Us and Ussers at Jack Straw, 2/22/2025

On a rainy afternoon last Saturday, five musicians including me gathered for a quiet protest against the noise which has been coming from the top lately. Two of the musicians couldn’t make it, so the “band” was different than expected, but we made quite a lot of quiet anyway.
Yes, we made a lot of quiet. Not a lot of noise. The music was improvised and aleatory, incorporating a lot of subtle sounds and silences, and sometimes tentative in sound (though not in intent). It was not “mellow”, however. We are not mellow; neither are we in compliance.

Location: Jack Straw Cultural Center, Seattle
Personnel:
Me (S. Eric Scribner): piano, hammered dulcimer, percussion
Keith Eisenbrey: piano, percussion
Karen Eisenbrey: percussion
Bruce Greeley: bass clarinet, random little instruments
Patrick Cunningham: synthesizer, percussion
Zeos Greene: sound engineer

The concert was watched over by an appreciative usser.
Ussers (rhymes with bussers and cussers) are a private symbol of mine, though I have yet to determine what they symbolize. Domed rectangles, animals but not recognizable as such, vaguely ominous, clinging to walls, associated with deep bass hooting and coughing sounds: they seem to be derived from an early hypnogogic vision or a long-forgotten synesthetic response to the sound of owls. (I am not a synesthete, though I have read that children may perceive sounds in this manner but later lose the ability.) I often connect ussers to sleep and dreams; I use them as such in this piece and in my novel “Ussers and the Echo of Nothing”. The one in this concert rested on the back wall. I’d made it from a cardboard box and a Styrofoam pincushion; I’d spraypainted it all the same color the day before and it still reeked of acrylic paint in the car all the way to the concert. In the somewhat larger space of the Jack Straw studio, the smell drifted away. As usual per ussers, nobody in the audience even noticed it until I pointed it out late in the concert.

We played four pieces.

Free Improvisation (I’ll call it “An Usser Watched Us”)
We made this up on the spot. Kieth provided a matrix of mysterious piano chords in a quasi-rhythm while the rest of us fazed in and out of silence with drones, percussive taps, and occasional hints of a groove.

Tree and Stone
Percussion made of stones and tree branches or paper “rustlers” to imitate the sound of wind swishing in leaves.
Graphic scores made from paintings subdivided into thirty one-minute sections.
Sounds played “in appreciation of the trees and stones that God made”.
Patrick added an electronic drone piece of his own composition: beginning as trembling bass squawks, evolving into a mountainous drone and subsiding into a series of bell-tone waves.
Most of our stones were small and clicked when we knocked them together, but one musician brought two large stones which boomed. The sound of an avalanche over the sound of leaves? One of these stones broke on the last strike and a piece clattered to the floor. Yes, an aleatory avalanche.
The YouTube version of this, from several years ago, is outside (not in a concert venue) and nearly silent.

SoundScroll X (10)
Much like “An Usser Watched Us” but based on a graphic score like a landscape. Keith and I traded places for this one.

Ussers of Sleep
The reason for the usser sculpture revealed.
“There was a luminous white mattress floating in the air in a room off to the side of the church sanctuary, and to the other side of the room there was a pool where I took a bath (it wasn’t the church’s baptismal). I took my shoes off, slipped my foot off the mattress where I was sitting, and complained how cold the water was, then I determinedly plunged both feet into the same warm water. I stood there for a few minutes, then I walked around to the side of the house and went in the back door by the kitchen. My shoes were on again. There was a child, a little girl with blonde hair, sitting on the dinner table; she wasn’t looking at me so I concluded that the owners of the house had told their children not to look at strangers. I went to the refrigerator, looked at some of the pictures that had been posted there; two were of people wearing a round head brace. I went back outside to the pool and put some shampoo on the washcloth and started to wash my hair. There were some guys at the other end of the grassy hard who started laughing at how my hair looked. I could see my own head, and my hair was plastered in feather-like shapes exactly like the feathers of female mallard duck. The men in the yard said it looked like something from a comic strip. I commented that I’d seen something like it on a minor character in Calvin and Hobbes. That minor character appeared; a smooth-haired yellowish-colored wiener dog. It put its paws on the picnic table next to me and jumped up, then looked at me, begging for something. I didn’t want it following me around, so I blew in its face to annoy it. It didn’t want to leave and it followed me.”
We read dream sequences like this in random order (one audience member read one too) over my prerecorded electronic drones.

Afterward
Some of the audience hung around for a half-hour chatting with us, talking about music in general, this music in particular, how the microtonal intonations in some of the pieces were reminiscent of Harry Partch, and how meditative and quieting the whole thing was despite its unconventionality. One woman told me I had been her substitute teacher in middle school some years ago but I probably didn’t remember. As I took down the usser sculpture from the wall, another said, “Oh, that’s what you were referring to.” But it had been there all along. Just like in my novel, an usser is seldom seen.
The next day, on a social media site, Karen (who writes a blog on band names) suggested our “band” should have been called Usandussers (Us And Ussers, after a band called You and Ewan). Works for me, or, for us (or uss).