SOU’WESTER EVENTS!
Discover what’s happening during your next stay or plan a visit around our free live music, workshops, wellness offerings and more!
In this workshop students will learn basic embroidery techniques (5 basic stitches) through stitching your favorite plant, vegetable, or herb using recycled materials and/or through altering a piece of clothing: hats, jackets, patches, or bags (Please bring your own piece of clothing to alter). Participants will be guided through a process of choosing a plant you identify with, learning about its properties, then experimenting with multimedia techniques to create a piece of hangable or wearable art.
Chloe Jacobson grew up in the dry, oaky lands of Southern Oregon and headed north to the lush forests of the Pacific Northwest to pursue a major in Visual Arts and Psychology from The Evergreen State College. She chose to pursue the healing power of the art process professionally through getting graduate degree in Transpersonal Art Therapy at Naropa University, and now practice as full time art therapist with the LGBTQIA population in Portland, Oregon. She is a multimedia artist specializing in embroidery, painting, and collage to express sensations, feeling spaces, and to tell stories of empowerment and liberation. She walks the edge of fine art and craft to explore the natural world through my lens as a queer art therapist. She blends media to reframe and re-contextualize, while offering simple messages. She especially seeks narratives of natural perseverance, adaptation, justice, and resilience in the face of adversity or human constructs. Her background in art therapy informs my process as being a platform for healing self-reflection, through making the latent, blatant.
Jed Crisologo : Presented by Sou’wester Arts
Jed Crisologo is a soulful Seattle singer- songwriter, who mixes Americana, Punk Rock and Soul influences into heartfelt, catchy, honest tunes. His introspective and thoughtful songwriting sets an honest, alive and intensely human core to their songs. This combination of earnestness and swagger creates a sound that travels from wonderfully noisy and ambient to stripped down and raw, from raucous and bombastic to swinging and groovy all while emphasizing the truth and humanity in the songs.
In this workshop students will be guided in making bath bombs from everyday household items and found materials from the surrounding natural landscape of the Sou’Wester. Using optional scents and/or herbs, students will create a personalized set of bath bombs filled with unique intentions and return home with a set of hand made bath bombs.
Hannon is a white, nb queer creative and care worker who’s been living for nine years in Portland, Or. on the occupied indigenous lands of the Cowlitz, Multnomah, and confederate Tribes of the Grand Ronde. Hannon is a facilitator of introspective space, and creator of Tender Tank, drawing baths meant to be in conversation with each bather’s internal tides. You can learn more on their website: hannonhannonhannon.com or instagram.com/tendertank
Workshop cost $77
AC Sapphire: Presented by Sou’wester Arts
The Mojave is a desolate dreamscape, a vista of mind-bending scenery that seems to transform with every sand-swept step. There’s something exquisitely wild about it, tinged with a hint of danger. On the surface it can appear sparse—even foreboding—but a deeper examination proves it teaming with all the tragedy and transcendence of life.
The same can be said for the music of longtime desert denizen AC Sapphire. It has the same surreal qualities, the same sense of constant metamorphosis, the same expansiveness and emotional evocation, the same sense of wonder and revelation, and the same wild and perilous spirit. Her cosmic sound blends disparate elements into an ethereal folk rock while her strong voice shakes listeners awake as she spins her passionate, dust-blasted tales. All these qualities can be heard on her upcoming EP, Omni Present and upcoming album Desert Car.
Sapphire’s life began in Eastern Pennsylvania where her household overflowed with eight home-schooled children. When she was 14, she was given a singing part in a Shakespeare production. “I had no idea I was even able to sing and then I found my purpose,” she explains. “My father, an antique dealer, had this really beat up guitar with one string. I would just play that one string and pretend I was shredding. Eventually, my dad helped me ad the other five. I started writing songs right away. By the time I was 17 I was gigging.”
Sapphire soon teamed up with two of her siblings to form Sisters3, finding regional success. Then her younger sister quit the group. For AC, it was devastating. She needed a change and knew just where to find it. For years, she had been selling pizza at music festivals around the country. “I worked for a company of outsiders, artists, and travelers,” she explains. “Every year after working at Coachella I would spend two weeks in Joshua Tree. I was entranced by the desert. I wanted to live there.” She followed that Siren’s song west to her new home. “I really feel like I came into my own there,” she says. “It was a sense that I was doing what I wanted with my life. The desert changed me. There’s mental clarity because you can see everything. There’s room. There’s space.”
This freedom and awe influenced songs like Omni Present’s “Desert Stars,” about the death of a friend and mourning the inability to share the marvels of the sandy wilds, and “Rock and Roll Van,” a more lighthearted fantasy about escaping the 110-degree heat via musical road trip. A different California landscape inspired Desert Car’s “Stick and Poke Tattoo,” a story of one of Sapphire’s real body decorations set against the backdrop of a brief affair with an Irish blacksmith and the crashing waves of the Big Sur coastline. “The Thrift Store Song” features Particle Kid and details what Sapphire describes as the best feeling in the world, “going to the thrift store and finding something that fits you perfectly.”
Despite her affinity for the arid expanse, Sapphire eventually decided to move on. These days she can be found in Portland, Oregon where she has put together a new band while also singing harmony and recording with Kyle Craft. She is preparing for a national tour in support of Omni Present.
Sapphire feels strongly about championing women in the music industry. She has volunteered as a vocal coach for the Portland Rock & Roll Camp for Girls and plans to raise money for the organization throughout her tour.
Nick Delffs : Presented by Sou’wester Arts
Nick Delffs grew up in Mendocino County, a lawless stretch of coastline that’s hard to get to and, for many, hard to escape. Nick did — emerging in the early aughts as the frontman for Portland band The Shaky Hands, whose sharp, jittery rock was anchored by Nick’s quavering vocals and questing lyrics. The Shaky Hands were mainstays of Portland on the verge of a major shift, and they rode that shift a while, signing to Kill Rock Stars and touring internationally with some of the bigger names in indie rock. But a hiatus in 2011 became indefinite and Nick Delffs was once again cast into the world: working as a sideman, releasing solo records, doing manual labor, going deeper into his spiritual practices, and, crucially, becoming a father.
Becoming a parent can affect different artists in different ways. Nick rode that change with surpassing grace and maturity. 2017’s Redesign, his first full-length under his own name, reflected the transition. In “Song for Aja”, Nick touched on other concerns familiar to those who follow his work: love of the natural world; longing for spiritual and physical connection; the desire to suffer with meaning and exult with abandon, to embrace somehow the world in its maddening contradictions and find the unity at the core.
Childhood Pastimes, his second release on Mama Bird Recording Co., is both more focused and, despite being technically an EP, more ambitious. It’s a four-song cycle — one song with many movements or four songs that bleed into one another, depending on how you hear it — that can be viewed either as a personal journey or an archetypal passage of a human being through four discrete stages: roughly, the movement from childhood innocence into adolescent adventure (The Escape); the sudden immersion into a life of discovery and excitement (The Dream); the first experience of romantic love, followed by the onset of heartbreak, dissolution, breakdown of self (The Affair); the emergence into a new way of thinking, a fresh perspective that encompasses all the suffering and joy into a balanced whole (The Outside).
Nick plays nearly all of the instruments here and the result is a unified aesthetic, born ultimately of his deep-seated love of rhythm: the thrum and throb of the acoustic guitars, the percussive melodic bang of the elegantly-crafted piano lines, and always, always the insistent, driving drums, propelling the record, and the listener, on this journey as the four tracks bleed into one another, one body, one blood, one beating heart. The concept of four songs that are really one suite of music requires a sure hand, and Nick’s never shakes: the way the songs blend together while retaining their distinctiveness — from the poppy exaltation of “The Escape” to the cold intensity, almost like an acoustic Kraftwerk, of “The Affair” — shows a songwriter and musician who has fully grown into his powers.
Those who have followed Nick’s career may see this as a culmination of years and years of honing and fine-tuning his bountiful gifts, and wonder with delight what might come next. For those who haven’t listened to Nick before, Childhood Pastimes is the perfect entry point, a distillation of what’s come before and the promise of a new beginning.
In this workshop students will learn to shoot in the classic, home movie, analog format and become part of a community of Super 8 and 16mm enthusiasts. Explore the “bucket method” of hand processing your film, and how to care for your negatives.
Stephanie Hough is an experimental filmmaker, production coordinator and director of photography whose work explores repetition, gender, relationships and emotional landscapes. Her films HOW TO FEEL (DV, 2010), HEART (16mm, 2013), SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE (Super 8, 2016) have screened in the NW Filmmaker’s Festival, Portland International Film Festival, Experimental Film Festival PDX, BendFilm, The Boathouse Microcinema, TriBeca Film Center and more. As an educator with the Northwest Film Center, Pacific University and the PNCA, Hough has a passion for sharing analog film techniques and making learning accessible for all.
Workshop cost $70
Register for all three Analog Film Workshops for $150
Erisy Watt : Presented by Sou’wester Arts
Portland-based Erisy Watt will release her sophomore album Eyes like the Ocean on April 1 via American Standard Time Records. This is the highly anticipated follow-up to her 2019 debut hailed by No Depression as “an exercise in what contemporary folk today sounds like at its peak.” With this new offering, Erisy returns with a lovingly crafted, sophisticated collection of songs, recorded live-to-tape and produced by Y La Bamba’s Ryan Oxford.
Erisy’s sound reliably alludes to iconic vocalists of the 1960s, but here, finds a more fitting home in the vintage-tinged indie ether of Bedouine or Julie Byrne. Her vocals are intimate and alluring, an artful alternation between soothing whispers and gentle howls, backed by an instrumental bigness that evokes windy mountainscapes and piercing blue skies. Throughout Eyes like the Ocean, Erisy calls upon the expanse of earth and sky to navigate life as an adult woman—satiating restlessness, finding connection, and fostering that ever-elusive sense of self that allows one peace.
Erisy Watt grew up in Nashville, but it wasn’t until she left the city of music for college in California that she began writing her own songs. Both of these formative settings are present in her creative instinct—Nashville’s knack for a timeless melody, California’s bewildering vastness and dusty free spirit—but upon these sonic bones lives a body of global adventure. Erisy is an environmental professional with a deep fondness for nature, and has spent time in eclectic locales like Nepal, Thailand, and Hawaii, most often in rugged, remote wilderness. She approaches the music profession with a similar sense of purity; she once toured Europe on foot, banjo on her back. This wide-open way of moving through a capacious planet enlivens Erisy’s music with true troubadour soul. Her songs spring not so much from one place in particular as from a series of well worn travel journals.
This stretch of inspiration calls for acute musical capacity, and fortuitously, Erisy no doubt knows what she’s doing. An accomplished multi-instrumentalist, she can walk up and down a fretboard in gymnastic Jazz chords, craft complex guitar patterns in a wide range of tempos, and masterfully press her vocal performances past previous limits. In the midst of recording her debut album in 2018, Erisy underwent surgery to remove a problematic polyp on her vocal chord. While the diagnosis and procedure proved traumatic, Erisy discovered a new vocal freedom in the healing process. Today, she describes the feeling of being uninhibited, both physically and creatively, as integral to her artistic evolution. The transformation is most palpable on crossover hit “Big Sky,” one of Erisy’s oldest songs, which she polished to shine.
On Eyes like the Ocean, Erisy lets her newly liberated talent shimmer, but her real art is in connection: tracing the invisible vessels between an ocean’s black depth and a mountain peak’s twinkling tip, tracking the slow immensity of glacial paths to the monstrous canyons they carve. She ties her insides to the outside, taking tips from the cosmos, a naturalist with a knapsack of stardust, making luminescent the dark parts of her path, finding a way forward.
The Apricots: Presented by Sou’wester Arts
The Apricots, an emerging Portland project, is serving indie-rock with funky, soulful influences. They have fun exploring cracks between the genres they love and growing sound between them. Spend a night with the Apricots and you’ll walk away with a pep in your step and a little teeny tiny sparkle in your eye, hopefully wondering “who the hell was that?”
