If you’ve been out to see underground experimental music in Chicago in the past ten years, odds are pretty good you’ve heard a manic laugh somewhere in the crowd, maybe followed by a scuffle—and if you have, odds are even better the source of both was Camilla Ha. An installation artist, stylist, costume designer, and former butoh dancer, Ha has been performing and recording as Magic Is Küntmaster since 2002, making electronic music that’s celestial like a black hole. Over the years she’s assumed a series of theatrical onstage personas, beginning as a menacing dead prostitute backed by naked female “ghosts,” then evolving into a sort of otherworldly chanteuse who’s a lot like Ha herself: elegant, unpredictable, witchy, deadpan. She can be just as strange and confrontational offstage, and many of her most memorable performances haven’t been part of any bill.
We’d been set up on a blind date to be pals by a mutual friend, Patrick Hambrecht, who leads the Brooklyn band and arts collective Flaming Fire. He understands why people have trouble with Ha, but he thought I’d get her. “I once saw her tell a DJ, ‘I’d really love to DJ here sometime,’” he says, “and five minutes later, ‘I hate the music you play. It’s awful.’ She didn’t even think about it. Both statements were just true.” Ha’s “genius-crazy juice,” he says, “comes out of nowhere, like a bomb. There’s no warning. You’re talking to this smart, canny lady at a bar and then whammo! Suddenly Camilla’s shrieking about demons and ghosts and crawling around on the ceiling, shooting flames out of her mouth.”
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When she graduated from high school in 1990, her family moved to the small Texas town of Lake Jackson. After a semester of community college in Los Angeles, Ha joined them there, but she couldn’t stand it. “I was already partying at goth clubs on Sunset Boulevard,” she says. “I just wasn’t having it.”
In early 2000 filmmaker Usama Alshaibi, best known for the Iraq documentary Nice Bombs, was casting for his first long-form movie, Soak, which he says is about “STDs, prostitutes, porn, phantoms, and travel.” He’d recently met Ha at the Rainbo Club in Ukrainian Village, where she was yelling at people to dance with her. Later he asked her if she’d be interested in a role for a “Korean woman who barely spoke English and was to be in some sort of sleazy porn video where she just gets beaten and fucked.” Naturally, Ha agreed.
Ha says it took her a few years to realize that she didn’t actually like being onstage. She’d drink to get over the fright, then go into a state that she says “wasn’t just about being drunk, but about opening up and going with whatever force was going to take over me. A lot of times that was a very angry, violent force that made for some amazing shows. Unfortunately, it started to bleed over into my day-to-day life. . . . I was aggressively confrontational and perversely getting off on upsetting or disturbing people.”
The opening-night party includes performance art by Ryan Dunn, aka Instinct Control; DJ sets by Alex Valentine and Rand Sevilla; and readings by Gabriel Wallace (formerly of Mahjongg) and painter Gregory Jacobsen (of the defunct Lovely Little Girls). Ha and Soliday have taken inspiration for their set from early synth experimenter Ruth White and a bizarre sex-magic sci-fi album released in 1969 by Louise Huebner, briefly famous as the official witch of Los Angeles County. Ha is also finishing a book of related collages and illustrations, likewise called The Cosmic Mind of Black Leather, financed by another CAAP grant and due out this winter. It draws on the same collection of dream journals the installation does—ten volumes spanning 20 years.
Sat 9/18, doors 8 PM, performances 9 PM, Reversible Eye, 1103 N. California, 773-862-1232, reversibleeye.net, $10 suggested donation, all ages.
