Hania Rani "Ghosts" & North American Tour: Nov 22 - Dec 10

While sharing company with modern neo-jazz chamber ensembles like Portico Quartet and GoGo Penguin, trumpeter and bandleader, Matthew Halsall, and other Gondwana Records modern classical, jazz and electronics artists, Polish composer Hania Rani has built up a considerable audience for her solo piano miniatures. Her latest for the label, "Ghosts", moves into an adjacent, aqueous abstract pop territory, with a few select tracks exploring muted vocals and diffuse song structures. The album itself mirrors the two concurrent courses of the progression of her career; she has released an album of duets for the seminal German classical label Deutsche Grammophon, composed a spare score for a documentary about Swiss sculptor, Alberto Giacometti, and issued a series of releases exploring her own brand of hush electronic chamber music. This dynamic interplay is explored in her BBC Radio 4 Profile, and while Rani has a singular fluid sound, she considers her work very much an ongoing progression, “I think I am still looking for my own voice." She says; "I started to learn from the masters, to mix what I know from classical music, from other things I listened to, and from one of my first inspirations Nils Frahm". It is this later, current neoclassical world to which her albums belong, which is cemented by the participation on her most recent recordings of Erased Tapes staples like Ólafur Arnalds, Portico Quartet's Duncan Bellamy, and indie rock artist, Patrick Watson. For all of these associations with an inward-looking brand of neoclassical chamber music, her current North American tour alongside bassist Ziemowit Klimek will be hosted in rock clubs and venues. "Just because of my classical background, I am fascinated with these a little bit more rock venues." Rani continues; "Also, there is something about a standing show that I admire. Sometimes I feel a little bit of embarrassment if people are just sitting and watching me from this very relaxed position. I know that some listeners would rather sit comfortably, but as a performer, it gives me so much energy and gives me more focus.” And while the instrumental soundscapes and tangential ballads on "Ghosts" are delicate, Rani says that's not true of her live sets; “The show is quite loud,” she notes. “We start with these extremely intense synthesizer sounds. And then I can go play the piano solo, really quietly. I need these kinds of extremes.”. Indeed, as posited by The Washington Post for her east coast dates, "Polish Musician Hania Rani’s Album is Delicate. Her Live Show Won’t Be", and the following Chicago show, "The Atmosphere was Just Right for Hania Rani’s Mesmerizing, Sold-Out Concert", we can expect more of the same from Seattle's performance next week at The Neptune Theatre.

Nils Frahm "Music for Animals" & North American Tour: Apr 19 - 29

Returning to Seattle for the first time since 2018, Nils Frahm performs in the massive theater space of The Paramount, a far cry from the intimate setting of his west coast premiere at The Chapel Performance Space during the inaugural Substrata Festival. Yet this is in line with the tenuous balance of popularity and personal values the artist has navigated in recent years, as documented in his interviews with The Independent, "Nils Frahm: ‘NFTs are the Most Disgusting Thing on the Planet", and "Is it Classical, or Pop? Nils Frahm is Worried, but Not About That" for the New York Times, and the larger venues and audiences the composer's music has garnered in the last decade. Along the course of this trajectory toward greater popularity, Frahm returned again in 2013 as sounding board to Ólafur Arnalds, heard in their largely improvisational musical dialog during the Decibel Festival night at the Nordstrom Recital Hall. "Trance Friends" describes a similar meeting at Frahm's Durton Studio in Berlin, wherein the two artists improvised throughout the night, documented over the course of 8 hours with no overdubs and no edits, as part of the assembled "Collaborative Works". Outside of classical music, Frahm's personal well of inspiration comes from the more varied fields of jazz, fusion, minimal electronics, world music, dub, and 20th century modernism, as reflected in the selections for, "Music Is Not Sport: Nils Frahm's Favourite Albums". These varied stylistic sources and genre influences were most clearly heard on his "All Melody" album of 2018, which marked a summation of sorts of his work for the Erased Tapes label. Following quickly on the label's launch in 2007 by Robert Raths, within a year the imprint had become home to the growing body of European neoclassical and contemporary chamber music shepherded by the likes of Arnalds and Frahm.

The two artists would supply Erased Tape's breakout albums in 2010's "And They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness", and 2012's "Felt", respectively. Bringing a new global audience to their mixing of both baroque and modern approaches to composition and unabashedly sentimental conceptual explorations. These thematic evocations touched on in Arnald's interview for The Quietus, "Escaping the Darkness: An Ólafur Arnalds Interview". On more than just the strength of its releases, the label had become known for its attention to acoustic and production process, as detailed by Frahm in his turn with the periodical, "The Listener is the Key: The Nils Frahm Interview". The question of acoustic character and instrumental voice taken to it's extreme in Pitchfork's cheekily titled, "Nils Frahm’s Piano Is Bigger Than Yours", detailing the meeting with instrument maker David Klavins, and ensuing invitation to play the world's largest piano, the 12-foot-tall upright, known as the M370. Unlike the latest in the line of solo piano recordings, the anthology collection "Old Friends, New Friends", released on his newly founded Leiter label, Frahm's most recent, "Music for Animals", features no piano whatsoever. Centered on almost an exclusively electronic palette, this first collection of wholly new material in four years is more resonant with the characteristics of the early ambient excursions of Em:t or Rephlex Records, than it is of Claude Debussy or Erik Satie. Born in the first year of the pandemic, when life and touring was uniformly on hold, Frahm found a new course in the early months of solitude; "My constant inspiration was something as mesmerising as watching a great waterfall or the leaves on a tree in a storm." He says in the album's release statement, continuing this sentiment with; "It's good we have symphonies and music where there's a development, but a waterfall doesn't need an Act 1, 2, 3, then an outcome, and nor do the leaves on a tree in a storm. Some people like watching the leaves rustle and the branches move. This record is for them."

Nils Frahm’s new album “All Melody” & US Tour: Mar 27 - Apr 6

The latter two weeks in March see a quartet of classical and neoclassical performances around the city. Among them, the fifth return of pianist Nils Frahm to Seattle, which began with his west coast premier at Substrata Festival in 2011. On tour across North America in support of his most recent album, "All Melody", the German composer's night at The Neptune will invariably be variations on the brand of swooning neoclassicism Erased Tapes has become known for. The 2007 launch of the label by Robert Raths began auspiciously enough with debuts from Rival Consoles and Codes In The Clouds. Within a year the imprint had become home to the growing electronic, neoclassical, and contemporary chamber music culture shepherded by the likes of Ólafur Arnalds and the aforementioned Nils Frahm. The two artists supplying the label's breakout albums in 2010's "And They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness", and 2012's "Felt". Bringing a new global audience to their unabashedly sentimental conceptual explorations of the beauty of nature and life in a temporal world. These thematic evocations touched on in his interview for The Quietus, "Escaping the Darkness: An Ólafur Arnalds Interview". More than just the strength of it's releases, the label became known for it's attention to acoustic and production process, as detailed in by Frahm in his turn with the periodical, "The Listener is the Key: The Nils Frahm Interview". The question of acoustic character and instrumental voice taken to it's extreme in Pitchfork's cheekily titled, "Nils Frahm’s Piano Is Bigger Than Yours", detailing the meeting with instrument maker David Klavins, and ensuing invitation to play the world's largest piano, the 12-foot-tall upright, known as the M370. In recent years Arnalds has also entered into a series of collaborations including his rendition of Chopin's sonatas and etudes with Alice Sara Ott. Herself an established pianist of the repertoire of Liszt, Beethoven, and Mussorgsky for Deutsche Grammophon. In their realization of the material, Ott and Arnalds' "The Chopin Project" sourced vintage instruments from various locations around Reykjavik, and selected spaces with distinguished acoustic character as the venues of performance. Nils Frahm returned again as Ólafur's regular sounding board and fellow improviser, as heard in their deeply intuitive dialog during the Decibel Festival night at the Nordstrom Recital Hall in 2013. "Trance Friends" describes a meeting at Frahm's Durton Studio in Berlin, wherein the two improvise throughout the night, documented over the course of 8 hours with no overdubs and no edits, as part of the assembled "Collaborative Works". Yet Frahm's personal well of inspiration comes from the more varied fields of jazz, fusion, minimal electronics, world music, dub, and 20th century modernism, as reflected in the selections for, "Music Is Not Sport: Nils Frahm's Favourite Albums".

Typonexus presents Lubomyr Melnyk at Chapel Performance Space: Jul 1

Lubomyr Melnyk's appearance at the final Northwest edition of Substrata was a rapturous cascade of dynamic tonalities, timbres and performance physicality. Producing some of the most bewilderingly gorgeous emanations I've heard originate from an acoustic instrument, of any kind. His is a music similar to the long-form Indian Ragas of LaMonte Young or Terry Riley, while embracing the density of Charlemagne Palestine and wedded with a repetitive patterned dichotomy of minimalism vs maximalism heard in Steve Reich or Philip Glass. Through marathon performances bending those forms to the service of tonal, harmonious, beauty, the composer's perspective from the piano bench seen him, "Lightning-fast Pianist Lubomyr Melnyk: 'When I Play I Turn into an Eagle Flying'". Returning for his fourth occasion in Seattle, Typonexus Globalist Series presents two nights hosted at their Nuclear Recital series and Chapel Performance Space, featuring music from this "Enigmatic Ukrainian-born Pianist, Who Looks like Rasputin's Doppelgänger". Melnyk has recently come to find company with a set of contemporary, younger composers on the British Erased Tapes label. While the 70 year old Ukrainian pianist is an outlier demographically, his aggressively modern chamber music has found shared company with the neoclassical experimentation of his label mates, Nils Frahm, Peter Broderick, and Ólafur Arnalds. As presented live for the BBC, Melnyk's self-pioneered Continuous Music approach makes for a fascinating read and lends some insight into the performance and it's technique, first represented on his 1978 release "KMH: Piano Music in a Continuous Mode". From the Wayward Music Series: "Ukrainian composer and pianist Lubomyr Melnyk is the pioneer of Continuous Music - a piano technique he has developed since the 1970s that use extremely rapid notes to create a rich, pulsating tapestry of sound. The technique of mastering his complex patterns and speeds makes for the kinetic athleticism seen in Melnyk's unparalleled performances. Inspired by the minimal, phase and pattern musics of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley, yet frustrated by the ecstatic detachment from reality they can encourage, Melnyk created Continuous Music. A form based in the innovations of the minimalist composers but with its roots more deeply planted in harmony; overtones blend or clash according to the dominant harmonic directives."

Kiasmos' new EP "Swept" & West Coast Tour: Dec 8 - 12

The 2007 launch of Robert Raths label Erased Tapes began auspiciously enough with several incendiary debuts by the likes of Rival Consoles and Codes In The Clouds. Within a year the imprint had become home to the growing electronic neoclassical and contemporary chamber music culture shepherded by Ólafur Arnalds and Nils Frahm. The two artists supplying the label's breakout albums, "And They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness" and "Felt", bringing a new global audience to their grandiose, unabashedly sentimental evocations of life in a temporal world, the beauty of nature and mortality's inevitability, themes touched on in "Escaping the Darkness: An Ólafur Arnalds Interview". More than just the strength of it's releases, the label became known for it's attention to acoustic and production process, as detailed in The Quietus, "The Listener is the Key: The Nils Frahm Interview". Further distinguished by a defined visual aesthetic with a special focus on psychical packaging and design, realized in collaborations with FELD, Supermundane and Gregory Euclide. It's been a year of collaborations for the label's Ólafur Arnalds. 2015 saw the release of his rendition of Chopin sonatas and etudes with Alice Sara Ott herself an established pianist of the repertoire of Liszt, Beethoven and Mussorgsky for Deutsche Grammophon. In their realization of the material, Ott and Arnalds' "The Chopin Project" sourced vintage instruments from various locations around Reykjavik, and selected spaces with distinguished acoustic character as the venues of performance. With the placement of mics accentuating these characteristics, lending the recordings their natural ambiance. Nils Frahm returned again as a regular sounding board and fellow improviser, their deeply intuitive dialog heard on the Decibel Festival night at the Nordstrom Recital Hall from their shared tour in 2013. "Trance Friends" describes a meeting at Frahm's Durton Studio in Berlin, wherein the two improvise throughout the night, documented over the course of 8 hours with no overdubs and no edits, as part of the assembled "Collaborative Works". Next week sees the first Seattle performance of Arnalds' project that strays the farthest from his neoclassical center. Over the course of a full length album "Kiasmos" and two EPs, "Swept" and "Looped" the year and a half of activity from his Kiasmos project with Byrta's Janus Rasmussen, has produced a sweeping, cinematic body of ambient techno that's as much spacial as it is propulsive. Their methodology taking on an equal dualistic quality. Divided between two studios, the two musicians describe a back-and-forth between hardware and software, the precision of digital and the slippery alignmnets of analog, detailed in Headphone Commute's "In the Studio with Kiasmos".

Decibel Festival of Electronic Music: Sept 24 - 28

The end of Summer rolls around once again as Seattle plays host to the second-largest electronic music festival in the United States! Last year's 10th Anniversary was a spectacular summation of the festival's decade of existence, drawing on their years of genre-diverse programming to assemble a lineup that encompassed their past highlights and sonic future to come. That diversity seen again as Decibel presents not only bigger names, larger venues and sold out dancefloor spectacles, but a return of the fringe, adventurous and unclassifiable in the form of 6 Optical mutimedia showcases in seated theater performance theaters. From the expanse of the five day program here is a selection from the multitudinous artists and showcases on offer by day. WEDNESDAY This year's Opening Gala takes place in the melting fiberglass and metal forms of Frank Gerhy's Experience Music Project with a minimalist melodic techno lineup including Ghostly's Lusine, Natasha Kimeko and Sabota. As well as the first of two performances by the ascending Max Cooper, this one billed as his 'Emergence' set in the OPTICAL 1: Kinesthesia audio-visual showcase. If his "Human & Inhuman" of this past year are any indication, expect this to be one of multiple festival highlights from Cooper. A showcase that would alone make for a strong opening salvo from Decibel considering that the bill is fleshed out Ghostly's The Sight Below and Young Turk's Arca & Jesse Kanda. Concurrently upstairs at the EMP, the always excellent Resident Advisor has assembled their own showcase of including Warp Record's Lunice and XL's Kaytranada. Across town at the ReBar, darker and denser forms of sonic matter have been assembled into the aptly titled Pitch Black showcase including New York's Black Asteroid, the techno dread sounds of Blackest Ever Black and Hospital Records maven, Vatican Shadow, and Sandwell District's Rrose. Warp Records is further represented up the hill at Neumos, The BassDrop showcase hosting Guillermo Scott Herren's groundbreaking hip-hop electronica fusion project Prefuse73, alongside urban beats from San Francisco's Ana Sia and Seattle's own WD4D. 

THURSDAY From strength to strength, the second day of Decibel arrives with two audio-visual showcases, the first at the acoustically primed Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya, OPTICAL 2: Huminary features the second, explicitly ambient set from Max Cooper after the previous night's Emergence set, along with Bathetic's Survive and 4AD songstress, Alice Boman. Across town at the EMP, OPTICAL 3: Playful Discord sees Decibel playing host to multiple highlight's from previous year's programming, with another dose of the deranged synthesis of Daniel Lopatin's Oneohtrix Point Never, the return of Uwe Schmidt's AtomTM future-1980's vision 'HD/AV' and the hardware meets digital fusions of dynamic electronica and heady melodicism from Raster-Noton's Kangding Ray. From evidence supplied in Decibel 2012, the Modern Love label and it's roster mainstays, Andy Stott and Demdike Stare, are delivering some of the strongest, deepest and darkest post-techno being made on the planet. It's no hyperbole to say these guys are at the vanguard. The body-impacting nature of their beats have hit a perfect equilibrium with some of the densest subterranean atmospheres being created in contemporary electronic music. These complimenting/contrasting poles are explored even more explicitly in their collaborative Millie & Andrea project via their take on traditions drawing from UK bass music and jungle. Over at the Crocodile, the decades-running Ninja Tune label brings their contemporary take on urban sounds and beats, equally influenced by hip-hop, dancehall, tech-house and dubstep, their showcase feature's the forerunner of contemporary dubstep-fuion, Martijn Deijkers's Martyn project, PlanetMU's FaltyDL and the UK's Letherette. Fittingly, in the deepest, darkest hours of the night, Dubscured plumbs the depths of low end atmosphere pushing through until sunrise. An all-star cast from the deeper end of the bass, beats and delay culture of minimal techno informed by the techniques of dub, both Canada's Tomas Jirku and Chain Reaction label artist Fluxion, were there at the genre's inception. For those who never sleep, Hot Flush label's Recondite proceeds Uwe Schmidt's stylistic lexicon on even further display, as AtomTM delivers a decidedly different set from his previous Optical performance. 

FRIDAY Again in the acoustically primed setting of the Nordstrom Recital Hall, a single OPTICAL 4: Static Memory opens the weekend's proceedings with Nine Inch Nail's Alessandro Cortini debuting a suite of 9 analogue synth pieces originating from a musical language outside that of the pop culture knowns of his band with Trent Reznor. Cortini's adventurous analog atmospherics are complimented by Deru & Effixx' 1979 project and Tri-Angle label's meeting of Haxan Cloak's production and Altar Of Plagues frontman, James Kelly's take on doom-electronica as Wife. An evening largely launched by dancefloor and bigger club events, the Hardware showcase at EMP hits a nice balance between atmosphere and the physicality of bodily compulsion. Epitomized by Simian Mobile Disco and their all-live hardware performance of their newest album, "Whorl", this is a more challenging, performative tangent of their sound. Another vanguard of the minimal techno and electronica explosion of the late-90's, Robert Babicz has moved from his granular synthesis work on Mille Plateaux to a distinct tech-house sound of recent years, current live sets bridging both the dancefloor and experimentation of decades past. The Ostgut Ton label showcase bridging similar territory, the label's Marcel Dettmann is equally at home on the dancefloor as enveloped in tapestries of timbral percussive nuance. Seattle's own rising star, the Hush Hush label expresses it's curator, Alex Ruder's founding concept to a 'T'; music for late-night headphone-nodding urban ambulation, what Ruder himself has coined the "Night Bus" sound. A fittingly self-descriptive genre, the label's roster of urban, hi-hop informed atmospheres has seen a year of excellent press and strong releases, particularly from Kid SMPL and Edward Haller's Slow Year project. 

SATURDAY Launching right in with Polish composer Michal Jacaszek's elegiac, haunting neoclassical compositions, I can think of no better way to begin a Fall Saturday afternoon than the OPTICAL 5: Ghostly International showcase at the Triple Door. A through-and-through solid bill filled out by the dub-influenced minimalism of Canada's Loscil and California's composer of guitar miniatures, Christopher Willits. Ghostly's SMM imprint has assembled some of the world's finest craftsmen (and women) working in this hushed little sonic sequester. The Dance Nostalgic showcase at the Showbox looks to do exactly what the title premise suggests, a night of the contemporary body of Italo-disco and early synth-wave inspired works like Ghostly's Com Truise and Norway's Hans-Peter Lindstrom with his own brand of. Speaking of nostalgia, it's been many, many a year since we've received a new transmission from Detroit-come-Canada's wonderboy, Richie Hawtin. His new live album, "EX", the first in over 11 years sees him rounding off the hard darkly gothic edges of 2003's "Closer", returning to a form more similar to his late-90's work for this soundtrack dedicated to Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum New York. Here's hoping we get a substantially powerful and transparent soundsystem at the EMP capable of delivering the austere dynamics and spacial qualities of Richie Hawtin & Friends. It's kind of astounding that we've already had a decade of dancehall, dub, ragga and two-step informed urban electronic sounds from Steve Goodman's Hyperdub label, but the advances made by Burial, The Bug, DJ Rashad and Goodman's own Kode9 project are already a half-decade in the past. His recent compilation series, simply titled Hyperdub 10, not only reflects on this decade come and gone, but paths forward for the UK bass sound. Expect to hear representations of both when Goodman himself hosts 10 Years of Hyperdub at The Crocodile. 

SUNDAY After the wild highs of Friday and Saturday, Decibel's final night on Sunday looks to be a relatively subdued affair by contrast. Not to say that there aren't some outstanding performances to be had, as it's opening event OPTICAL 6: Erased Tapes at the Triple Door makes clear. Going on 7 years now the UK's Erased Tapes has been host to the finest in neoclassical, minimalist electronic ambient, abstract folk and songwriting the world over, it's roster including some of the first recordings by Ólafur Arnalds, Peter Broderick and Nils Frahm. Seattle's own Decibel and Substrata festivals have been at the forefront of bringing their music to a wider domestic audience. Last year Decibel itself hosting two nights of collaborative works by Frahm, Broderick and Arnalds at Benaroya Hall. The label returns with a showcase of relatively new faces including the (dubiously-named) collaborative project between German electro-acoustic composer Greg Haines and Portland's Peter Broderick, making more substantial bass and rhythm-based compositions with Martyn Heyne as Greg Gives Peter Space. Representative of the label's new voices, the showcase also hosts the return (after opening for Nils Frahm this past March) of Douglas Dare's orchestral electronic hybrid-songwriting, and Ryan West's analog-sourced abstract dance music project, Rival Consoles. What will act as the closing night party to my ears, the Friends of Friends label showcase at the Crocodile features a 6 artist lineup of urban LA sounds sharing a kinship with things like Flying Lotus and his Brainfeeder imprint. Deru & Effixx return with a collaborative set outside of their 1979 moniker, it'll be particularly revealing to see how their approach to performance and composition differ in each of these distinct contexts. The urban styles, rhymes and rhythms of FoF will likely being the last aural environ I find myself in, at the end of a 5 day odyssey. By this point, I'm sure myself and company will be needing a good lay-down in the park, getting some sun and enjoying a trek out around the city, having seen the inside of performance halls and nightclubs over course of the 5 previous nights. Hopefully having found some surprises, shocks, jolts to the viscera and intellect along the way, Decibel will by then seem like a endless stream of cultural ideal, made real. And as with every year, even for all the exhaustion and wearing effects of too little time and too much music, I'm sure it will seem premature by the time it's conclusion comes. Ushering in the end of Summer here in the Northwest as it has every year for over a decade.

Decibel Festival of Electronic Music: Sept 25 - 29

The end of Summer rolls around again as Seattle plays host to the second-largest electronic music festival in the United States! Hard to believe, 2003, the first year Sean Horton and crew, inspired by years of attending Mutek in that gorgeous city of Montreal, conceived assembling something of it's kin on the west coast, and Decibel Festival of Electronic Music and Visual Media was born. This year celebrating their 10 Year Anniversary with not only bigger names, and larger venues hosting sold out dancefloor spectacles, but a return of the fringe, adventurous and unclassifiable in the form of 4 Optical Showcases of multi-media arts, abstract and experimental sounds, in seated theater performance venues. WEDNESDAY Opening night begins with the spacial sonic installation work of Mileece in the lush setting of the Chihuly Garden and Glass, a showcase of Factory Pop to follow at Neumos, with Peter Hook performing classics from New Order's "Power, Corruption & Lies" and "Movement" along with Chicago's electro-pop pioneers, Adult. Across town the abstract hip-hop beats of Ninja Tune's Blockhead and Wax Taylor can be heard at the Showbox and by night's end, the heavy bassbin assault of London's Hyperdub label bringing you label founder, Kode9's particular fusion of Reggae, Dub, Electronic and Bass Music. Labelmates Ikonika and DJ Spinn round out the bill.

THURSDAY Decibel's second night starting off a slow, gorgeous ramp-up rather than an explosive bang, we get the first of the Optical 1: Kollaborations at Nordstrom Recital Hall featuring neoclassical composer Hauschka and collaborative project from piano virtuoso Nils Frahm and Portland's electro-acoustic folkie, Peter Broderick as Oliveray. Afterwards across town the always excellent Resident Advisor hosts a showcase of that artist we were denied in last year's Decibel, Actress, with Lapalux and Natasha Kmeto supporting. Back up the hill at Chop Suey the solid roster on the Tri Angle label shows their stuff, with Vessel and the dark hip-hop and dub assault of Evian Christ, while at Neumos, Shabazz Palaces represents for Sub Pop's 25th Anniversary at night's end. FRIDAY The weekend begins with Optical 2 again in the prime acoustic setting of the Nordstrom Recital Hall, Friday's showcase being all things Erased Tapes label, with a second solo performance of Berlin's Nils Frahm and Icelandic chamber music composer, Olafur Arnalds. Across town at the Crocodile, Ghostly International celebrate their own 10 year anniversary contributing to Decibel, having been a significant part of the festival since it's inception, this year presenting Shigeto, Lusine, Dauwd and Beacon. Away across the no-man's expanse, the South-of-Downtown Showbox hosts the Cosmische inspired tech-disco of Nicolas Jaar and friends, Warp's Mount Kimbie and Phaelah. Simultaneously, more Ninja Tune beats can be heard at the downtown Showbox WTF Showcase with Machinedrum and XXYYXX. If you're not exhausted yet, Q will supply the delirious Afterhours barrage of Speedy J and multi-media artist extraordinaire, Scott Pagano pushing all levels into the red.  

SATURDAY If Friday hasn't already inspired bodily transcendence, the second weekend night is almost certain to be threshold defining, as it's a looong and diverse one. Beginning with Optical 3: Night Vessel featuring the vamp chanteuse, Zola Jesus and symphonic/big band composer, Jim Thirlwell with the psych/noise abstraction of Margaret Chardiet's Pharmakon. Decibel in the Park will again be a smaller affair this year, basically the ambient 'framing' for the festival's will-call at the Broadway Performance Hall. Speaking of anniversaries and longevity, Thomas Fehlmann and Alex Paterson return! Joined by fellow Cosmic Adventurer Detroit's Juan Atkins across town at the Showbox. Again simultaneous at Showbox Sodo, the Ragga, Rhymes, Beats and Bass of the Mad Decent label will be unleashing their low-frequency barrage. If you're running on superhuman reserves by this point, there's a double-thrashing of alfterhours on offer with Derrick Carter representing for Mixmag at Q and yet another anniversary! The 20th in fact, for Berlin's era-defining techno label Kompakt at Neumos, featuring a second solo set by Thomas Fehlmann, Matias Aguayo and John Tejada... ending at 6:30am. Yes, you read that right. SUNDAY Closing day performances begin with what will likely be a personal highlight of the whole festival, Optical 4: Black Noise featuring the Warp records-meets-Constellation label electro-acoustic dirge, percussion and bass of the UK's Raime, Australian bass, noise and Metal maestro Oren Ambarchi and Seattle's own Rafael Anton Irisarri as The Sight Below at the Triple Door. Across downtown at the Crocodile more stylings of the Brainfeeder, Ninja Tune and Timetable labels with Nosaj Thing, Teebs and the bass n' gloom thrum of Lorn likely being the last venue I find myself in, at the end of a 5 day odyssey. By this point, I'm sure myself and company will be needing a good lay-down in the park, getting some sun and enjoying a trek out around the city, having seen the inside of performance halls and nightclubs over the previous five glorious nights. Hopefully having found some surprises, shocks, jolts to the viscera and intellect along the way, Decibel will by then seem like a endless stream of cultural ideal, made real. And as with every year, I'm sure it will seem premature by the time it's conclusion comes. Ushering in the end of Summer here in the Northwest as it does every year since 2004.