Wilson Shook is an improvising saxophonist and manual therapist living in Oakland, CA since 2022. His approach to music has been shaped by collaborative relationships with Gust Burns, Paul Hoskin, Ben Bennett, Greg Kelley, Carol Genetti, Ted Byrnes, and others, as well as an ongoing sonic exploration of the resonant void spaces of American hydrologic and transportation infrastructure. For ten years Wilson helped to organize the performance space Gallery 1412 in Seattle, and has a long association with the Seattle Improvised Music Festival.

A self-taught musician, Wilson approaches improvisation, study, collaboration, and performance as sites of radical experimentation with modes of being, relating, and perceiving. Wilson’s practice cultivates an awareness of human vulnerability and technological fallibility; embraces excess, fragmentation, and incompleteness; and pursues the chaotic, queer, and interdependent imperatives of aleatory existence amidst a crumbling, toxic culture.

Attentiveness, transformation, commitment to the materiality of the musical act and its consequences; radical presence as the only avenue of escape. Always mindful of the axiom, via Éluard—There is another world, but it is in this one.