The ghost, the dredge, Dawson City and me.

Back in January while I was in Dawson City Yukon, Dan Sokolowski director of the Dawson City Film Festival and part of KIAC challenged me to participate in the One Minute Film Challenge. A project where participants shoot a one minute film with the Super 8 film format with no editing or just in-camera editing. I pointed out that I'm more of any audio artist and that I could record a one minute track in an audio format while I was still there. I also said he could bill it as a movie without a picture. Everyone at the screening would be sitting in the dark anyway so they could conjure up images in their head based on what they were hearing. Dan was cool with all that.

I went back to the residency house studio and started improvising with a jaw harp, my voice and the scrap yard guitar I built to show the 3D lab students at SOVA. Then hit record on the H2 and laid out some tracks live to tape as they used to say. Actually I recorded several versions of the same thing as I tried to squeeze it down to one minute long. When I got home I lifted out a choice but rough track and shipped it via the long wires to Dan.

After listening to it, I titled it The Dredge. I usually let my intuition guide what I do as an artist and sort of think that after spending two weeks immersed in Dawson City in the dead cold of winter, reading about the Gold Rush there, visiting the #4 Dredge preserved up on Bonanza Creek, experiencing a visit from the ghost of Macaulay Residence amongst other things, I captured what was going on inside me with my recording.

The screening of all these one minute productions is on May 1 at the ODD Fellows Hall at 8 pm in Dawson City.