Racer Session #537 | Super Snorkel | February 20, 2022
Greetings, fans of the avant!
Thanks for showing out in full force for our first session of 2022! It was so nice to see your smiling eyes behind those masks of yours. We’re excited to be bringing you another Racer Session this month, and one in the true spirit of the session: two friends who first improvised together at a Racer Session, and went on to create a project together!
Jay Rauch and Ryan Carraher are musicians and composers who met as grad students at UW's composition department and are still local to Seattle. They plan to share a set that uses their homemade instrument, the Super Snorkel, and share with you its crunchy, noisy, cage-free improvisational sounds.
Jay Rauch’s music has been performed both in the United States and internationally. He has had works read and performed by members of ensembles including the JACK Quartet, the American Modern Ensemble, Sound Icon, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. Jay began his musical studies on piano at the age of five. This was soon followed by a plethora of other instruments including West African drums, drum set, clarinet, and several saxophones. At thirteen he picked up his primary instrument, bassoon, which he studied through high school. In 2018 Jay received a Bachelor of Music in composition and theory from Boston University, and also holds a Master of Music in composition from the University of Washington. Jay lives in Seattle with his partner Michaela, one roommate, and a very old dog. He loves to teach, read science fiction, patch noisy electronics, collaborate with other composer/performers, and cook.
Ryan Carraher is a composer, guitarist, and improviser based in Seattle, WA. His compositional work is concerned with articulating the vulnerability of the human body, the role failure plays in identity expression, superabundance, and a composer-performer-audience relationship defined by kinesthetic empathy. His works often experiment with notation. Ryan has been named the Eastern division winner and national finalist of the MTNA composition competition, selected as a national finalist for the American Prize, and selected as a national finalist in the Flute New Music Consortium composition competition. In addition to composition, Carraher is an accomplished guitarist specializing in free jazz and experimental improvisation. As bandleader, he has released numerous albums to critical acclaim with his 2016 debut release Vocturnal named to the All About Jazz “Best of 2016” list. As a sideman, he has contributed to numerous recording projects. Currently, Carraher is pursuing his DMA in composition at the University of Washington. He earned his MA at Tufts University and his Bachelors in Guitar Performance at Berklee College of Music.
Jay and Ryan have provided a very enticing description of Super Snorkel below - truly, we dare you to read this and decide you don’t want to see and hear it for yourself. Their Racer Session is this coming Sunday, February 20th, and it starts at 7pm. We hope to see you there!
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“What do you get when you cross a shop vac, 40 ft of electrical tubing, PVC, bassoon reeds, a gourd, and a couple grody brass instruments from an estranged cousin’s estate auction? It’s the SUPER SNORKEL, an instrument homegrown in Seattle and making its Cafe Racer debut this coming Sunday, egged on by clarinet, guitar, transducers, and contact mics. The SNORK is a wily beast. It grunt-howls, hiss-wallows, and caterwauls at will. It bakes unpredictability into our music, and we embrace its surprises wholeheartedly. Uncertainty in group improvisation has always helped us speculate on the world around us. When we don’t know what comes next, we embrace other forms of knowledge—physical rather than rational—and we ask questions like who has a voice? Who has agency? By setting up instruments to perform on their own, we can extend those questions to all actors, whether human, material, social, or technological. The SNORK doesn’t just serve human performers; it shows us interagency between everyone/everything/everyspace.
We’re so excited to share some weird sounds at the Racer Sessions (the very first place we ever improvised together), and we hope to see you there!”
–Jay & Ryan
Ryan Carraher & Jay Rauch