AC Villa and Thollem transform the mundane into the exotic in a mesmerizing sonic and visual environment.
“intense and virtuosic…” -TimeOut NY
Silver Ochre Live takes the audience into sonic and visual environments, passing between elegant lines and questionable borders, through diffused stories and striking beauty. This visual/sonic combination transforms the mundane into the exotic and reveals the familiar in the strange. Thollem and ACVilla’s collaboration reflect their decade of perpetual touring. ACVilla’s experimental videography and Thollem’s spontaneous compositions reveal the curiosity and ease with which they surf the extremes that travel inevitably presents.
ACVilla has been nomadic since 2008 working as an artist’s facilitator, grant writer and photo-videographer. Her interest in, and study of, lines is evident in the ways she accentuates them, erases them and crosses them in every aspect of her life. A summer nomad since her second decade, she had become a perpetual peripatetic traveler by her fourth. After living in a log cabin in the California coastal redwood forest and helping rebuild a 100-year old adobe abode in the high desert of Northern New Mexico, she found herself receiving mail in Mexico City, Prague and Thessaloniki, among other places. She has seeded ideas and plants, penned thoughts, shaped clay and wire, and witnessed the sunsets over both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, all the while seeing and listening to Life in new and unique ways.
Thollem is a peripatetic pianist/keyboardist, composer, improviser, singer-songwriter, author and educator. His compositions and performances range from the sub-genres of post-classical, free jazz, noise, punk rock and ecclecticism. He has been touring perpetually throughout North America and Europe since 2006, performing solo works as well as collaborating with an array of musicians, dancers and filmmakers including ACVilla, Martha Colburn and Manucinema (Tuia Cherici). The music for Silver Ochre is inspired and influenced by the incredible array of music heard in this multi-cultural country including but not limited to: Corridos, Gamelan, Taiko, Free Jazz, Noise, Post-Classical, Arabic, Blues, Circus music and more, all filtered through the lens of an experimental piano player.
“ACVilla’s vibrant footage is expertly matched to Thollem’s strangely nuanced sonic output.” – Live Eye TV
“An intense and virtuosic keyboardist” (TimeOut NY) with “fluid keys pulverization” (Spin Magazine), Thollem possesses “an attractively extreme viewpoint” (LA Times).
