The Emetics are two individuals, Kedrick James and Don Klassen. We are post-millenial poet-musicians, and our art is intended to bring on altered states of perception and consciousness. This project began as a chance to understand how music could evolve when it was no longer a free and open domain of interaction, how it could become transcendent when it had lost its soul.
This project encompasses our writing, composing, playing, deliberating, drawing, designing, animating, producing and performing skills. It is our attempt at a total artform which does not recognize the boundaries of professionalization and division of labour.
Our music is informed by digital technologies. This project would not be possible without the vast storage and editing capacity offered by computers. Our computers are a part of our feedback loop, insofar as our digital editing of raw performance guides our next performance. But it is not digitally created. It is digitally captured, cut, and stored. But the sounds are played live or they come from the world around us, and the chemistry of its fusion is organic. It is a hybrid, a cybernetic process, a cyborg symphony, a hyperactive, hyperlinked web joining the natural and virtual worlds.
We live, work, create and record in Vancouver, Canada. Both of us have toured internationally as musicians and poets, and are veterans with twenty years of professional engagements in these fields behind us. However, this project is something we have always wanted, yet never achieved. It has finally come to fruition, and we hope you will enjoy at least a passing glance at what has become for us an all-consuming obsession.
Check out our website to find out more about our mission, our art, our experiment, our audio journals, and our underlying theoretical position on this strange hybrid artform we call The Emetics. This is not just chaotic noise, and you will soon discover the depth and decomposing complexity with which we are approaching this project. Thanks for taking the time to check it out.