Shawn E Hansen’s Sycamore House Series; Improvised & Other Music

Posted June 21, 2019

Wednesday, July 17, 2019 at 8:00 PM

Sycamore House welcomes Nathan Alexander Pape from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Nathan will bring his unique experimental style of improvised guitar finger-picking and will be joined by Kansas City’s Shawn E Hansen on a new high-definition synthesizer made in Berlin, Germany. The duo had their premiere at the Tulsa Artists Fellowship’s Annual Improvised Music Night and will be performing a new set of pieces for their Kansas City debut. The night will open with two solo acts. Sterling Holman on electric guitar with an array of delays and loopers and Aaron Osborne bowing gongs, upright bass and electronics. All three sets will explore soundscapes oscillating between groove based percussion swells, minimalist composition, experimental folk, and ambient sonic textures.

The Sycamore House series was started in 2012 by Shawn E Hansen to help encourage improvisers and unconventional musicians to visit the Kansas City area and share their unique musics. Local musicians share the bill in a cultural exchange of ideas and styles occupying the fringe between jazz, rock, folk, ambient and classical musics. Charlotte Street Foundation has hosted the series for the last seven years.

Event Details

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When

Wednesday, July 17, 2019 at 8:00 PM

Where

Capsule (1664 Broadway Blvd., KCMO)

$10 Admission

Nathan Alexander Pape is a musician, mathematician, acoustician, and educator born in Smithfield, VA, and based in Brooklyn, NY, from 2008 until 2018. He now joyfully resides just outside of Tulsa, OK, surrounded by old oak trees and a host of wildlife.

Instead of simply defying the constraints of the guitar, Nathan uses its limitations and traditions as viable sources for creation. Nathan’s personal vocabulary is informed by jazz, free improvisation, acoustic phenomena, and a repertoire of American folk songs—drawing upon an excitement of the unknown and a sense of nostalgia and joy that he finds in his Virginian heritage. His solo practice focuses on the sonic expansion of the steel-string acoustic guitar through improvisation, generative strategies, and minimalist structures/processes. This work is documented on two albums—STUDIES in 2017 and this point of view produced a dozen or more stories in 2015.

Ongoing projects include collaborations with composer/percussionist John O’Brien, saxophonist Patrick Breiner of Battle Trance, composer/pianist David Alan Broome of Ensemble Pamlemousse, synthesizer player Shawn Edward Hansen, and poet James Belflower. Patrick and Nathan’s album Ground Air is forthcoming on Astral Spirits in 2019.

List of participating artists:

Nathan Alexander Pape
@nathanalexanderpape on Instagram

Shawn E Hansen
@kjearadio on Instagram

Sterling Holman
@audiblesurgery on Instagram

Aaron Osborne
@sundaynightartifice on Instagram

Curatorial Bio:

Shawn E Hansen is a composer, improviser, phonographer and piano technician. Instruments: synthesizer, organ, piano, saxophone. He’s the 2018 Charlotte Street Performing Arts Fellow. Practicing his own style of Great-Plains hermetic art known as Tangential Assertivism, he performs with Neal Wilson (L.A.), Chris Forsyth (PA.), Laurel Sparks (NY), and makes films with Cyrus Console. Tangential Assertivism is the practice of observing the relationship between disparate thought-objects placed in close proximity spatially or temporally. Shawn runs KJEA-radio, a transmitted conceptual space first broadcast in 1984. He studied with Maryanne Amacher, Richard Teitelbaum, George Lewis and Pauline Oliveros at Bard in 2001.