How Kaki King Uses Technology To Create A Synaesthetic Experience On Stage

American guitar goddess Kaki King is on her way to Australia again for the Sydney Guitar Festival in early to mid-August, as well as a whole bunch of her own dates across this wide brown land of ours. She has toured our nation many times before, but Australian audiences will never have seen a show quite like this before. Her The Neck Is A Bridge To The Body show is something unique, and she joins us from her home in Brooklyn to let Aussie punters know what audiovisual delights she has in store for them on this upcoming tour.

"I've come to Australia as a solo guitarist, I've come with a band, but this show is very interesting," she explains. "It's a musical and visual show, and to an extent it's a theatrical show because I have developed a character for myself over the years. I don't do very much, but I'm certainly not exactly myself as I appear on stage.

"So it's guitar as projection maps, so the light from the projector hits the guitar and only the guitar, so there's no bleed. It looks incredible, it turns the guitar into this creature, this portal, an eye into all these different beautiful scenes. And in addition, I'm able to control, in large part throughout the show, depending on where we are, what you're seeing with what I'm playing. I play a note, that note runs through a computer and through different softwares, and suddenly you'll see a green spiral. It happens in a flash."

It is far from some canned, contrived thing, it is all generated live and in the moment. Each show is slightly different from every other show, and it all adds up to one hell of an eye and ear popping audiovisual spectacle. "There's a very live performance element to all of it," she reveals, "because I am performing it with a live video engineer. But there's so much in it, there's animation and there's video and there's audio-reactive art. There's an arc of a storyline, it's pretty abstract, but it kind of carries the music and the audience through this journey, and when the show is done it feels like it's taken you somewhere."

Ultimately, it is very much a one of a kind show, and it is something she is very proud of having created. "As far as I know, I have the only game in town," she says, "and at the same time it fulfils my role, maybe even more so than ever, as a guitarist. I do as I'm directed on the instrument, I'm finally able to give it the personality that I witness when I play guitar, but do that visually as well as musically."

King can trace the inspiration for creating such a distinctive show back to a spontaneous conversation she had with a friend several years ago when she was actually going through a minimalist phase with her onstage performance. "It's funny, it's one of these things where a friend of mine said something to me," she recalls. "Prior to creating the show I had gone right back to a very simple show, about as stark lighting as you can on stage. Just me and the guitar, and no more than three lights, pulling off this show for an audience.

"I think the friend said, 'For the people that aren't totally obsessed with your hands, why don't you bring in some more lighting design? Why don't you have different colours and different effects and just set the tone a little bit.' And I was like, 'That's not the worst idea!'"

So that random conversation led all manner of investigations into the feasibility and logistics of making a visual spectacular, which led her to where she is today, touring the world with a show that is blowing people's minds. "I started to look around, and I discovered projection mapping," she says. "From this simple discovery, I asked, 'Can I do this on a guitar?', and so many other questions had to be answered. But once they were, I was like, 'Yeah, this is completely feasible, this is something you can pack up and travel the world with.'

"So from asking the, 'Can it be done?' question, I said, 'Ok, let's make a show.'"