My name is Mike Gamble. I’m an intermedia artist based out of Portland, Oregon.

VY//BLE is a live manipulation of a series films I made of the course of three months. The music is set to a short EP entitled “Adolescent Throwback” that I made at a time of a whirlwind of artistic re-discovery. Over the course of one summer in 2006, I produced the music in a small studio (about the size of most domestic closets) in Brooklyn, NY. I had just been acquainted with the musical tools that had I used when I first started to record music as a 13-year old boy in the early 90’s. As an eager young musician I saved my lawn-mowing riches to purchase a Boss drum machine, some Casio keyboards, and a 4-track Fostex cassette tape recorder. The feeling of nostalgia that was induced when I picked up these instruments again led me to produce music that has a very lo fi, scrappy-but-exciting aesthetic to it. When conceptualizing this project I wanted to match this same buoyancy visually, by mixing experimental video-art, narrative short film, and the traditional music video format. The films I shot where composed and then executed in a fashion that reflects the lens of life in the digital era. As a performance, the live remix of each film is further enhanced by the aid of live MeteOrcherstra, audio reactive projections, and the spirit of the moment.

I’ve spent the last 20 years immersed in the jazz, experimental rock and improvised music scene primarily in NYC, with close ties to New Orleans, Burlington, Boston, San Francisco and now the Pacific Northwest. In Portland, I keep myself busy as the artistic director of the Creative Music Guild, which is a non-profit organization that promotes local and international experimental music, dance, installations, and film. As a touring artist I have worked and recorded with Bobby Previte, Nels Cline, Lori Goldston, Todd Sickafoose, and my trio The InBetweens. On top of working as a professional guitarist and a film composer, I just received a Masters of Arts Interdisciplinary Studies at Oregon State University, where I presented a final performance/thesis that merged video art, music, and film under one umbrella. As the filmmaker, composer, editor, and live performer, I attempted to surpass the traditional roles and media archetypes by harnessing, to a certain degree, the mark of an interdisciplinary auteur; one who is responsible for melding lines, expanding boundaries, and generating a degree of improvisation that blurs the timing and hierarchy of the process. This combustification of sorts is further negotiated live, in real time, by live accompaniment and audio reactive video manipulation.