
(03:27) Exosphere
(09:37) Oort
(17:20) Axion
(26:38) Orbits
(32:16) Eridanus
(37:15) Asteroid 2

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.

Kaori Suzuki is a Tokyo-born composer and artist who uses high-droning modified acoustic instruments, intensely high register electronics, tape, and other handmade elements necessary to spin her auditory transmissions. She holds a diverse background in electronic music having designed and produced vintage-inspired electronic instruments (Magic Echo Music) from 2009-2015. Previously based in Seattle, she is currently on faculty at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College. When she’s not performing her solo or collaborative works, she is playing drums in the Oakland-based minimalist psych-punk group Night Collectors, and bowed guitar/cello in the Ecstatic Music Band. Her works are published on independent labels in Germany and the U.S. and soon on Beacon Sound.

rose flames dance on a spiral staircase is a live, loud iteration of a composition using an amplified adapted melodica, oscillators, and real-time processing. Central to the music are the breaths of a re-tuned melodica which was modified to be played with foot pumps, allowing for the sustained excitation of its reeds. Its close-miked amplification interacts with the drifting frequencies of analog oscillators and time delays, the results producing transient harmonic variations and slight auditory distortions in a voluminous echo of an empty concert hall. Various iterations have been performed in small clubs, galleries, and at least once in a concrete munitions storage magazine, and has since been called a performance which “rewards endurance with transcendence”. An offering for the new year.

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.

Composer/pianist Amy D. Rubin enjoys mixing notated music and improvisation with words to create new ways of telling stories. A number of her works are published and recorded by the Music Research Institute in the “Anthology of Keyboard Music from Africa and the Diaspora.” Amy’s music has been recorded on CRI, Mode, Koch International and Con Brio Recordings. She has been commissioned by Seattle Chamber Players, World Music Institute, and Quintet of the Americas, among others, and has collaborated with many Seattle musicians including clarinetist Laura De Luca and pianist Dawn Clement. She is always looking for new collaborators. Many of her performances, lectures, and collaborations can be seen on YouTube.

Here she is joined by her friends Esther and Dass, whose voices you’ll hear in combination with Amy’s improvisations using acoustic piano and synthesized sounds. Included as well is her improvisation for piano and synthesized sounds, Winter Solstice, and a new piano piece in progress, Jamaican Sunset. Amy was a Fulbright professor in Ghana, and you’ll most likely hear some West African influences in her melodies, sounds and rhythms. When she asked her collaborators to choose their poems there were no stated themes in mind. What does emerge is a tapestry which reflects our landscapes, our hopes to create beauty, and our fears about love, loss and devastating upheaval.

Esther Neeser immigrated to the Northwest from Switzerland but stays in touch with the Europe she loves through poetry and politics. She is reading “The Sigh” in German by Christian Morgenstern and “How to Paint the Portrait of a Bird” in French, by Jacques Prevert.

Gordon Dass Adams works and walks outdoors when possible, reads poetry, and stabs at watercolors while listening to the rain. He is reading two poems by the Pacific Northwest writer Gary Snyder, “1980: Letting Go,” and “Beneath My Hand And Eye The Dis­tant Hills, Your Body.”

0:00 – Introductory Remarks
1:52  – How to Paint the Portrait of A Bird (French #1)
4:52 – Jamaican Sunset
9:53 – How to Paint the Portrait of A Bird (English)
12:34 – Beneath My Hand And Eye The Distant Hills, Your Body
16:40 – The Sigh (English)
18:36 – Better Times Ahead
20:58 – 1980: Letting Go
23:24 – The Sigh (German)
25:20 – Winter Solstice Improvisation

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.

Kyle Hanson has created music for dance, film and theater. He co-led the Black Cat Orchestra from 1990 to 2006, and wrote songs and performed with Mirah and Spectratone International.

This evening’s songs were created and performed spontaneously on the accordion with a new bellows technique of my own invention. I thank Steve Peters and Nonsequitur for the opportunity to present this music, and am grateful to be a part of this community of performers and listeners.

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.

Since 2007, A.F. Jones (Tracyton, WA) has been engaged and interested in collecting and selectively compiling site-specific recordings, from the polar ice cap to parking garages in need of routine maintenance. Camera lucida is the third protean composition from Jones, preceded by Apparatchiks (2013), and X Malfeasant, Appropriating Y (2013).

Camera lucida (for Barthes, Sontag, Morris) (2020) is a protean composition for one recordist and one acoustic space or soundstage.

The recordist creates a sound image, of any length, of a selected space or soundstage using the walls and other physical boundaries within the space as filters with an intent to expand or close-in on specific features unique to the space. The acoustic space/soundstage may be left alone or altered, specific to the desires of the recordist.

Camera lucida is for the listener that engages with it. The listener should consider the concept of studium/punctum (Barthes), that “allows discovery of the operator” within the aural image. The composition is intended for any musician, writer, composer, or any communicator, under any circumstance, actively or subconsciously thinking about what might be conveyed in their subject or message.

The following terms are offered for consideration in performing or listening to any version of Camera lucida:

• Photogeny — the practice of bringing an image to light. Also an antiquated synonym for photography. Or more literally, producing an image with light, physically, chemically, and aesthetically.

• Audiogeny — the producing of a mental image by way of sound.

• Acoustogeny — the shaping of aural images by way of the traits of acoustic spaces.

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.

Steve Fisk is an American composer and record producer, born 1954 in Long Beach, CA. While he is widely regarded as one of the midwives of the Northwest Grunge Music scene, he has been writing and releasing his own work since 1979. He currently lives in Tacoma with his wife, artist Anne Marie Grgich.

Be The First To Like B-83 (for Gordon Mumma) was commissioned by the Frye Art Museum in 2015 as part of their Genius/21 Century/ Seattle. It is an homage to Gordon Mumma’s Megaton, for William S. Burroughs. Both “Megaton” and “B-83” are concerned with the limitations of thermonuclear bombing.

Reflections on Berkeley in a Time of Plague (2020) is a text setting of Jack Spicer’s poem Berkeley In A Time of Plague. It is read by Fisk’s frequent collaborator Richard Denner/Jampa Dorge, who was a student of Spicer’s.

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.

Bit Graves is an experimental electronic chamber duo that explores the shifting boundaries between the physical universe and the digital multiverse. Their music takes the form of dense drone landscapes which range in character from ambient to abrasive. By blending the coarse, unpredictable voltages of plain circuitry with the rigid, precise calculation of digital programming, they depict sonic worlds which are both organic and artificial.

We recorded this concert as a set of three duets for KORG MS-20 synthesizer and SuperCollider live processing. Each duet was constructed as an improvisation on the theme of opposing analog and digital forces. We use different digital models to deconstruct the synthesizer signal and piece it back together in real time, with unreliable and somewhat unpredictable results.

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.