Artist Feature: IMMA Musica

IMMA Musica is a full-time video artist from Ridgefield, Queens. "I chose this name because it means 'mother' in Hebrew, and it's also a joke about the band ABBA, since 'Abba' means 'father'." After immigrating to New York in his early twenties, he cut his hand while working as a cook, which led him to step back from bass guitar and lean into electronic music instead. Daft Punk was a major inspiration — after they broke up, he researched the synths behind their records, which reshaped how he heard the genre. Saving everything he could, he bought a Roland Juno-106; his love of synths only grew, along with his collection.

Background

Time in the synth world eventually led IMMA to video synthesis. He took a train to Newark, New Jersey to buy a Videonics VE-1 video equalizer, and through that search he found the local video synth community. "That community opened my mind to glitch art and experimentation within the medium. (Shout out to Mike Video Punk, viz.wel, and spaceoctupus)." Soon after, he devoted himself to glitch art and VHS — today his Queens studio holds roughly 2,000 VHS tapes, 40 CRT TVs, and a large collection of video mixers and glitch boxes.

Process

He's developing a live set that merges music and visuals: synths for live electronic music, a small 3-inch CRT TV with a 4K camera pointed at it for rescanning, and a glitch box to run Resolume through.

Current Work

Alongside the live rig, he's been experimenting with larger-scale painting that uses feedback as reference, ahead of an upcoming exhibition.

IMMA looks forward to playing more shows, building more interactive installations, and hopefully releasing a tape of footage he's collected over the years — and to more collaborations with artists around the world.