soundimagenet

Last Wednesday I played a wonderful gig with Soundimagenet at Presentation House Studio. We also played a show at the Museum of Anthropology as part of the Man Ray exhibit there a few weeks ago and it was great.  

Here's Krista amazing poster for the MOA gig:

This group is an interdisciplinary collaboration between video artist, Krista Lomax and musicians Carol Sawyer (voice), Clyde Reed (bass) and Gregg Simpson (drums).   I have worked with a lot of great video artists and film makers in improvised music settings, but Krista Lomax really has the goods.  She listens and improvises like a musician and, working through her laptop, has a virtuosic control over her incredibly diverse repertoire of evocative moving images.  She is also a really friendly and fun person to work with.  The musicians with whom I collaborate in this band are among the finest improvisers around.  Clyde Reed and Gregg Simpson  are real pioneers of improvised music in Canada and they play with a rare depth of feeling and incredible improvisation intuition.  Carol Sawyer has an amazing ability not only with extended vocal techniques but also a rare talent for improvised 'dadaist' deconstructions of text and spontaneous poetry.  
Like me, the musicians in the band also have 'other lives' outside music.  Clyde is an emeritus professor of Economic History, Gregg is a world-renowned surrealist painter, and Carol works in various visual media from photography, to collage and painting.  I think somehow this makes the music better and makes our collaboration with Krista work more smoothly somehow.  I can't yet say for sure how or why this is.  Maybe after a few more gigs I'll be able to understand better the nature of what we are doing.  So far it just works on some kind of subconscious level.  Fuji Mooney, a student from my FPA 140 class at SFU said that the music and video had a kind of "dream logic".  The music and visual elements feed each other in a very natural way somehow without obvious surface connections.  Now that we have played a few gigs together, I am starting to recognize elements of Krista's visual improvising 'vocabulary' and I think she must also recognize elements of our collective musical vocabulary.  We haven't talked about this much, if at all.  I always think it is a good sign when collaborative art can be made without a lot of talk.

Projects like this make me feel very happy and fortunate to live in Vancouver, which is absolutely loaded with very creative and talented people who are willing to try new things. There should be a video up soon with an example of our collaboration.