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Jam session with Kimbra and a few members of Janelle Monáe's Band, held at Funky Claude's Lounge (Montreux, Switzerland) on July 15th, 2012. Vocals: Kimbra and Mr. [name, please?]. Piano: Joey Gonzalez. Bass: Brandon Gilliard. Drums: Mikey Phillips. Trombone: Marcus Lewis. Trumpet: Lance Powlis.

 

(Fan video)

Kimbra and Taylor Graves jamming an original by Taylor Graves, 'Best Friend', at the Piano Bar (Hollywood, June 20, 2014), with Miles Mosley, Brandon Coleman and Tony Austin.




Kimbra and Moses Sumney having an improvised jam session at Mark de Clive-Lowe's 'Church' residency at Downstairs At Fifty Seven in Los Angeles, on July 17, 2014.

"Unreleased special improvisatory track featuring Thundercat from one of our weird jam sessions"

(Patreon, Jul 14, 2020) [Not available]

SPACE JAM at Baby's All Right in New York (July, 19, 2015) featuring Ian Williams (BATTLES), Vishal (Empress Of), Dan Edinberg (The Stepkids).




SPACE JAM, Live at Babys All Right (NYC), September 20, 2015, featuring Kimbra, Amaury, Lars Horntveth, Delicate Steve, Dan Edinberg.




SPACE JAM live at Baby's All Right (NYC), October 18, 2015. Vocals: Kimbra and Bilal.




Full Live improvisation for SPACE JAM residency (2016) at Baby's All Right (NYC) featuring Amaury, Benjamin Davis and Jake Sherman. Vocals: Kimbra and Jonathan Hoard.

Kneebody + Daedelus, feat. Kimbra - Live at the Echoplex (Los Angeles) on Feb. 25, 2016.
Shane Endsley: trumpet. Ben Wendel: tenor sax. Adam Benjamin: keyboards. Kaveh Rastegar: bass. Nate Wood: drums. Alfred Darlington (Daedelus): monome, effects, sound production.
"Fallen Love" (Daedelus)






Improvised liveset with Daedelus, Lars Horntveth and Jeremy Toy, at Loop Summit 2016  (Funkhaus Berlin, November 2016). 

...Kimbra put on a completely improvised performance with musicians she’d never worked with before (*) including Daedalus, Lars Horntveth and Jeremy Toy. Everything was created on the spot, including words from a language she improvises in the moment as well. “What I'm really interested in about improvised music is watching people wrestle with self-doubt in the moment. I think jazz is like that, too, you watch someone going into a solo and they start off intimidated and then they overcome something in the moment of music.” As to the improvised performance in question she says, “There are lots of really questionable moments throughout that performance where you can feel the fear on stage. It's quite interesting to watch it back because I can feel my own doubt about whether it's any good. But then there were moments where things came together and I see us in a moment of connection.” 

“It's energetic, it's the pregnant pause of bodies in a room, waiting, responding, moving to the "Oh shit. We dropped a groove! Oh, now it's stopped." You watch people, watching what they're doing, you know? So without that, I just can't, it's like sex without love or something, you know what I mean? It's like sex without any connection. I don't know if that's too crass to say. That's kind of been my experience of it."

["Kimbra: Expansion, Contraction, Improvisation" (June 3, 2021)]

*.- Note: "Musicians she’d never worked with before" is not quite right. Kimbra had performed with  Kneebody + Daedelus in February and even before with Lars Horntveth (Space Jam sessions in 2015).

Fan video of part of the Loop 2016 performance:

EXO-TECH – Industrial Exotique

LIVE RECORDING IN-THE-ROUND

Le Poisson Rouge (NYC), July 6, 2016.

"After making a hypnotic debut in a series of sold-out impromptu shows in February, multi-headed musical phenomenon EXO-TECH returns to weave more outsider rhythms and polychrome visions, featuring an ensemble of some of New York’s most respected music luminaries. Traversing fields between Liquid Liquid, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Talking Heads and the soundtracks of Jodorowsky or Herzog, EXO-TECH is a live improvised ensemble created by antipodean banshees Sophia Brous and Kimbra, featuring a cast of exceptional musical heads including Yuka C. Honda (Cibo Matto), Mauro Refosco (Atoms for Peace), Danny Meyer (Chairlift, Julia Holter), Doug Wieselman (Antony and the Johnsons, Laurie Anderson), Jeremy Gustin (Delicate Steve, Petra Haden), Spencer Zahn (Twin Shadow, Empress Of), Benjamin Lazar Davis (Cuddle Magic), Cole Kamen-Green (People’s Champs), and Cleek Schrey. Special guests include: Brian Chase (Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Moses Sumney, and Miho Hatori (Cibo Matto, New Optimism)!" [Event description from lpr.com]




EXO-TECH

An experimental intimate show of fully improvised music.

State Theatre / Arts Centre Melbourne (18 July 2018)

Sophia Brous, Kimbra, Benjamin Lazar Davis, Jeremy Gustin, Dave Harrington, Danny Meyer, Doug Wieselman, Cleek Schrey and Spencer Zahn.

The gig was as secret as they get. No posters, no flyers, no Facebook event. In the backroom of a Fitzroy bar last winter, maybe a dozen punters sat in the dark and witnessed something happening for the first and last time.

It started with some noises. Creaky bass rumbles and keys, the rattle of percussion as slowly, a landscape emerged from the mist. Voices began to growl and skitter.

International pop sensation Kimbra – for yes, it was she – crouched on the floor facing her friend Sophia Brous, as their whispering voices began to coo and wail and spiral up each other's spines.

Jeremy Gustin, a drummer visiting from New York for the weekend's Supersense Festival, dropped a loose, swinging beat and the road suddenly loomed into view. Now we were going somewhere. Nobody, on stage or off, had a clue where.

It was all very, very exciting.

"It's liberating and I guess a little terrifying," Kimbra reflects of the process that drives the Exo-Tech collective.

"We're all stepping into a space where your inhibitions have to come down. If you bring in a lot of tension or ego or need-to-prove, it can become like lasagne, where everybody is planting ideas on top of each other.

"If you come in as a listener, really work on being sensitive to the energies around you and see what you can offer to take the idea in a new direction, then it becomes exciting because everything is up for grabs and anything can happen."

A lot has happened in the two years since Kimbra and Brous, the Melbourne expat best known here for her jazz/ experimental festivals Overground and Supersense, dreamed up the Exo-Tech recipe in a bar in Brooklyn.

David Byrne, Questlove, Sean Lennon and Cibo Matto's Yuka Honda are among the larger identities who have wandered into the morphing ensemble's democratic creative space.

Performing in a centre-facing circle with New York guitarist Dave Harrington, Appalachian fiddler Cleek Schrey, clarinettist Douglas Wieselman and half-a-dozen other quiet achievers of New York's jazz, pop, film and avant garde sprawl, Honda is among those on board next week's Melbourne return.

"It's not jamming randomly, it's more about spontaneous composing," she says. "Sometimes when you jam you're not really looking for structure. You're just mingling and dancing with each other, but with Exo-Tech we're trying to compose a song on the spot.

"We're trying to come up with the structure by suppressing ourselves and being very spontaneous, but trying to make everything meaningful," she says, laughing as words begin to fail.

They fail for good reason: the conversation between these musicians mostly takes place on stage. "I can't say I know them really well," Honda says. "For instance Dave Harrington, I met him at one of the Exo-Tech shows. We said 'Hello, nice to meet you', and then performed together.

"It's a really interesting situation. Musicians can just meet and start playing music and you find out who they are on stage. When you meet a person [offstage] you are face-to-face ... but when you're playing together I think you are all talking to the god of music. It's not so much about you or them. We are all just elements in this wonderland of music."

The sky may be the limit, but the ground is pretty well defined in Exo-Tech world. "Everything," says Kimbra, "is built off the groove.

"You sort of set up this ambience, noises, but as soon as the beat drops, that's when the song reveals itself. When [Gustin] comes in with this gunshot rhythm it demands everyone starts going for it. We have to surrender our bodies and say, 'OK, let's go'."

Exo-Tech performs one show only in Australia on July 18 in the round on the stage of the State Theatre, supported by Yuka Honda's Eucademix and the Dave Harrington Trio.

["New York and Melbourne in tech-ological embrace" (Michael Dwyer), www.theage.com.au, 12 July 2018]

 

Note: Sadly due to illness, Yuka C Honda was not able to appear as a part of the concert.

Exo-Tech at The Sultan Room (NYC) on Aug. 4, 2019. Performers: Sophia Brous, Kimbra, Zeena Parkins, Yuka Honda, Kenny Wollesen, Dave Harrington, Stephane San Juan, Spencer Zahn, Benjamin Lazar Davis, Jeremy Gustin, Cleek Schrey, Alex Toth, Anna Roberts-Gevalt.

More here and here.

Exo-Tech ensemble improvising music at Public Records (NYC) on Dec. 7, 2021: Sophia Brous and Kimbra joined by Miho Hatori, Mauro Refosco, C. Spencer Yeh, Kenny Wollesen, Mikey Freedom Hart, Mike Haldeman, Jeremy Gustin, Simon Hanes, Cole Kamen-Greene, Danny Meyer, Josh Werner, and more.

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