NonSeq: Edelmar & Achil Obenza

Marble takes its name from the way life actually moves — not in straight lines, but in swirls. People enter and leave. Moments press into each other. Different textures, colors, and temperatures share the same glass. Edelmar and Achil Obenza invite you into that swirl — through music, image, and word — as a reminder that even in the marbling, there is pattern. Even in the chaos, there is beauty. And even as people come and go, community remains the thing that holds us.

Edelmar is a Seattle-based musician, photographer, and storyteller whose work lives at the intersection of sound and image. Whether he’s at the piano or behind a lens, he is drawn to the moments that don’t announce themselves — the quiet weight of a person in their element, the breath before a note lands. Rooted in the Filipino value of Kapwa — the understanding that the self is never separate from the other — his creative practice is less about self-expression and more about shared recognition. In Marble, Edelmar brings both music and visual work, weaving together two languages that have always, for him, been saying the same thing.

Achil grew up in a café — a place where people passed through daily, carrying their stories and experiences from all seasons of life. From childhood to adulthood she watched how things shifted monumentally over time, how people came and went, how the world was infinitely shifting, marbling into something new. She has lived many lifetimes in one: a creative childhood rooted in song, art, and composition, a young woman finding her voice, and then a mother learning an entirely new voice. Poetry came in the stolen moments. The quiet in-between times. A way to synthesize the existential pains of grief and loss for what has been with the perpetual process of renewal that takes place on every level. Through Marble, Achil brings her compositions, her voice, and her poetry to the stage as testimony: that life doesn’t move in lines, it swirls — and every ending is also, somehow, a beginning.

Curated by Gretchen Yanover for Nonsequitur’s NonSeq series.

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