Racer Session #540 | Mason Lynass | Sunday April 3rd, 2022

Hey, creative music listeners!

This Sunday at 7pm, we are back for the first Racer Session of April. And we’re excited to welcome back our friend, the percussionist and composer Mason Lynass, to curate the session!

Mason Lynass is a music creator and A/V producer, based here in Seattle, WA. As a solo music performer, his work was most recently featured at his Masters recital at the University of Washington, as well as Seattle’s John Cage Musicircus. Outside of his solo work, Lynass has played festivals and toured the United States with rock bands, performed at PASIC with the UNT Percussion Ensemble and the Santa Clara Vanguard, and performed at SoSI, Chosen Vale, and Inuksuit NYC. He is a recent graduate of the University of Washington, having obtained a Master of Music degree in percussion performance while studying with Dr. Bonnie Whiting, playing in the Partch Ensemble and various UW ensembles, and recording and releasing a recital of solo percussion repertoire in June of 2020. He earned a Bachelor of Music degree in percussion performance from the University of North Texas, where he studied with Christopher Deane, Paul Rennick, and Ed Soph. Lynass is a winner of the Portland Percussion Group’s Call for Scores with his work Tesserae, composed for percussion trio or quartet. The Portland Percussion Group premiered Tesserae in May of 2017, and the piece was published through Tapspace in 2019.

Some words from Mason ahead of this Sunday, below. We encourage you to explore some of his music this week, and to join us this Sunday at 7pm for his Racer Session! We look forward to seeing you there.

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“Over the past two years I've enjoyed learning about audio engineering, synthesis, sound design, and various facets of electronic music. I've been heavily influenced by ambient and new-classical electronic musicians, from Brian Eno and Suzanne Ciani to the infinite variety of current electronic and computer music makers.

”I've had limitless fun using MIDI devices and digital instruments in Ableton Live to create musical environments inspired by nature and life in the city. Some deep over-thinking of my personal music-making process inspired me to develop a system of generative music, so that I could focus on instrumentation, space, and character, instead of writing pitches and rhythms. Each piece of music is generated from sets of rules determining things like pitch, rhythm, etc. using elements of chance and randomness, so that every performance generates a unique musical output.

”As the musical director of sorts, when I perform this music I can't anticipate exactly what will be generated, which makes performing so exciting to me! It feels like a duet between myself and the computer - except I also programmed the computer, I guess. I've performed these pieces for my new record "Music for an Ordinary Day," and for small audiences on the internet, but this is my first time performing these works for an in-person audience. I feel so fortunate to be welcomed by the Racer Sessions community, to present my experiments and perform improvisations for an encouraging and open audience.”

Mason Lynass, c/o the artist