After the dry spell of the holiday season, live music finally returns to the Northwest! Seattle's progressive underground monthly, Elevator had a groundbreaking year in 2015 with acts like Lawrence English, Rene Hell and M.E.S.H. gracing their showcase at the Machine House Brewery and expanding into exhibition curation with last week's Corridor Festival. Hailed as a unanimous success for it's day-long meeting of audio-visual media, installation art, music and performance, "The Organizers of Corridor Festival Invite the City to Be Alone Together". The festival's programming featuring live electronic, electric and experimental sounds from, A Box in the Sea, Ahnnu, as_dfs, Beastnest, Black Hat, decimus, Djao, Limits, Raica, Ramzi, Rene Hell, Sarah Davachi, x/o and The Esoterics, a secondary room of installation work by national and regional names, Bristol Hayward-Hughes, Ceci Cor-Leo, Coldbrew Collective, Grey Ellis + Tara, Leena Joshi, Jinx’ 75, Annisa Amalia, and Robin Cullen intershot by dance performances from Northwest choreographers, Belle Wolf, Campbell Thibo, and Coleman Pester. The reach of Elevator's vision continues to expand in 2016, this week bringing in The Wire's 2013 album of the year artist Julia Holter. She'll be performing her lush interplay of jazz orchestrations, dissonant guitar and open-ended songform alongside the soaring vocalizations of Haley Fohr's Circuit Des Yeux at the Columbia City Theater.
The Seattle Symphony [untitled] Series continues in 2016, with two works inspired by the interrelationship between New Minimalism and the Abstract Expressionists and the late-1950s and early 1960s in which together they constituted a New York School that revolutionized each of their respective artforms. The hour-long program includes John Cage's "Living Room Music", Earle Brown's "Music for Cello and Piano", Christian Wolff’s "For Bob" which honors the famed painter Robert Rauschenberg and Morton Feldman’s piece inspired by and written to be performed in Rothko Chapel as a moving tribute to painter, friend and contemporary, Mark Rothko. A composition conceived to express the unity of, "Meditation and Modern Art that Meet in Rothko Chapel". Upon his arrival in 2011, Seattle Symphony's new conductor Ludovic Morlot initiated this late-night [untitled] Modern Composer chamber series which has brought contemporary back into symphony's lexicon, after almost a decade of being remiss in their performance of these modern works. To date Morlot has programmed a who's-who of 20th/21st Century Modernism including, "John Luther Adams Pulitzer Prize Winning 'Become Ocean'" which had it's premier and was recorded with the Seattle Symphony in 2013. Continuing his programming of modern works, this weekend sees the rendering of Luciano Berio's disorienting choral, "Symphonia", as well as the newest installment in the seasonal [untitled] program. Previous installments acting as showcases for the works of George Crumb, György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, John Cage, Terry Riley, Giacinto Scelsi, last year's performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen's groundbreaking electro-acoustic, "Gesang der Jünglinge" and the series' initiation with the realization of Olivier Messiaen's rarely performed, massive symphonic work, "Turangalîla".
