THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED.

Doug Russell is a guitarist and improvisor based in Seattle. He studied music at Wesleyan University under Alvin Lucier, Anthony Braxton and Ron Kuivila before forming the Los Angeles-based free noise group Open City with Peter Kolovos and Andrew Maxwell. Open City operated from 1997 to 2006.

Kirill Nikolai is a Seattle-based composer. He has released both solo and collaborative works on Tonefloat (NL), Fluid Audio (UK), Apollolaan Recordings (UK), Reverb Worship (UK), and Ho Hum Records (UK). 

They will be presenting experimental music for electric guitar in solo and duo configurations, including solo improvisation, a guitar based microsound and spectral piece, an original composition for two guitars and oscillator, and a performance of Alvin Lucier’s “Criss-Cross”. 

TEXTURES is an improvising trio exploring that idea, the timbre and fabric of sound, nuance and undulation, getting past note into the sound itself. As a group, we come to this project with no specific preconceptions or dialogue, no mapping it out, and so the work will be as spontaneous as possible, with structures of amoebic movement. As some musicians have noted, music is a listening art, and so with improvisation the element of trust is bolstered, the value of Ear consciousness is brought into a more present focus.

Lu Evers (clarinet) is a veteran of the 1970s Seattle avant jazz scene, with Al Hood’s Jazz Workshop, and a founding member of Holus Bolus. Lu spent a few years in New York with his own trio, and stellar accordionist Victor Prieto.

Domenic Chiaverini (bass) has toured and recorded throughout the United States and Europe. He has played in all styles of music and has performed and/or toured with Wally Shoup, Ed Petry, Moraine, Alex Dimartino Trio, Semaphore, Gotham, and others. He is currently Currently teaching and performing in the NYC tri-state area after having lived in Seattle and the Northwest.

Tom Scully is a Seattle-based guitarist, improviser, and teacher. He currently plays in the improvised noise-rock duo CSTMR.

Screening and listening party for A Nomad of Sound by Marina Albero.

Join us in a very special night of music and community to celebrate Marina Albero’s new album. Successfully funded through a crowdfunding campaign last summer, the album is going to be launched November 3rd, but this event is a very special screening and listening party where the tracks can be watched as they were recorded in New Orleans. There will be a live performance as well of one of the tracks by Marina and her daughter Serena who’s also part of the new album.

A new trio to deliver a mix of free improvisation and punk, all of it wild-eyed and fierce as hell. Guitarist Joe Baiza (Saccharine Trust, Universal Congress Of) and bassist Mike Watt (Minutemen, fIREHOSE, Stooges) both need no introduction, but if you insist: They’re defining figures of the 1980’s California hardcore/post-punk scene and did as much as anyone to expand the music into something beyond categorization, pulling things in from all over the imaginary genre-map, including free jazz’s improvisation and exploratory fervor. Drummer Chris Corsano (Rangda, Björk, Bill Orcutt) came up in a world heavily indebted to Baiza and Watt, fully embracing the ethos of “Punk is whatever we made it to be.” He’s brought that approach to free improvisation/experimental/etc. since he came on the scene in the late ’90s. Flash forward to late 2023 when the trio first met out in the Mojave Desert. They cut an album for Yucca Alta Records (available here), followed by a pair of SoCal shows. Now they’re embarking on a West Coast tour.

Featuring a special collaboration of Alan Jones, Dave Abramson (What), Tom Scully and Casey Adams (CSTMR). Combining their respective duo endeavors, they will be forging an exploratory quartet as What?xCSTMR.

Seattle sax legend and Festival Resident Artist Skerik performs solo saxophone with a complex multiple EFX system based around harmonizers and a balanced continuous matrix routing system. Those allow him to program effects in multiple arrays and create up to nine independent voices through one saxophone. He constructs dynamic, symphonic improvisations inspired by such composers and improvisers as Wayne Shorter, Ornette Coleman, Olivier Messiaen, and Steve Reich. Blazinspace (aka Gardenia Theroux) transforms the space with immersive digital projections.

Hey everyone! Sous Chef here, inviting you to a night of beautiful and avant garde sounds in celebration of the release of my debut album Pas un Monde, Mais un Miroir and supported by the incredible New York pianist/composer Erika Dohi and local bass and songwriting maestro Kelsey Mines featuring the visual crafts of Dion Egg.

The night will kick off with Kelsey Mines playing solo bass and vocals, a transcendent improvisatory experience I first saw at a Cornish show that left me mind-blown. You won’t wanna miss it. Followed by the amazing artist Erika Dohi, flying in from NYC. I saw her perform at the Chapel as part of the Earshot Jazz Fest a few years back and she was a huge inspiration for my record too. Unreal pianist, great composer, genuine mastermind.

I’ll be closing out the evening with a solo performance featuring the grand piano, my modular synths, the octatrack and a few more goodies, as well as visuals provided by the one and only Dion Egg. The performance will feature music from the album as well as a few covers and some new original works, all surrounding the theme of “Place.” It’s set to be an incredible night of unique, original music, the kind of show that only happens once in a blue moon. Come experience something truly new!

Doors open 7 PM, music 8 PM.

Blurring the limits between speed and slowness, guitarists Meg Duffy and Greg Uhlmann communicate in velocities, underwriting each other’s peaks and flurries as they ache toward a mutual horizon. After playing in Perfume Genius and Hand Habits, Duffy and Uhlmann embarked on their first record together, Doubles. A testament to the wordlessness of their musical intimacy, they take up the guitar in order to make an imprint of the slowness and presence of their improvisational practice. These one-take improvisations, recorded in Uhlmann’s brothers’ house on a borrowed tape recorder, unfold like a game of truth or dare. Their constant motif is an unceasing return, a steady heartbeat they mutually commit to, knowing when one wanders off, the other will either follow or call them home. Here, flushness overrides order, each note saunters by like initials etched into tree bark: a devotion both passing and eternal.

Primarily known as a bassist with groups like Grammy-nominated band Alvvays and surf pop band La Luz,  Abbey Blackwell (Seattle) is focusing her energies on writing for solo guitar and voice. Her songwriting calls back to the lyrical, hanging melodies of Sibylle Baier and Linda Perhacs, with angular, geometric chord progressions that lean in satisfying directions. Her next full length album Big Big Motion will be released 9/13.

(photo: Jacob Boll)

Guitarist Michael Nicolella performs his own works for solo classical guitar, alongside music of: Debussy, Falla and Albeniz and works for electric guitar by: György Ligeti, Tom Baker and Jacob ter Veldhuis. 

Described by Classical Guitar magazine as “one of the contemporary guitar’s most gifted stars,” and by Guitar Player magazine as “a classical iconoclast, (who) continues to push the boundaries of the genre as both a composer and player,” Michael Nicolella is recognized as one of America’s most innovative classical guitarists. He has performed throughout North America, Europe and Japan as solo recitalist, chamber musician and soloist with orchestra. Michael’s recording of his arrangement of the Complete Bach Cello Suites was described as a “monumental achievement” by Soundboard magazine while the Seattle Times commented, “Nicolella’s smooth virtuosity… show the suites in an entirely new light.” His previous four critically acclaimed releases were albums of contemporary music for classical and electric guitar in solo, chamber, orchestral and electronic settings. Nicolella has performed with a wide range of orchestras and artists, including Seattle Opera, Symphony Tacoma, Northwest Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Modern Orchestra, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, violinist Gil Shaham, and sopranos Alexandra Picard and Joyce DiDonato. He is a frequent performer with the Seattle Symphony, having performed over one hundred concerts with the orchestra. Michael is on the faculty of Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle.  

Lauren Sarah Hayes brings the intense physicality of her hybrid human-machine sonic performance to Seattle, with support from local computer synthesists Sebastian Camens and RM Francis.

Lauren Sarah Hayes is a Scottish improviser, sound artist, and scholar recognised for her embodied approach to computer music. Her music is a mix of experimental pop/live electronics/techno/noise/free improvisation and has been described as ‘voracious’ and ‘exhilarating’. She is a sculptress of sound, manipulating, remixing, and bending voice, drum machines, analogue synths and self-built software live and physically. She is excited by what can happen in the vulnerable relationships between sound, space, and audience. Her shows are highly physical, making the performance of live electronic music more engaging for audiences. Over the last fifteen years she has developed and honed a deliberately challenging and unpredictable performance system that explores the relationships between bodies, sound, environments, and technology.

Hayes has been commissioned by major festivals including the London Jazz Festival, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival with a live BBC Radio 3 broadcast as part of its 2017 International Showcase, and Sonica, for which she gave four sold-out performances inside Hamilton Mausoleum, Scotland, famous for once holding the longest echo of any man-made structure. She has performed extensively across Europe and the US, including as part of her tenure with the New BBC Radiophonic Workshop at Kings Place, London. The Wire described her 2016 album MANIPULATION (pan y rosas discos) as “skittering melodies and clip-clopping rhythms suggesting a mischievous intelligence emerging from this web of wires”. Her 2021 release Embrace (Superpang) was included in Bandcamp’s Best Experimental Music of February 2021.

Sebastian Camens is a Dutch/Australian multidisciplinary artist based in Seattle. With releases on NADA and Conditional, his work aims to push the boundaries of the subversive within computer music.

RM Francis is an artist based in Seattle working with computer-generated sound and language via recording, installation, and performance. He has presented work at the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music (Oakland), The Lab (San Francisco), Kolonia Artystów (Gdańsk), and at festivals including Diffusion (Baltimore), Algorithmic Art Assembly (San Francisco), and Parken (Vienna). His practice foregrounds computation-based compositional strategies, focusing on methods that exploit discrepancies between human and artificial auditory systems. His current work exploits latent phonological data extracted from non-linguistic sound in order to generate the tonal, rhythmic, and semantic content of synthesized speech. The resulting asubjective narration articulates the potentialities of speech decoupled from embodied human expression, navigating between abstract sound and uncanny characterological specificity.

His oeuvre spans multimedia work incorporating sound, video, performance, and chocolate (Hyperplastic Other, 2017), investigations of historical computer synthesis methods (A Taxonomy of Guffaws, 2020), procedural text works for a chorus of synthetic voices (Every Single Person Has Some Muscle, 2022), and hallucinatory duets between dictation apps and deep learning networks (pedimos un mensaje, 2023). In addition to his solo projects, in recent years he has collaborated with Jack Callahan & Jeff Witscher, Jung An Tagen, and farmersmanual, among others.