Musician & Sound Artist

Joey Largent’s work explores the relationships between sound, environment, and context, taking both conventional and custom-built acoustic instruments and delicately interweaving them with natural landscapes. His primary focuses are improvised music for dance and long-duration solo and ensemble compositions, often working with just intonation, feeling-based improvisation, timeless-based performance, and long, subtle tones that gradually unfold over time. Much of his performance and recording practices are done in or inspired by site-specific, isolated locations in nature, ranging from the terminal chambers of lava caves to mountain summits to the intersections of abandoned architecture with the natural environment. Joey’s compositional style comes from studies in Southeastern European folk music, butoh, improvisation, microtonality, and North Indian classical music, studying khyal gayaki of the Kirana Gharana and dhrupad rudra veena of the Dagarbani. Amongst others, he has studied with Rose Okada, Michael Harrison, Tatsuya Nakatani, Jung Hee Choi, and La Monte Young.

Joey’s work seeks to produce deep feeling and experience through sound-- one that is strongly immersive, sensitive, and relational to the experience of feeling full presence in an environment, attempting to offer the opportunity to explore the expansive qualities of place, self, and memory through listening alone.

Flutist

As a performer, recording artist, teacher, and scholar, Gwen Franz is a diverse violist of multiple musical traditions. In 2017, she was awarded a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of Washington in classical viola performance, which also included studies within the jazz and ethnomusicology departments. Her research on improvisation and oral traditions resulted in her thesis topic, “The Homeric Answer: How By-Ear Learning and Improvisation Enhance the Musicianship of Classical Performers.” Dr. Franz has been featured as a concerto soloist and chamber musician throughout the Pacific Northwest, has toured throughout the United States and Chile. She has also performed with eclectic musicians such as Darol Anger and Eugene Friesen. In 2013 she released two albums, Airoso, with classical guitarist Hilary Field, and Douce Ambiance, with jazz violinist Michael Gray and cellist James Hinkley. Her many years of professional orchestra experience include performing with the Seattle Symphony, Northwest Sinfonietta, Grand Rapids Symphony, Lansing Symphony and Evansville Philharmonic. She recently moved to Port Townsend with her husband, Ernie Franz. (Dec 2018)