Sunday June 5 * 6pm * MASKS, VAX REQUIRED * TICKETS

DC Listening Lounge’s annual Sound Scene Festival at the Hirshhorn wraps up at 5pm downtown, at which point intrepid audio adventurers will hop on the metro up to Takoma to Rhizome for more. This year’s festival theme is TRUST, and what better display of the power of trust than through (non)mastery of the practice of freeform improvisation. Putting it all out there. Trust through listening par excellance…..

Spectrum 3 is a fiery, but soulful vanguard music trio that combines “the cry” of jazz with various other idioms, including the raw aesthetic of their Detroit home and the extended technique explorations of the avant-garde. Drawing on a large body of composed material, the group varies every show’s balance of pure improvisation with playing - and playing-off of - the themes of bandleader and saxophonist Skeeter Shelton. He’s joined by Joel Peterson on double-bass and Jim Baljo on drums.

Now in his mid-60s, Shelton is finally getting the notoriety he has long deserved. As the son of drummer and Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM) charter member, Ajaramu Shelton, Skeeter was largely raised by organist Amina Claudine Meyers and grew up around many of his parents’ collaborators and employers, including Sonny Stitt, Gene Ammons, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman and Fred Anderson. His early musical study was with harpist Dorothy Ashby and organist Lyman Woodard. Shelton has been a member of Hakim Jami’s Street Band, The Vizitors, The Northwoods Improvisers, The Soar Trio (with pianist Thollem), The Faruq Z. Bey Quartet, the United States Army Band and Joe Tex’s group. He has performed and/or recorded with Fred Anderson, James Blood Ulmer, Han Bennink, Dennis Gonzales James Carter and Dushun Mosley. At the end of 2021, he released, Sclupperbep, a duo record with percussionist Hamid Drake on Two Rooms Records.

Joel Peterson is a multi-instrumentalist and composer who works in a wide range of musical fields. He has performed with William Hooker, Elliot Sharp, Han Bennink, Damo Suzuki, Marshall Allen, Rhys Chatham, Amy Denio, Salim Washington, Tatsuya Nakatani, Jack Wright, Eugene Chadbourne and many others. His chamber music has been performed by members of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Opera Theater, New Music Detroit and The Toronto Symphony. Peterson is a founding member of Immigrant Suns; Cycle of Rejuvenation (with William Hooker); BoxDeserter and Soar Trio with Thollem; Agape Trio (with Alex Harding); Scavenger Quartet (with Frank Pahl); Kindred (with Faruq Z. Bey); Viands, and rock-hybrid improvisers Chatoyant. Peterson also owns and operates the art space Trinosophes in Detroit.

James Baljo is best-known as the former guitarist of noise darlings Wolf Eyes, but he also performs solo guitar-with-tape-machine sets as 696 Blues Band, plays drums and percussion in improvising hybrid band Chatoyant and performs various electronics in CJS. His extensive touring has crossed the US, Europe and parts of the Middle East.

BEAM SPLITTER is a duo for amplified voice, trombone and analog electronics. Utilizing the pure sounds of acoustic and closely amplified sound sources, the duo joins together two individual voices into a distinct dialog that delves beyond the borders of the corporeal elements of extended technique and sound. There is an intimacy and conflict that becomes evident as the two personas intertwine, in moments joining together seamlessly and in the next, being left with the feeling of irrevocable fracture. The two manage between these extremes with a kind of improvised grace that reveals an effort towards a common goal. It is an honest metaphor for a human relationship in process that even in the most serene moments can leave one raw and entirely exposed.

Since beginning their collaboration in 2015, they have been extensively touring the globe, in Europe, New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil, Taiwan and the USA. They have presented their music in a wide variety of spaces, taken part in larger commissioned works at the Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires and largely conceptualized a theatrical adaptation of MEDEA in front of the Olympic Stadium in Kiev, Ukraine (for butoh dancers and musicians) produced by the Ukho Agency. They have shared their collaborative projects with artists such as Phil Minton, Andrea Parkins, Ka Baird, Victoria Shen, Valentin Tszin, Flavia Ghisalberti, and the Norwegian duo, Streifenjunko, with Eivind Lønning and Espen Reinertsen. www.beamsplitter.org

Weston Olencki is a composer/improviser/weirdo from South Carolina, now living in Vermont. Various recording projects of theirs have been released by HatHut, Sound American, Carrier, New Amsterdam, Clean Feed, Dinzu Artefacts, SUPERPANG, Notice, Tripticks Tapes, Creative Sources, Out of Your Head, and their first solo brass release SOLO WORKS, which featured on Bandcamp Daily’s Best Experimental Music of 2020. They are an active member of RAGE THORMBONES, Ensemble Pamplemousse, the Wet Ink Large Ensemble, and perform regularly as a soloist and ensemble member on low brass instruments, handbuilt contraptions, and various electronic media.

Weston will present a new version of "a vine that grew over the city and no one noticed", which navigates through lineages of old time Appalachian musics, rural geography, and the material/industrial histories of the Carolinas. The piece is performed on a setup consisting of retuned and electromechanically controlled banjo, AM radios, railroad spikes, homemade electromagnetic resonators, and AI-synthesized country music - futurism of a preserved past. www.westonolencki.com/

Introduced to the creation of music through studying piano and clarinet as a youth, Jenny Moon Tucker found herself aimlessly studying English at university, with an insatiable appetite for experiencing sound and listening. Acquiring a monophonic synthesizer, a record player that could go down to 16 RPM, and a four-track tape recorder, they began weaving their own music into form. Digging the clarinet out of the closet and receiving the gift of a C-Melody sax provided the tools to more fully express her voice. After making certain sonic realizations, she met some likeminded individuals in the Washington DC area, proceeding to record, tour, and release a plethora of long players with the collective Twilight Memories of the Three Suns. Shuffling around the country for some years and tasting the experiences different environments provided, they collaborated with folks young and old, noise and jazz veterans alike. Settling in Baltimore in 2013 she found a living making preserves, and has been cultivating a relationship with growing medicine and food at Greenspring Punch, a small farm north of Baltimore. By allowing music and improvisation to continue to shepherd her through life, she feels better capable to surf the density of the human condition and seeks to channel healing and encourage imaginative exploration and listening with her work. Some highlights of their performance history have been working with the High Zero Foundation and the True Vine in Baltimore, Rhizome and Union Arts in DC, Vox Populi in Philadelphia. They highly value the intimacy found in the countless living rooms and basements that have also provided space to share their vision. Jenny Moon Tucker primarily plays Alto Sax and percussive textures sourced though a variety of scrappy tools and contact microphones. Through play she coaxes voices out of objects that speak to her. She currently performs and records by herself and in various collaborations in the Baltimore and DC area. jennymoontucker.bandcamp.com/