Guitarist Mark Oi and bassist Bill Noertker first met in the mid-90s when Oi was playing with John Tchicai and Noertker was playing with the After the End of the World Coretet. When Tchicai moved to France in 2001, Oi moved to Seattle. That was the same year that Noertker formed his working ensemble, Noertker's Moxie. By 2014 Oi had returned to the Bay Area. Since then he and Noertker have been meeting weekly to hone their unique musical lexicon through the use of non-standard compositional techniques, improvised harmonic textures, cell structure pieces, juxtapositions of incongruent melodic lines, neo-classical formations, telepathic improvisational dialogues, and the blurring of standard electric guitar/electric bass roles. Their first CD release is due out on Edgetone Records in Spring of 2018.
•
The Lost Shapes is a collective. There are five of them. They improvise, they compose, they perform their compositions for each other, improvise together. They perform their musics for you. And they say musics because they each have such different compositional voices. This gives the group a unique breadth and depth of story. They cover broad territory and dig deep into the soil of the music. Their sensitivity to the varied musical goals and unrelenting commitment to each other and the moment of improvisation binds those stories together in a unified collection.
There are five of them, but as their namesake implies, or rather, seems to have cursed them, that often one of them is missing from each concert. Lost you might say. Except for Safa. They haven't lost him yet.

Cost: $10-$15 sliding scale

Audio samples in which musicians at this event play: