Seattle pianist, Jesse Myers, presents an evening of spacious solo piano works from the masters of time and space— Arvo Pärt, Morton Feldman, and more. In a reference to the aesthetics of John Cage, this program is meant to bring mental clarity. The audience is encouraged to get comfortable, bring a mat or pillow, and forgo the chairs. So, hit reset on your brain, close your eyes, and become entranced by the magical sounds of the Chapel’s extensive resonance.

Jesse Myers is an adventurous explorer of music that expands the possibilities of the piano. With a strong interest in performance that pushes piano music into new realms, Myers frequently performs music for prepared piano, new music for piano and electronics, as well as traditional classical literature. He is a performer, educator, and composer with a goal of giving the audience a fresh perspective of the piano and an imaginative understanding of the music. His solo concerts have been featured on City Arts Magazine, KingFM’s Second Inversion, Seattle Weekly, The Live Music Project, Seattle Weekly’s “35 Things You Must Do This Fall,” and were a part of The Stranger’s Best Concerts of 2017 for three seasons. His recent work with the prepared piano and electroacoustic music has led to tours across the country including artist residencies and guest performances at Cornish College of the Arts, Capital University Conservatory of Music, Bowling Green State University, Lewis University, and Carlsbad Music Festival.

Program:

David Lang – Cage
John Cage – In a Landscape
Carl Vine – Threnody
Beat Furrer – Voicelessness, The Snow Has No Voice
Morton Feldman – Palais de Mari
Arvo Pärt – Für Alina

February, led by double bassist Kelsey Mines, will be premiering five separate pieces that seek to challenge the musical range of the double bass. The program incorporates contemporary classical compositional elements with free improvising, all made possible by ensemble members, Mike Gebhart, Andrew Olmstead, and Matt Williams. Concert attendees can expect to hear extended techniques, synthetic sounds, eclectic percussion instruments, vocal harmonies, and so much more!

Tiny Ghost is a new quartet with Greg Sinibaldi, Katie Jacobson, Ivan Arteaga & Raymond Larsen. We play music that is strange, pretty, funny, and weird. We like trying to understand the limitations we put on ourselves within the ‘free’ or ‘improvised’ music genre. We often ask ourselves questions like “what happens if we make ‘silly’ sounds while improvising?” or “what if this piece had a story behind it?” to try to push ourselves beyond what we think we know about free and improvised music. We like discovering sounds together and using words in combination with sound in our music.

Pink Void is the moniker of Crystal Perez, best known in the noise world for her part in the much-revered Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, and currently playing bass in Low Hums. Since 2011, she’s created sprawling landscapes of layered guitar, samples, and static as Pink Void, that are, as she describes, “Sensual nightmare soundtracks for the whole family.”

Noisegasm is the Electronic music duo of Greg Weber (guitars, synths, pedals) and Brad Anderson (keyboards, computer). Equal parts noise, rock, classical, ambient and avant garde, their shows may caress your eardrums or bludgeon them, usually both.

OwL-Dent = Experimental soul. Crux trinket. Everything is a toy. Whirlpools. Sometimes finds ghost voices.

An evening of music and discussion with Seattle composers:

Carson Farley, Film Music, for piano, cello, and flute
Aaron Keyt, Music for Wallace, for piano
Ian McKnight
Patrick O’Keefe, Morning Stroll (revised), for clarinet quartet

The Seattle Composers’ Salon fosters the development, performance and appreciation of new music by regional composers and performers. At bi-monthly, informal presentations, the Salon features finished works, previews, and works in progress. Composers, performers, and audience members gather in a casual setting that allows for experimentation and discussion. Everyone is welcome!

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.