Lakebottom Sound

Announcement: New Life for the FreeSessions - TONIGHT | Lakebottom Sound Comes to A Close.

Hello Missoula,

Thank you for your support over the years. I'm writing to announce that Lakebottom Sound is coming to an end. I will continue to contribute to the Missoula landscape as a creative musician, instigator, and educator, but no longer through this organization. I am excited to announce that the FreeSessions will be living on under the care of the Missoula Community Radio and Daisy Chain Productions!

When Lakebottom Sound started in 2017, the community support that immediately rallied behind Lakebottom Sound was immense. We put on 10 amazing Sound Series concerts across genres at venues all over Missoula, guaranteeing musicians fair pay, featuring local and touring musicians from Canada all the way to New York, and fostering a culture of intentional listening that I believe still ripples through Missoula. We held classes and workshops supporting the musical expression of folks ranging in age from 9 to 70. And finally, we held countless FreeSessions cultivating a climate of listening, improvisation, expression, creativity, and collaboration across genres and media. I am fortunate to have had so many folks and sponsors get behind this vision so quickly.

As I have been focusing on my own musical career and family over the past few years, I have been unable to continue this programming. My FreeSessions co-founder Bill Kautz and I have made the decision to step away from facilitating the FreeSessions, and we are thrilled that Missoula Community Radio and Daisy Chain Productions has stepped up to continue fostering this community improvisation space. We believe their community-oriented open-mindedness and unique location in the library is a beautiful continuation for these sessions to live on and thrive with new potential participants and collaborators. I'd like to thank Bill Kautz, Jay Bruns, Joe Glassy, Heather Adams, Tom Benson, Imagine Nation Brewery, Robert and Fernanda, Kelly Bouma, The Westside Theater, all the FreeSessions volunteers over the years, and the whole Arts Missoula community for all the support!

Please check out the FreeSessions. I am honored to help with the transition and curate the first FreeSession run by Missoula Community Radio on March 25 at 6pm at the Library.

Learn more at:
https://www.1015kfgm.org/freesessions

With love and gratitude,
Naomi Siegel
Photo by Donal Lakatua

Thank you for all the years of support for Lakebottom Sound and the FreeSessions. The FreeSessions will be living on under the direction of Missoula Community Radio and Daisy Chains Presents at the Missoula Public Library, kicking off on March 25. We love you, Missoula!

Join us Sunday, April 2nd at 7pm at The Westside Theater as our friend Will Stoskopf curates with Sounds of Speciation! Thank you Will!................................................................

My name is Will Stoskopf, of the Missoula psychedelic rock band Cosmic Sans, and for the next FreeSessions on April 2nd I will be accompanied by the members of local improvisational psychedelic group Sounds of Speciation, which includes guitarist Cooper Godfrey and percussionists Noah Glover and Carson Smith. I brought this ensemble together in an attempt to bridge conventional music and song structure with pure improvisational sound.

I’ve been combing through “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert Pirsig lately, and an excerpt from it gave me some inspiration for the direction of this next FreeSessions. Most of the book is spent with the author attempting to understand the concept of “Quality” (capital Q), and one way he attempts to accomplish this is by  imagining a world without Quality. “If we can show that a world without Quality functions abnormally, then we have shown that Quality exists, whether it’s defined or not.” Pirsig then imagines a world where Quality has been removed from the fine arts, and asserts that “there’s no point to symphonies, when scratches from the record or hum from the record player sound just as good.”

 I struggled with this statement, especially since coming to FreeSessions, since in previous curations and ensembles noise of definite Quality arose from chaos and musical nonsense. 

For my curation, I ask members to consider how the role of Quality in music and sound can be stretched beyond the role Robert Pirsig gave it. For my performance with Sounds of Speciation, we will be attempting to create a form of Quality through the intentional addition and subtraction of the conventional description of Quality. 

This month I chose to highlight the Music Inclusion Coalition (MIC). MIC helps subsidize costs for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ students for auditions, private music tutoring, and education application costs.

Photo by Amy Donovan Photography