What we might assume is a continuation of the “interstellar Americana” she was exploring with her last band, The Ghost Gamblers, former Earl Greyhound bassist is currently in the final 3 or so days of the Kickstarter campaign to fund her next project, Tularosa, An American Dream-Time. As you can see from “Oh, Gallows” above, the music is dreamy and experimental, indeed. The video also marks Thomas’s directorial debut. Gotta love the Martha Graham-inspired spirits, right.
As you’ll see in the Kickstarter description, there’s a lot of American myth and family feuds that serve as partial inspiration for the project. But there are also bigger questions that Thomas wants to explore:
The Tularosa album is the soundtrack to a multi-disciplinary storytelling/theatre work (what I call a “songspell”) that I have been researching and developing for a number of years.
In the songspell Tularosa, twelve players portray twelve American “archetypes”, morphing into various characters– both historical and imagined– across the American landscape and timeline. A masked chorus moves, sings, comments, illuminates. Video projections of the land’s macro- and microcosms call us back to the living, animate Earth.
The American West, and Tularosa specifically, becomes the epicenter for these archetypal characters and their differing mythologies to crash and burn. The songspell Tularosa asks: Why do we feel so entitled to mercilessly exploit the land? Why do we so easily enact violence for our own sense of expansion? Why do we favor “progress” over other values? Why do we force our beliefs about the world onto the “other” so insistently?
There are just a few days left to support the project. Consider helping Kamara make it over the top! Need more inspiration? Here’s a clip of her performing the project’s title song:
KamaraThomas_Tularosa from KamaraThomasMusic on Vimeo.
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