The Disappearance of Clouds
Bill Stevens, compositions and spoken word using Narakeet, an AI text to speech program

Three Suns - based on the artist Nung-Hsin Hu book and performance art

The Only Name We Can Call It Now Is Not It's Only Name (excerpt)
...based on the book, a poem by Valerie Hsiung

Landscapes of Retreat / The Disappearance of Clouds
...based on the climate writings and art of Rosetta Elkin and Tomasz Saraceno

The Disappearance of Clouds

Landscapes of Retreat / The Disappearance of Clouds
Rosetta Elkin / Tomasz Saraceno
Bill Stevens, composition

Rosetta Elkin is associate professor and academic director of landscape architecture at Pratt Institute. Landscapes of Retreat are portraits of climate adaptation. Rereat is found in the land that is left behind as settlement patterns shift due to a changing climate.

Tomás Saraceno is an Argentine contemporary artist whose projects, consisting of floating sculptures, international collaborations, and interactive installations, propose and dialogue with forms of inhabiting and sensing the environment that have been suppressed in the Capitalocene era.

Water and air, planets and stars, are tied by cycles of transformation. Every change is refracted in this fragile tension, calling for new ways of thinking, feeling and knowing multiple atmospheric threads of interconnection.

Landscapes Of Retreat / The Disappearance of Clouds

The Only Name We Can Call It Now Is Not It’s Only Name (excerpt)
Valerie Hsiung
Bill Stevens, composition

Valerie Hsiung is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, and the author of several poetry and hybrid writing collections. Born in the Year of the Earth Snake and raised by Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives in Colorado where she teaches as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing & Poetics at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa.

Spoken Word made possible with Narakeet, an AI text to speech program

The Only Name We Can Call It Now Is Not It's Only Name

Three Suns
Nung-Hsin Hu
Bill Stevens, composition

Nung-Hsin Hu (胡農欣) is a Taiwanese-born U.S.-based interdisciplinary artist who interweaves time-based media, installation, performance, and artist’s books in her practice. Her work intends to reveal the invisible status, articulate the unconsciousness, and perform the vulnerability through a poetic and whimsical approach.

First Movement: Artic Circle, The Land Without Return
Why North?
Touching the Rumble of Melting
Encountering the Absurd Guests

Second Movement: Taiwan, Incurable Nostalgia
Time moves in one direction, memory in another.
We are that strange species that
constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.

Third Movement: Iceland, Midnight Sun
How to Summon the Night to Return?
The Clocks are Not in Unison
At the End of Route One

Three Suns

Bill Stevens has been driven by a quote he attributes to Miles Davis, “I have to change”, but he will be the first to tell you that his music is embedded in a deep understanding of history brought to the present and beyond. He is always thinking about the process of creation, finding the new, pushing boundaries both in his playing and especially in his compositions where he has always looked to follow the voice inside of him toward his own spiritual path throughout a life in music. 

Although Bill’s current music is based in sound and color through electro-ambient sound settings that often utilize spoken word, fine art inspiration and field recordings, he also has a robust back catalog of straight ahead Jazz, modal Jazz in an ECM style with an emphasis on Impressionistic harmony and Romantic based melodies, free Jazz and avant-chromatic funk.

It has been a journey with many accomplishments (signed by iti Records, grants from the Seattle Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Humanities, conference speaker and guest performer in Norway and Australia to name a few), but there have been challenges on the path as well (years of overcoming a distinct fear of performing, a break from the exhaustion of maintaining a career in music that turned into a six year sabbatical to a debilitating almost career ending bout with bells palsey that affected his ability to play the trumpet. Bill refers to his sound on the horn today as a ‘fragile beauty’). But Bill’s middle class upbringing in Syracuse, NY taught him the value of hard work, that anything worth caring about as much as he cares about his music is worth fighting for. It was out of these trials that Bill began to commit toward sharing his love of music with a younger generation in the New York City public schools. Bill has worked to inspire and provide his students with creative experiences through his love of music, performance and composition.

Bill wants his fans to know how important they are to him. He always ends his newsletter by saying, “Thank you for being the most important part of my music”. For Bill this is not just a slogan, but his mantra. He genuinely cares about the lives of the people who listen to his music by often saying that his mission each time he performs or each time someone listens to his music at home is to transport them away from their daily grind, to have them momentarily forget about their job, issues at home, whatever the case may be to find a moment of relaxation and inner peace transforming them through instrumental abstract concepts as a fuel to empower and enlighten.

The Disappearance of Clouds

Bill Stevens Music