Aaron Michael Butler, Peter Tracy, Carlos Cotallo Solares

It’s hard to say exactly when the group of players you throw together for shows becomes a steady ensemble. For us, it might have happened as early as the first time we played through Lines, Dots, Clouds, Pulses, sometime in early 2024. In a sense we’ve been reinterpreting that piece together ever since.

Aaron and I met Carlos in late 2023 through the Seattle free improv scene, and soon after we invited him to feature on our concert series in_series_. Many gigs, rehearsals, and nights-out followed, and by the time Eva-Maria wrote us What Next?, it had become clear that Lines had turned itself into something like our trio’s foundational document. All of a sudden we had a shared aesthetic to our name, and when I sat down to write Errata for the last in_series_ in May 2025, all I had to do was follow suit.

It’s a testament to the strength and clarity of my ensemble-mates’ ideas that no matter whose score we’re following or where we find ourselves improvising, we always end up sounding like us.

Errata

Errata is a relatively through-composed trio structured in twelve cells, within which each player performs one or two actions. The piece grew out of playing and performing with its dedicatees, percussionist Aaron Michael Butler and violinist Carlos Cotallo Solares. Over time, we've honed in on steady, yet unrelated pulses, long sustained layers, and hard transitions between sections.

What Next?

the score gives us a few notes referring to disorientation and processes of finding some new orientation: “finding a new tone within the interstices.” or: “welcoming a walk into unknown landscapes.” - and some more.

the players do not follow a sequence of thought processes given in a score, but engage in an activity, losing orientation and regaining orientation that will carry them again only for a while. the players’ musical practice is characterized by processes of searching and finding. Thus, they take part in a process of creation, they participate in a becoming. The listeners will not find a production, but an activity: the musical practice

Aaron Michael Butler is a percussionist, composer, sound artist, and educator based in Seattle. His work often deals with static textures, repetition, durational stamina, resonance, and psychoacoustic effects. As a performer and advocate for contemporary music, he regularly presents new commissions alongside modern and overlooked works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Peter Tracy is a German-American cellist, composer, and writer from Seattle, based in Berlin. His current work focuses on open scores, silence, minimalism, and the political possibilities of score-based music.

Carlos Cotallo Solares is a Spanish composer and performer based in Seattle. His work deals with indeterminism, musical quotation, and the relationship between music and language. His pieces often focus on a single concept or technique that is interpreted in multiple ways. As an improviser, he performs on electric guitar and pedalboard, exploring effects not as a way to modify the guitar’s sound but as instruments on their own. He is a member of the free-improvisation trio Wombat, with Justin Comer (saxophone) and Will Yager (double bass). His music has been performed in festivals and conferences across the US and Europe and his audiovisual collaborations with the video artist Timothy David Orme have been shown at film festivals internationally. He studied composition at the University of Iowa, UDK Berlin, and the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg.

Eva-Maria Houben studied Music Education at Folkwang-Musikhochschule Essen (Germany) and the organ with Gisbert Schneider. Since 1993 Professor Houben has been lecturing at Dortmund University’s “Institut für Musik und Musikwissenschaft”, with both music theory and contemporary music as her focus.

She is related to the wandelweiser group of composers since 2000. Her compositions are published by edition wandelweiser, Haan (Germany).

CD. Discreet Archive, DA043.