Doors open at 7 PM.

Debut performances of two large-group ensembles:

The Northwest Experimental Guitar Orchestra is an eighteen-piece ensemble comprising musicians from Seattle, Tacoma, Bremerton, and surrounding areas. Its primary focus is exploring non-traditional means of scoring, conduction, and technology integration, with an emphasis on self-guiding scores that eschew the need for traditional conduction in a large-group setting.

In their debut performance, they will be performing two aurally-guided compositions by Blake DeGraw in which the performers’ parts are communicated to them through headphones:

Koiní Moíra is a minimalist composition heavily inspired by the works of Steve Reich and György Ligeti; it is an experiment in forming and maintaining decelerating phase patterns over an extended duration. The Ersatz is an impressionistic tragedy about a clash between birds and insects.

Cryptid Soup is a Seattle-based queer contemplative improvisation collective led by experimental guitarist and iOS-music pioneer Qid Love. The group explores improvised music as a pathway for spiritual growth, meaning making, and identity development for queer and marginalized folks. Qid Love (they/she) is an autistic, disabled, non-binary/transfemme artist, writer, filmmaker, and musician with over 130 albums.

The Last Milonga: contemporary sounds in guitar and composition from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela. Music of Ricardo Zohn Muldon, Quiqui Sinesi, Carlos Moscardini, Astor Piazzolla and more.

Mark Hilliard Wilson presents a short concert exploring contemporary composers from Latin America. The evening will feature both the familiar, even classic tangos and also experimental music from Venezuela, but all of it derived from folkloric influences.

Mark is known for his performances on the first Friday of the month at St. James Cathedral, as the founder and director of the Seattle Guitar Orchestra, for his recordings with Sarah Bassingthwaighte, and his collaborations with composers from around the world, most notably with Ukrainian composer Oleg Boyko, who has written two concertos for Mark and Nigerian composer Taiwo Adegoke as well as a number of pieces for Seattle Guitar orchestra.

Seattle Guitar Circle, a 9-piece acoustic guitar orchestra, brings “Simple Songs” to the Chapel (Monk, Coltrane, Corea, Satie, Coltrane, Brouwer, Monk, Fripp, Sakamoto & SGC).

Seattle Guitar Circle was founded in 1993 by Steve Ball, Bill Rieflin and Bill Van Buren. For 30 years, they have been playing eclectic, polyrhythmic prog chamber music arranged for large acoustic guitar ensemble all over the Seattle area. Seattle Guitar Circle has many related sub-groups such as Tuning the Air (7 years of weekly shows at Fremont Abby), Tiny Orchestral Moments (7+ years of workshops and live shows) and Argentina’s Electric Gauchos, recording and performing in Seattle since 1997.

This international community was initially born via Robert Fripp’s ‘Guitar Craft’ workshops that began in 1985. Each SGC performance is a combination of tightly-arranged chaos, layered guitars ‘circulations’ – where each guitarist plays one note at a time in evolving melodies.

SGC performs collaborative repertoire for layered guitars and voices including structured improvisation that sounds composed and composed collaboration that sounds improvised. This 2023 ‘Simple Songs’ performance brings to life new arrangements of pieces by Meredith Monk, Hanai Rani, John Coltrane, Jon Brion, Jonny Greenwood, Charles Ives, Chick Corea, Erik Satie, Leo Brouwer, Robert Fripp, Ryuichi Sakamoto – as well as new work from composers within the core SGC team.

Dear Persephone will open and collaborate with the SGC. Dear Persephone is Jessica Gallo and April Mitchell, dual harp & vocals playing Ethereal Folk: a blend of classical, improvisation and folk. 

Steven Arntson is a falsettist, concertina player, and writer from the Pacific Northwest. His is a planet that closely orbits no star. Melodies set against instrumental drones and varied textures conjure a hopeful spirit and thoughts of the forest and its creatures. Tonight he performs original compositions for concertina and falsetto, as well as arrangements of works by Béla Bartók and JS Bach.

Please join four of Seattle’s top improvisers – Tom Varner (French horn), Heather Bentley (viola/electronics), Greg Campbell (percussion/mixed brass), and Neil Welch (saxophone/electronics) as they celebrate the summer solstice in sound. In the second half of the program, special guest artists will be joining in.

Ricksplund is a Provo, Utah-based improvising duo consisting of Steven Ricks (trombone, electronics) and Christian Asplund (viola, piano/keyboards, electronics). Ricksplund has existed for almost 15 years.  The most recent manifestations of this duo involve one improvising on their particular acoustic instrument (trombone or viola, respectively), while the other improvises adding effects, samples, and loops created from the live instrument’s sound.

A Flawed Contraption is a duo consisting of Seattle virtuosos/luminaries Greg Campbell (vibraphone and percussion) and Jesse Canterbury (clarinets).

The two duos will team up to premiere a new stopwatch-based, comprovised quartet by Asplund from his Ghost Speech series.

Two American practitioners of the West African kora engage the shape-shifting landscape of the Mandinka sonic arts.

The kora is a 22 stringed harp, a creation of the great Mande civilization based in West Africa. It has migrated in somewhat recent years to be recognized as a music of global significance. Chet Corpt and Sean Gaskell are honored to be a small part of this development, initiated by the work of various kora masters, some of whom both have studied with.

Kora arises from a primarily oral culture, and one of the hallmarks of Mandinka sound arts is that it’s style and substance are remarkably fluid. There are no codified versions of songs, or even of the narratives behind them. There are, of course, traditional and ceremonial music performances in Mandinka culture, but in a concert setting each performance is intensely personal, and hopefully unfolds in new and unexpected ways.

St Celfer (John Parker) makes future folk improvisations on glitch-tronics: sound is amalgamated and congealed into a resolution of crossed and overloaded signals. During the isolation of the pandemic, St Celfer devised instruments focused on the interface between human and machine. They mount to a single mic stand with interconnected gear attached and arranged so that the player can best make music in the moment. Each performance embraces sensory overload in order to unlock ways of perceiving a world made narrow: There is a lot of noise today – we need to hear the music within it. St Celfer has been featured as “New & Notable” in the experimental category on Bandcamp for 3 years running.

The cavernous and beautiful project of Chloe Harris, Raica walks a fine musical line between lucid animation and blurred darkness. Using only machines that communicate noises and blurps to a fascinating degree.

The Red Pants Collective, an improvised movement and sound project formed by father/daughter duo Giordana and James Falzone, are joined by special guests Omar Willey on spoken word, Heather Bentley on viola and cello, and movement artists Maia Melene D’Urfé and Symone Sanz.

Four Seattle electronic musicians join forces to present an evening of cinematic, immersive ambient music, with engaging visuals in an inspiring venue for making expansive, patient electronic music.

WMD is the ambient electronic project of Michael Erickson. The prolific Electronic Musician from the pacific northwest creates lush, airy songs thrumming with the power of melancholia, nostalgia, and the bliss and sorrow of relationships.

Party Store is the recording and live performance project of multi-instrumentalist Josh Machniak. Embracing a minimalist approach, Party Store aims to capture and convey Machniak’s own form of experimental songwriting, drawing from influences that range from ambient, shoegaze, slowcore, lofi and folk. 

Shelf Nunny is the musical alias of Seattle based artist Christian Gunning. Focusing heavily on found sounds and cinematic soundscapes. Great for any fans of Icelandic group múm.

Mason Lynass is an electronic musician making generative, ambient, and IDM music in Seattle. His recent generative electronic music works explore themes of quantum listening, personal introspection, and human connection to nature and technology.