Work began on the Choose Your Own Adventure album during a rabbit-hole of bingeing “true crime” media at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is an examination of how the “true crime” industrial complex shapes popular culture and erases the actual lived experiences of victims and communities being documented. Choose Your Own Adventure specifically examines how media in the 1980s and 1990s expressed and bolstered a culture of fear regarding perceived threats to middle-class suburban safety in the Pacific Northwest. This Sundown Curfew video was realized with the assistance of videographer Jefferey Chong as we retraced locations that my family lived in Vancouver prior to the internment. I was interested in comparing the media fed fear of otherness expressed in the the 80’s/90s and the pre-war period, and the meaning of the lyrics radically changes whether one identifies as th “other” or not.
From time to time, I get the chance to do commercial work. Pairing my music to businesses and products doesn’t always seem like a natural fit, but sometimes I get to make the soundtrack to some truly epic visuals! Kingtide Films brought me onto this project for Yokohama tires and this is probably the largest client to feature my work. I love the pure scale and majesty of Kootenays in this!
1 and half years ago I had the pleasure of working on a piece commissioned by the Powell St Festival Society as a part of the Kyōdai project (see the post below). It was such a powerful experience to write a piece that was directly influenced by and meant to play with a selection of digitized home movies. The process was very intimate, to have access to family memories that were not my own and to try and tell a story that was both beautiful and sad. I felt such a strong connection to these images, these families and the music they inspired that I went to work and recorded a proper hi-fidelity version of my composition. I could only call it… Kyōdai (siblings). This is a testament to lives that were uprooted by toxic nationalism, xenophobia and racism; to say that we were here and that even after such adversity, those lives continued to flourish.
Last fall I had the great privilege of joining this Kyōdai project which culminated in a live performance (and live-stream) at the Fox Cabaret in Vancouver. The project’s inception came from the GEI National Arts Symposium held in September 2022.There was a lot of talk about how we could best describe and include the various and diverse groups of peoples of Japanese heritage living in Canada. We settled on the word Kyōdai, which means siblings. The Kyōdai project involved the Powell Street Festival Society the Nikkei National Museum and 3 Japanese Canadian musicians. We each developed a live set that was meant to interplay with curated home movies from Japanese Canadian families. It was a spectacular event and huge undertaking for me to compose my 30-minute composition in just over a 1-month period. You can watch the whole thing here or skip to my set at the 1 hour mark.
It was some bucket list wish fulfillment to play at Alix Goolden Hall, and what a way to do it, as a part of the Winter Wonderment festival in Victoria. This set features some work from Fantasy Themes Vol 1 plus debuted a few new ideas I’ve been refining.
Matsu’s Forest of Dreams album launch Dec 17th 2021 at the Ministry of Casual Living
In case you missed the launch of this album, you can check out this video with sound we took directly from the PA. Alexis Grey Hildreth of TOOL USE created all of the visuals. You can catch up with him here.
Friday December 10th, 8:00pm PST
The live YouTube premiere is finally happening for “The Kiln Project.” It’s been 2 months of composing, recording and editing the music for this collaboration with dancer Shion Carter. In this photo you can see Bee Kent filming on site at the charcoal pit kilns on Galiano, and Dayna our host at LEÑA Residency. This film will be available for a limited live stream on YouTube (see the link below) before it is entered into festivals in the new year. Thanks to Active Passive for facilitating and supporting this project.
I love dinosaurs. It’s one of those themes that will always make me filled with the wonder of childhood. I still can’t believe I had the feature my music in this educational short of the Museum of Victoria (Australia). Another great project thanks to Kingtide Films.
Alexis Grey Hildreth and I collaborated on another video and I couldn’t be happier to finally share it. I gave him complete control to pull imagery from whichever song called to him from my upcoming album, Fantasy Themes Vol 1. He chose “The Heavens Rained Stones.” This song was originally inspired by an episode of Star Trek Enterprise that explores the perception of time, but the titular imagery can be found even in the most grounded works, such as Ken Loach’s “Raining Stones.” When i first saw the finished video I was shocked by how it weaves mystical and historical images to supernatural effect. This was exactly what I was trying to achieve with this song musically, by juxtaposing shimmering spectral strings and traditional waltz rhythms. I guess this why Alexis and I have been making art together off and on for 15+ years. Keep on dreaming all you starchildren out there! Fantasy Themes Vol. 1 is releasing Friday December 4th exclusively on Illuminated Paths.
My good friend Alexis Grey Hildreth collaborated with me to bring the song THE GREAT FIREWALL into video format. Alexis is a multidisciplinary artist from the Pacific Northwest. In 2014 he received a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and in 2017 completed an MFA from the University of Waterloo. In 2016 Alexis traveled to England to work with Iain Ball as a recipient of the Keith and Win Shantz Fellowship. Alexis’ work revolves around boundaries, barriers, and thresholds. He is invested in the relationship between internal and external geography, the balance of terror and awe, and with mapping the transition from one state of consciousness into another. Check out his other works here… gozertoast.com
The opening track from the upcoming album P.S. I LOVE YOU, available everywhere on April 18th 2019.
princeshima.com 