What: Kaki King: The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body
Where: Charlie White Theatre, Mary Winspear Centre
When: Tuesday, 7:30 p.m. (6:30 p.m. doors)
Tickets: $38.50 plus service charges. At the Mary Winspear box office: 250-656-0275 or marywinspear.ca
Kaki King’s eyes were never that great. She wasn’t completely disabled — she could see with glasses. Just not very well. Then, in 2008, the 36-year-old New York-based guitarist underwent corrective laser surgery. It changed her world profoundly.
“Suddenly, just looking at everything was really interesting. Light, dark, colour, contrasts. It was just fascinating to look at stuff,” King said this week. “I didn’t develop that as a child. I had to develop it as an adult.”
Her newly awakened fascination with how things look, combined with a continued passion for the guitar, led to a show she calls The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body. King uses a technology called projection mapping to display videos on her white guitar. The audience sees clouds, waves, abstract shapes — whatever she wants.
Using software, she also translates her music directly into imagery. King, dressed in white and wearing white-framed sunglasses, will pluck a note that will shift the visuals from deep blue to shocking pink. Sight and sound are thus melded in an unusually intimate matter. (To experience an online example, search “The Surface Changes by Kaki King.”)
It’s a singular show — King is unaware of anyone else doing exactly what she’s doing. What makes it more remarkable is her playing style, which is both unusual and virtuosic. As well as finger-picking, King taps and slaps the guitar strings and body, creating lush soundscapes with electronic looping and layering.
She attracted national notice as far back as 2006, when Rolling Stone magazine featured her in an article headlined “The New Guitar Gods.”
King has performed on talk shows with David Letterman and Conan O’Brien. Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters once said: “There are some guitar players that are good and there are some guitar players that are really f---ing good. And then there’s Kaki King.”
King said The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body is more than a series of disconnected images and sounds. The show is meant to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end. It begins with just her guitar seeming to play itself, “running its own program” with King standing offstage. She enters in an all-white costume intended to suggest a lab assistant.
“The guitar is what’s really telling the show. I help it tell its story,” King said.
The show increases in sight/sound complexity in the first half. A moment of conflict is followed by a final movement of grace and harmony, in which musician, guitar and technology fuse into one.
King said the overarching theme of The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body is the relationship between humanity and technology in the modern age.
“Who’s really in control? Is it the tool or is it us?” she said.
She started playing guitar at the age of four. In her youth, King played in rock bands and New York subways. Her varied accomplishments include having written film scores. In 2007, she received a Golden Globe nomination for her contribution to the soundtrack for Sean Penn’s Into the Wild.
Her intense focus on combining music and visuals (she began work on The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body in 2013) has spilled into all aspects of her life.
“Suddenly trees or a park or a car . . . they just sound like something. I can’t spell it out to you. I get to score my day in a way that’s different,” King said.