I met Ryan Purchase in grade 9 (we were 15), at Campbell Collegiate, in Regina. We hit it off immediately because we were both really into the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, as well as the Lord of the Rings. I remember going over to his house and playing the HHGTTG text-based video game (which you can now play online – for free!! But be warned – it’s INFURIATING!!!), and listening to a lot of music – I’m pretty sure Ryan was the one who introduced me to Dread Zeppelin (oh yeah, we were both big Led Zeppelin fans).  Basically, we liked all the same stuff – the only area we ever differed was Dr Who, which I never got into. We acted very silly in class, not exactly tormenting the teachers, but probably annoying and confusing them a lot. Mr Ransom, our French teacher, in particular. For example, a class exercise involving the phrase “j’aime le rosbif” spawned a whole four years of roast-beef-centered conversations, as well as roast beef sandwiches left on his desk as gifts.

We also both played in the South Saskatchewan Youth Orchestra (Ryan plays the trombone), we both went to the University of Regina for our B.Mus. degrees, we both played in the Regina Symphony Orchestra, and we lived in Toronto at the same time (Ryan for the two years of his M.Mus. at University of Toronto, me only for one year for the first year of an Artist Diploma at the Glenn Gould School of Music). We haven’t lived in the same city since, though – Ryan lived in Edmonton for many years, and eventually moved to Ottawa, while I travelled all over the place working on cruise ships for a few years, lived in Krakow for a year, then Vancouver for two years, and eventually settled in Montreal.

In 2004, we spent most of the month of May backpacking in Iceland. This was a life-changing experience for both of us. It’s imprinted so strongly on my psyche that it still feels like it just happened, even though it was more than a decade ago. We backpacked throughout the southern part of the country, where it was usually quite easy to find rides and places to stay, although we ended up several times at the hostel in Vik (the town at the southernmost point of the country, famous for it’s huge cliff overlooking a black sand beach and the rock figures in the water, which legend tells us are three trolls who were caught in the morning light after struggling to pull a captured ship to shore). We met tons of amazing people, both locals and travellers. There were two Scandinavian women around our age driving the circumference of Iceland who we bumped into several times and in several places throughout our trip!

When we wanted to go to the more remote areas in the north of the country, we rented a car for a week, a Volkswagon Golf which we named after the young woman who worked at the Vik hostel, Aesa. Unfortunately, the car rental used up our accommodations budget, so we slept in the car the whole time (except for one night in Siglufjordur, where we went to a hotel and had the whole place to ourselves). As uncomfortable as it was for the two of us to sleep in such a small car when it was still below freezing at night, we awoke in some pretty amazing places. Although once we woke up to discover we had slept in a school parking lot, that was more funny than amazing.

As you can probably imagine, Ryan and I have musically collaborated many times over the years. We’ve both attended KlezKanada many times, which is where I met a lot of musicians I play with regularly. We’re both into improvised music, and even though we’ve explored it in different ways, we have performed many times together, often through the IMOO series in Ottawa. Ryan recently released an album, Morphology of a Lover, which is pretty amazing, as was the entire process. He assembled a bunch of great improvisers (me, Mike Essoudry, Amy Horvey, Megan Jerome, Christian Dawid, and Ryan), and recorded us individually but in sequence, having either just an idea in our minds to explore, or sometimes a recording of only the previous person, which we reacted to. He then took all these separate improvised elements, and edited them together to create an incredibly cohesive and musical album.

Morphology of a Lover is one of the albums included in my “Complete Works of Joel Kerr” Indiegogo perk. Thanks Ryan!