October Concerts You Can’t Miss

by Maggie Molloy

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Second Inversion and the Live Music Project create a monthly calendar featuring contemporary classical, cross-genre, and experimental performances in Seattle, the Eastside, Tacoma, and places in between! 

thvLYmNB

Keep an eye out for our flyer in concert programs and coffee shops around town. Feel free to download, print, and distribute it yourself! If you’d like to be included on this list, submit your event to the Live Music Project at least 6 weeks prior to the event and tag it with “new music.”

October 2018 New Music Flyer

 

Wayward Music Series
Concerts of contemporary composition, free improvisation, electroacoustic music, and sonic experiments. This month: atmospheric soundscapes, improvised noise, music inspired by historic women of Mexico, and more.
Various days, 7:30/8pm, Good Shepherd Chapel | $5-$15

Max Richter and ACME
There are few places more appropriate for the rainy day soundscapes of Max Richter than Seattle. Hear the prolific composer with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble as they perform Infra in its entirety, plus selections from The Blue Notebooks. Check out our interview with the composer for more details on what’s in store.
Tues, 10/2, 7:30pm, Moore Theatre | $35-$45

Photo by Wolfgang Borrs.

Leslie Odom, Jr. with the Seattle Symphony
Leslie Odom, Jr. launched into stardom when he originated the role of Aaron Burr in a little musical called Hamilton. Now he joins our own Seattle Symphony for an evening of jazz standards and Broadway hits.
Tues-Wed, 10/2-10/3, 7:30pm, Benaroya Hall | $46-$103

SMCO: American Experiences
It’s rare to see the concertmaster of PNB on the same program as the rapper from Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop”but then again, Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra’s 10th anniversary is cause for boundary-bursting celebration. Michael Jinsoo Lim joins the orchestra for Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto, Wanz performs Randall Woolf’s Blues for Black Hoodies, and masterworks by Leonard Bernstein and Jennifer Higdon complete the program.
Thurs, 10/4, 7:30pm, Nordstrom Recital Hall | $15-25

Wanz guest stars in SMCO’s Tenth Anniversary concert.

The Esoterics: CŌNSŌLŌ
Requiems are reimagined in this concert exploring the sense of comfort found in the musical act of remembrance. Included in the program are new works from the three winners of last year’s POLYPHONOS competition: Anna-Karin Klockar, Sarah Rimkus, and Ily Matthew Maniano.
Fri, 10/5, 8pm, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church | $15-$25
Sat, 10/6, 8pm, Holy Rosary Catholic Church | $15-$25

OSSCS: The Bounty of the Earth
Orchestra Seattle and Seattle Chamber Singers launch a season-long celebration of the music of Lili Boulanger, performing her extraordinary setting of Psalm 24 (“The Earth Belongs to the Eternal One”). Also on the program is Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Haydn’s The Seasons, and a composition by the OSSCS’s new conductor, William White.
Sat, 10/6, 7:30pm, First Free Methodist Church | $10-$25

Earshot Jazz Festival: Amy Denio
Vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Amy Denio brings her inimitable brand of politically-charged avant-jazz to Earshot, performing compositions and improvisations that color her four-octave vocal range with electronics.
Wed, 10/10, 8pm, Good Shepherd Chapel | $10-$18

Kin of the Moon & Karin Stevens Dance: lily/LUNG
Kaley Lane Eaton’s 30-minute electroacoustic composition LUNG receives its world premiere by musicians from Kin of the Moon and Strange Interlude, with choreographed dance by Karin Stevens and Amelia Love Clearheart. Also on the program is Eaton’s chamber opera lily [bloom in my darkness], which tells the story of Eaton’s great-grandmother, an orphan who fled England at the start of WWI.
Thurs-Sat, 10/11-10/13, 8pm, Erickson Theatre | $20-$50
Sun, 10/14, 11am, Erickson Theatre | $20-$50

Photo by Michelle Smith-Lewis.

Samantha Boshnack: Seismic Belt
Seattle-based trumpeter and bandleader Samantha Boshnack takes listeners on a sonic adventure into the Ring of Fire in Seismic Belt, her latest large-scale work scored for seven-piece band.
Fri, 10/12, 7:30pm, The Royal Room | $10-$20

Seattle Symphony: [untitled] 1
Enter the sparse and haunting sound world of Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen’s Schnee (“Snow”), an immersive, hour-long chamber work filled with ghostly canons and crystalline frost. Fellow Dane Thomas Dausgaard conducts.
Fri, 10/12, 10pm, Benaroya Hall | $16

ROCCA: Enescu, Bartók, Prokofiev
Romanian American Chamber Concerts and Arts presents an afternoon of scintillating masterpieces by George Enescu, Béla Bartók, Gabriela Lena Frank, and Sergei Prokofiev.
Sat, 10/13, 3pm, Nordstrom Recital Hall | $26

Music of Today: Mivos Quartet
The New York-based Mivos Quartet travels to Seattle for a performance of music by University of Washington School of Music faculty composers Huck Hodge, Joël-François Durand, and more.
Tues, 10/23, 7:30pm, Meany Theater | $10-$15

Jesse Myers & Leanna Keith: Lizée’s Hitchcock & Tarantino Etudes
Cult classic fans rejoice: pianist Jesse Myers and flutist Leanna Keith present two of Nicole Lizée’s etudes for glitch film. In her Hitchcock Etudes, the composer glitches and stitches together live piano music with scenes from Psycho, The Birds, Rope, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. For her Tarantino Etudes, a virtuosic bass flute solo flutters between scenes from Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Kill Bill.
Fri, 10/26, 8pm, Good Shepherd Chapel | $5-$15

Earshot Jazz Festival: Allos Musica
Classical, jazz, and Middle Eastern musical strands are woven together in this improvising ensemble of clarinet, launeddas, accordion, oud, harmonium, and percussion.
Thurs, 10/25, 7pm & 9:30pm, The Royal Room | $10-$22

Emerging Artist: Joep Beving
Lose yourself in the delicate, melancholic melodies of Dutch advertising-executive-turned-composer Joep Beving in this solo concert of intimate piano music.
Fri, 10/26, 8pm, Nordstrom Recital Hall | $25-$30

Emerald City Music: Café Music
Be whisked away to the warmth of a quiet café in this program of 20th-century French Impressionist and American composers, including music by Jean Françaix, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Paul Schoenfield.
Fri, 10/26, 8pm, 415 Westlake | $45
Sat, 10/27, 7:30pm, The Minnaert Center (Olympia) | $25-$45

Renee Baker: When Two Close Kindred Meet

Article by Gabriela Tedeschi
Audio interview by Dacia Clay

The celebrated, multi-talented composer Renee Baker is joining Kin of the Moon this Saturday for When Two Close Kindred Meet, a concert featuring the world premiere of Baker’s Tyaga: Divine Life Suite.

Structured around the four stages of life in the Hindu faith, Tyaga guides performers in improvisation by allowing them to respond to a variety of media: graphic notation, original paintings, and other printed media. This kind of outside-the-box approach to music is standard for Baker, who is known for her unique notation techniques and innovating by combining multiple art forms. Serving as conductor, too, Baker uses her own system of highly expressive gestures to lead the musicians and give shape to Tyaga.

Renee is after a charged, soloistic, intuitive, committed, take-no-prisoners, uncompromising approach to sound-making,” Kin of the Moon violist and co-director Heather Bentley said. “Renee’s ideas and insights about what new music is and can be are monumental.”

Baker is also co-hosting a film screening this Thursday with the Northwest Film Forum at the Seattle Public Library in Downtown Seattle. She’s presenting two films, one of her own and one by Oscar Mischeaux, both of which she has scored with the Chicago Modern Orchestra Project, a chamber ensemble she directs.

Second Inversion’s Dacia Clay speaks with Baker about her Seattle film screenings, the world premiere of Tyaga, and her wide-ranging musical career. Listen to the full interview below.


Renee Baker presents two film screenings this Thursday, June 14 at 6:30pm at the Seattle Public Library in Downtown Seattle. For more information, click here.

Kin of the Moon premieres Renee Baker’s Tyaga this Saturday, June 16 at 8pm at the Chapel Performance Space in Wallingford. For more information, click here.

New Music for June: Red River, Wonderful Town, and LOTS of Women in Music

by Maggie Molloy

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Second Inversion and the Live Music Project create a monthly calendar featuring contemporary classical, cross-genre, and experimental performances in Seattle, the Eastside, Tacoma, and places in between! 

thvLYmNB

Keep an eye out for our this flyer in concert programs and coffee shops around town. Feel free to download, print, and distribute it yourself! If you’d like to be included on this list, submit your event to the Live Music Project at least 6 weeks prior to the event and tag it with “new music.”

New Music Flyer June 2018

 

Wayward Music Series
Concerts of contemporary composition, free improvisation, electroacoustic music, and sonic experiments. This month: sound collages, electronic textiles, radiophonic works, and more.
Various days, 7:30/8pm, Good Shepherd Chapel | $5-$15

PNB: Love & Ballet
Love takes many formsfrom literal to abstractduring Pacific Northwest Ballet’s four-pack of contemporary hits featuring music by Arvo Pärt, Sufjan Stevens, Joby Talbot, and Beethoven.
6/1-6/10, Various times, McCaw Hall | $37-$187

Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra: Zimmermann
An ardent pacifist and humanist, German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann‘s abhorrence for his country’s actions during World War II resulted in compositions that cried for justice and brotherhood. Seattle Philharmonic performs his final work: “And turning around me, I saw all the injustice under the sun.”
Sat, 6/2, 2pm, Benaroya Hall | $20-$30

Ancora: Postcards
Ancora performs song suites from four corners of the world: Russia, Japan, Spain, and Iran. The program features songs by and Sergei Rachmaninoff, Bob Chilcott, Einojuhani Rautavaara, and Abbie Betinis.
Sat, 6/2, 4:30pm, Green Lake Church of Seventh-Day Adventists | $11-$14

Inverted Space Ensemble: UW Composition Studio
New music collective Inverted Space performs works by UW faculty composers Huck Hodge, Joël-François Durand, and Chuck Corey, as well as world premieres by student composers Aidan Gold, Irene Putnam, and Nikki Chang.
6/2, 7:30pm, UW Brechemin Auditorium | FREE

Tess Altiveros performs the role of E in Seattle Opera’s new production.

Seattle Opera: O+E
Journey to hell and back with a new twist on Gluck’s classic telling of Orpheus and Eurydice. A groundbreaking adaptation of the legendary tale reimagines the main characters as a modern same-sex couple and features an all-female cast and creative team.
6/2-6/10, 2pm/8pm, Seattle Opera Studios | $45

Seattle Mandolin Orchestra: The Wheel
The musical worlds of the U.S. and Iran come together in this concert featuring the Seattle Mandolin Orchestra and the Seattle Guitar Ensemble. An exciting new generation of Iranian and American composers will debut works for mandolin ensemble, guitars, strings, and voice.
Sun, 6/3, 7pm, Trinity Parish Church (Seattle) | $15-$25

Orca Concert Series: English Quintets
Seattle clarinetist and composer Sean Osborn reimagines 19 Beatles songs in his Quintet for Clarinet and Strings. Quintets penned by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Arthur Bliss round out this evening of English music.
Mon, 6/4, 7:30pm, Good Shepherd Chapel | $15-$25

Seattle Modern Orchestra: In Quest of Spirit
In their season finale, the Seattle Modern Orchestra performs British composer Jonathan Harvey’s Bhakti (Devotion): an epic 50-minute work centered around Sanskrit hymns from the Rig Veda and scored for chamber ensemble and quadraphonic tape.
Sat, 6/9, 8pm, Good Shepherd Chapel | $10-$25

Seattle Symphony Composer-in-Residence Alexandra Gardner.

Seattle Symphony: Wonderful Town
A world premiere by composer-in-residence Alexandra Gardner is performed alongside selections from Leonard Bernstein’s Broadway classic Wonderful Town and his cheeky Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs.
Thurs, 6/14, 7:30pm, Benaroya Hall | $22-74
Sat, 6/16, 8pm, Benaroya Hall | $22-74

Seattle Symphony: [untitled] 3
The sonic landscapes of the Southwest come alive through Alexandra Gardner’s playful Coyote Turns and Mason Bates’ richly-colored Red River. Ahmet Adnan Saygun’s lyrical Partita for Solo Cello completes this late-night program in the Benaroya Hall Grand Lobby.
Fri, 6/15, 10pm, Benaroya Hall Grand Lobby | $16

Brass Band Northwest: On the Town
Brass, jazz, and classical music combine in this sparkling program featuring three dances from Leonard Bernstein’s On the Town performed alongside George Gershwin’s Cuban Overture and other works.
Sat, 6/16, 7:30pm, Bellevue Presbyterian Church | $10

Kin of the Moon presents a world premiere by Renée Baker.

Kin of the Moon: Tyaga
Experimental chamber troupe Kin of the Moon performs the inimitable Renée Baker’s newest piece, Tyaga: Divine Life Suite. Scored for voice, viola, cello, percussion, electronics, and a whole lot of flutes, the piece will also feature guest improvising artists Gretchen Yanover and Greg Campbell.
Sat, 6/16, 8pm, Good Shepherd Chapel | $5-$15

Seattle Symphony: Copland Symphony No. 3
Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony, with its rousing Fanfare for the Common Man, comes to life alongside music of Leonard Bernstein and John Williams.
Thurs, 6/21, 7:30pm, Benaroya Hall | $22-74
Fri, 6/22 (Untuxed), 7pm, Benaroya Hall | $13-55
Sat, 6/23, 8pm, Benaroya Hall | $22-74

New Music for April: Music of Earth, Moon, and More

by Maggie Molloy

SI_button2

Second Inversion and the Live Music Project create a monthly calendar featuring contemporary classical, cross-genre, and experimental performances in Seattle, the Eastside, Tacoma, and places in between! 

thvLYmNB

Keep an eye out for our this flyer in concert programs and coffee shops around town. Feel free to download, print, and distribute it yourself! If you’d like to be included on this list, submit your event to the Live Music Project at least 6 weeks prior to the event and tag it with “new music.”

New Music Flyer - April 2018

 

Wayward Music Series
Concerts of contemporary composition, free improvisation, electroacoustic music, and sonic experiments. This month: drone cinema, phonetic etudes, murder ballades, and the muted colors of Morton Feldman.
Various days, 7:30/8pm, Good Shepherd Chapel | $5-$15

Things That Break
New music merges with stop-motion animation, visual art, and theatre in this multidisciplinary concert centered around the theme of “breaking.” Four Seattle-based female artists come together for a unique presentation of world premieres.
Fri, 4/6, 8pm, Good Shepherd Chapel | $5-$15

The Sound Ensemble: You Didn’t Know They Composed
Did you know some of today’s top rock stars and pop stars have tried their hands at classical composition too? The Sound Ensemble presents an evening of chamber music by the likes of Björk, Beck, Bryce Dessner, and more, plus a new commission by James McAlister.
Sat, 4/7, 7pm, Good Shepherd Chapel | $10-$15

The Esoterics: CŌNFIDŌ
The ancient rite of the Christian liturgy, the Mass, is reimagined for modern times in this program of works by Gregory Brown, Giles Swayne, and Kirke Mechem. The Esoterics sing four settings of Mass texts that express crises of faith, criticize organized religion, and prioritize the health of our planet over any individual belief.
Fri, 4/13, 8pm, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Seattle | $15-$22
Sat, 4/14, 8pm, Holy Rosary Catholic Church, West Seattle | $15-$22
Sun, 4/15, 7pm, Christ Episcopal Church, Tacoma | $15-$22

Seattle Modern Orchestra: The Clouds Receding
Immerse yourself in the dense sonic clouds of composers like György Ligeti and Beat Furrer, plus a new world premiere by Orlando Jacinto Garcia featuring violist Melia Watras as the soloist.
Sat, 4/14, 8pm, Good Shepherd Chapel | $10-$25

Sound of Late: 48-Hour Composition Competition
A group of composers each gets 48 hours to compose a new piece for their assigned instrumentation, and a group of performers gets six days to prepare before they perform the works live in concert.
Sat, 4/14, 8pm, Gallery 1412 | FREE

SMCO: Songs and Dances of Peace
The Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra performs a powerful program exploring Leonard Bernstein’s now-ubiquitous quote, “This shall be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” Featured composers include Bernstein, Barber, Golijov, and Tchaikovsky.
Sat, 4/14, 8pm, First Free Methodist Church | $15-$25
Sun, 4/15, 2pm, Rainier Arts Center | $15-$25

What Better Than Call a Dance?
Experimental chamber troupe Kin of the Moon joins forces with dancer/choreographer Karin Stevens and clarinetist/improvisor Beth Fleenor for a program that wildly reimagines dance music from Renaissance to waltz to tango and even EDM.
Fri, 4/20, 8pm, Good Shepherd Chapel | $5-$15

On Stage with KING FM: Earth Day Celebration
The Ecco Chamber Ensemble celebrates Earth Day with a program of music exploring the vital role of water in both our basic survival as well as our art.
Sat, 4/21, 7:30pm, Resonance at SOMA Towers | $20-$25

Symphony Tacoma: Earth Songs from the Harp
Grammy-nominated electric harpist Deborah Henson-Conant joins Symphony Tacoma for a boundary-bursting program ranging from blues and jazz to flamenco, folk, and beyond.
Sun, 4/22, 2:30pm, Pantages Theater | $19-$82

Seattle Art Song Society: Elemental
In honor of Earth Day, the Seattle Art Song Society performs songs inspired by the elements of fire, earth, water, and air. The program features music by Ruth Crawford Seeger, Aaron Copland, Juliana Hall, Ernst Bacon, Björk, and more, plus brand new works by Steven Luksan and Brian Armbrust.
Sun, 4/22, 3:30pm, Queen Anne Christian Church | $20-$40

Seattle Symphony: Stravinsky Persephone
A stunning cast of star soloists, dancers, and puppeteers (plus three choirs and four grand pianos!) join the symphony for an entire evening of Stravinsky rarities, including his Persephone, Les noces, “Song of the Volga Boatmen,” and Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments.
Thurs, 4/26, 7:30pm, Benaroya Hall | $42-$79
Sat, 4/28, 8pm, Benaroya Hall | $42-$79

Seattle Symphony: [untitled] 2
Symphony musicians dive into the mind of Stravinsky with a performance of his elegant Octet, a piece which first came to him in a dream. Plus, the Dmitry Pokrovsky Ensemble brings a scintillating blend of folk traditions and extended techniques to two wild works by Russian composers Vladimir Nikolaev and Alexander Raskatov.
Fri, 4/27, 10pm, Benaroya Hall | $16

NOCCO: Lost Sisterhood; Found Landscapes
The North Corner Chamber Orchestra presents a newly commissioned Cello Concerto by Philip Lasser alongside Louise Farrenc’s stunning Symphony No. 3 and Aaron Copland’s unforgettable Appalachian Spring.
Sat, 4/28, 2pm, University Christian Church | $15-$25
Sun, 4/29, 7:30pm, The Royal Room | $15-$25

Women in (New) Music: Reflections on wilderness

“The animal instinct of the world is to destroy others thinking it may build for itself out of the ruins, but the divine instinct knows that the only true structure is in building up together.

Will you be counted among those who seek to destroy, or will you seek to rise to the heights, the dizzy heights where the air is so rarefied that only the strong can stay long enough to be dissolved in an ecstasy of oblivion?

– Mary Crovatt Hambidge, Apprentice of Creation


Photo by Arthur Allen.

by Kaley Eaton
W
ritten while in residence at the Hambidge Center, Oct, 2017

Today I woke and walked out to my porch to learn that I had been instrumental in the death of a large beetle. Beetle had been attempting to cohabit my cabin at Hambidge for the last few weeks, and I had been careful in routinely transporting him to the outdoors, assuring him we would both be more comfortable with such an arrangement.

Last night, he had taken refuge in my curtains around midnight, but given the slow swagger I had observed over the past few weeks, I was comfortable he would stay put through the night. I couldn’t find him during my bedtime sweep, so I assumed he was tucked and comfy. Around 2am I was awoken by a large buzz to find him near my head, on the window. At the point, I’m certain Beetle knew this was a violation of our terms and I gently placed him in his cup and returned him to the forest.

But in the cold fog of morning, there he was, paralyzed, upturned, and slightly discolored at the bottom of the cup. A part of my evening phone conversation with Rian last night addressed the topic of insect extinction, which furthered my resolve to coexist with Beetle. And yet my discomfort with a loud buzz seems to have clouded this resolve, and now, Beetle is dead.

His death is timely and heartbreaking, as my time at Hambidge has been dedicated to the pursuit of dissolving my human ego in service of something better, something with which Beetle is likely more acquainted than I. As such, I dedicate the work I’ve done here, wilderness, to Beetle.

wilderness has lived several lives in the past few months and currently exists in two incarnations: an interactive installation for nine loudspeakers, and a companion work for headphones. The work explores my complicated geographical relationship with the United States. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, you become a person who takes volcanic mega mountains, temperate rainforests, pods of cosmically intelligent swimming superbeings, and massive, tranquil salty bays full of salmon and mussels and elegant kelp for granted. When such a person moves east to join the rat race (which has unfortunately found its way west), the resonance of this landscape is a manic buzz in the heart. A deep, bottomless, spiritual hole grows with each minute one is away from this place, until the eventual homesick Google image search for “Pacific Northwest” elicits a cascade of loneliness. This was the experience I sought to sonify in wilderness: the experience of moving far, far away from a place where wilderness still dominates humanity, and hearing it sing in the distance while enveloped by the low rumble of the sprawling urbanity of the Eastern U.S.

While I have an obviously subjective relationship to the distribution of wilderness in the contiguous U.S. as a Washingtonian and Montanan, I believe there exists, on a global scale, a longing for wilderness, a palpable guilt for what we’ve destroyed, and a deep anxiety that every choice we make is destructive. These are the ideas that propelled me to design this work and the ideas that have obsessed me here at Hambidge, where these themes are ever-present in the landscape, the geographical situation, and the spiritual residue of Mary Crovatt Hambidge’s life.

The loudspeaker version of this work is intended for a large room and indeterminate length. Nine loudspeakers are arranged on a theoretical, room-sized map of the United States as follows:

Each speaker emits a synthesized sound generated from data sourced from the University of Montana Wilderness Center. As you can guess from the image, the sound each speaker makes is representative of the relative acreage of protected wilderness in the immediate radius of the speaker. Speakers in areas with higher acreage of wilderness emit louder, higher-pitched, and more rapidly pulsating sounds. Speakers in areas with low acreage of wilderness emit quieter, lower-pitched, and more slowly pulsating sounds. All sounds were calculated meticulously to ensure a spatially accurate, relative experience of how much wilderness we have preserved and destroyed.

In doing this, my goal was to illuminate how much life exists where human life does not; we often associate sound with humanity, and I wanted to illustrate an experience where human sprawl was as silent as the death it causes. The result was a staggering realization that, while the Eastern U.S. has many alluring qualities, it is utterly drained of wild places. The resulting sound, to me, felt like the sad buzz I felt when leaving my volcanoes and rainforests.

While walking through the installation, listeners are invited to this experience. There are also thrown into a less romantic experience: with each speaker, I place a microphone that picks up the sounds the listeners make as they walk through the work. If you make a sound above a certain threshold it triggers an explosion of speaking voices and loud noises. This is intended to simulate the anxiety we feel that every move we make is, in some way, pollution.

Artistically, it bothers me that one can only experience works for loudspeaker arrays in venues lucky enough to have more than two (decent) loudspeakers. So, in pondering the eternal question of accessibility, I decided to develop a 3D version of this work for headphones that curates a walk through the installation using ambisonic panning and HRTF decoding for headphones.

Naturally, as this version allows me to take you on my own subjective experience of driving through the contiguous U.S., the piece is time- AND space-based, which adds another layer of anxiety and direction. As one walks through the West, loud mountain ranges of sound pass on either side; once one has left the West, the sounds become increasingly war-like, human-related and noisy (please see the content warning). These sounds come from news reports about animal culling, recordings from the Elephant Listening Project, and field recordings I sourced from my porch at Hambidge.

Throughout the work, a buzz that seems to come from inside the head resonates and later intensifies into a folk-inspired melody setting the above words from Mary Hambidge. After enduring the war, we drift backwards back into the wilderness, into the “ecstasy of oblivion” she theorizes.

I’m currently obsessed with the idea that my generation experiences the world through headphones. How can artists disrupt this experience? How can we create a fantastical, three-dimensional sonic reality that makes us appreciate and long for the reality that has existed before and will exist after the headphones disappear? Given the current fixation on visual virtual reality experiences, what role does sound have in the question of the future?

With all of that said, and with the memory of Beetle in my heart, I would like to invite you into my new work and also to please consider the question posed by Mary Hambidge above: will you be counted among those who seek to destroy?

As of press time, Beetle seems to have been resurrected.

KLE


wilderness for headphones is available below. Please use …. headphones! Preferably high-quality headphones. The 3D sound elements, essential to the work, will not read through external speakers.

CONTENT WARNING – gunshot sounds

This work contains sounds that may cause physical and/or emotional discomfort to those who are survivors of war and/or gun violence, or are sensitive to sounds related to violence. These sounds begin at around 4:25. Please practice self-care if choosing to listen to this work. These sounds are NOT present in the live installation version of this work; we hope you will have an opportunity to join us in the live experience with Kin of the Moon.


wilderness for nine loudspeakers will premiere Saturday, Nov. 18 at 8pm at the Chapel Performance Space with the new concert series Kin of the Moon. For more information, please click here.