Chloe Harris (aka Raica) has been an integral and influential figure in the Pacific Northwest music community for over two decades. Her contributions as a musical artist, producer, DJ, mentor, record label owner (Further), and record shop owner have helped lay the groundwork and build the foundation upon which rests the current success of Seattle’s underground electronic music scene.

(00:00) Untitled 1
(06:54) Untitled 2
(10:58) Untitled 3
(17:42) Untitled 4
(23:24) Untitled 5
(29:34) Untitled 6
(37:20) Untitled 7

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.

Jessica Lurie is a multi-instrumentalist specializing in saxophones, flute and voice, and enjoys a varied career as a performer, composer, producer, and teaching artist. Highlights include working with artists such as Taylor Mac, John Zorn, Devotchka, Helen Gillet, Fred Frith, Bill Frisell, Henry Butler, Indigo Girls, Mark Ribot, Frank London, Allison Miller, and Nels Cline. Jessica performs with her own ensemble, and co-leads the Tiptons Saxophone Quartet & Drums, Living Daylights trio, Sofie Salonika, Freethiopiques, and Slingshot, and has been working on several new solo and collaborative recordings to be released in 2021.

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. Classically trained, she has shifted to an unabashedly experimental artistic output: As a performer, she can be seen performing on instruments like her electric seven string and five string violins or her electronic pedal board in numerous chamber ensembles that utilize improvisation, electronics, and often both. As a composer, her work for chamber ensembles and orchestras has been performed by organizations across both California and Washington. 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.

Heather and Jessica have been creative collaborators for years in their free improvisation project Slingshot. Tonight’s music is all about Spring! – new growth and ideas emerging from fertile dirt and darkness into light and air, to tree and blossom. Their spontaneous compositions both hold intentional musical space for the many changes and traumas brought by the pandemic, while blooming with new sonic energy and color.

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.

Dave Abramson is a drummer and percussionist. He grew up playing in the hardcore and metal scene on the east coast and studied visual arts in upstate New York, where he began to play improvised and experimental music. Since moving to Seattle in 2002 he has recorded, performed and/or toured with folks such as Eyvind Kang, Secret Chiefs 3, Wayne Horvitz, Climax Golden Twins, Lori Goldston, Paul Hoskin, Wally Shoup, Greg Kelley, Boredoms, etc. Abramson is a member of the bands Master Musicians of Bukkake, Diminished Men, Spider Trio, Telescoping, and has composed music for the Maureen Whiting Dance company since 2004. He has toured throughout the U.S., Europe and Canada and can be heard on albums released by Tzadik, Sub Pop, Drag City, Abduction, Conspiracy, Web of Mimicry, and Important Records.

For the last few months I have been back in New Jersey at my childhood home, a return to the concrete basement where I first started playing drums along to cassettes and eventually with bands. On my first drum set, a 1989 Tama Rockstar, a Bar Mitzvah present from my parents, and a 1967 Ludwig kit gifted from a friend, I present six improvisations. The opening and closing pieces are deconstructions of a theme entitled “Doubles”, and the third is based on the Afro-Haitian folkloric rhythm Yanvalou. It has been a time of self-reflection personally and musically to be back in the space and on the instruments related to my younger self. Thanks to everyone for tuning in.

(00:00) Improvisation #1
(05:36) Improvisation #2
(10:44) Improvisation #3
(15:17) Improvisation #4
(20:58) Improvisation #5
(27:25) Improvisation #6

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.

Kasson Crooker (aka Symbion Project) has been composing various styles of eclectic electronic music for the past 25 years. Based in Seattle, Kasson’s current musical focus is on immersive audio experiences, from live quadraphonic surround sound performances to interactive VR-Music apps featuring interactive spatial audio. Spanning the past three decades, over a dozen albums and EPs have been released from Symbion Project, ELYXR, Khems, Freezepop, and many other side projects, as well as composing bespoke music for indie films, video games, and VR experiences. (YouTube, Instagram)

Gishiki is a live quadraphonic performance of music from the Symbion Project albums Gishiki and Backscatter, primarily featuring the Japanese koto heavily processed through modular synth DSP, layered over lush vintage synthesizer beds and field recordings. Live performances of Gishiki took place in 2018-19 on the West Coast featuring performances at Good Shepherd Center Chapel (Seattle), Bloom (Portland), and Synthplex (Los Angeles). The music ranges from lush, immersive ambient to dark and pulsating, with the koto as its sonic centerpiece.

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.

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.