SELINSGROVE -- Experimental artist Peter Yumi is finding success through a trio of mediums.
Mr. Yumi's music, photography and film are all on display at the Kind Cafe in Selinsgrove for a unique performance mish-mashing music with photo art and short movies.
"As part of the presentation, I recorded the sounds the espresso machine made and used it to make drum loops and beats," he said. "It was loud and obnoxious, but it was still interesting."
As a musician and artist, Mr. Yumi says he's more concerned with answering big-picture questions than with appealing to mass audiences. His songs play with politics and ideas of ownership.
"In the end the goal is for it to become something more than the song. It's about ideas," Mr. Yumi said.
His photography follows suit. In the days leading up to his Sept. 14 performance, he could been seen on the opposite end of Market Street taking multiple photos of the Kind Cafe.
"That one image was six hours of taking one photo every two minutes," he explained, noting he sold the resulting composite photo the night of his performance.
Mr. Yumi says he arrived at experimental art after pursuing a more orthodox musical route. He had been a guitarist in a Denver, Colo.-based punk band 15 years ago when Yumi came to an epiphany: he decided he was tired of hauling around so much cumbersome equipment.
"I just started getting fed up with it," he said. "I was tired of having to practice with other musicians."
Electronic music, he discovered, was the solution. He could work by himself, at his own pace, and could go in any direction -- no matter how right-brained or far out.
Mr. Yumi now hones his craft for up to 15 hours a day, plugging away on his home computer at his home in Selinsgrove to craft songs that are at once spacey, ambient and haunting.
"Ideally, what my music is more about (is) education and media literacy. It's about how the media affects us and how we interact with technology," he said.
Mr. Yumi says he also draws inspiration from his wife, Karla Kelsey, a poet and creative writing professor at Susquehanna University.
"Most of my work is inspired by imagery from her poetry, and her poems are often inspired by imagery from my artwork. In the past five years we've really played off of each other."
Mr. Yumi doesn't devote much time to promotion. He says he spends all of his energy creating his craft. So he was pleasantly surprised when all 13 of his pieces were snapped up on Sept. 14.
"I was really blown away," he said. "It was great that so many people came out."
As an artist, Mr. Yumi doesn't shy away from anything. He's now helping to write and produce a hip-hop album -- his first ever. The twist? Mr. Yumi worked with a Tanzanian rapper who busted his rhymes in Swahili.
Mr. Yumi explained, "We started recording at 10:30 a.m. and went until 10:30 at night. He's a phenomenal rapper."
And while he hasn't yet managed to make his living solely from art, things are beginning to pick up for Mr. Yumi, who was recently commissioned to create a composite piece comprised of pictures of the Susquehanna River.
For the entire fall season, Mr. Yumi will trek down to the river each day to take a photo. When he's done, he said, the resulting superimposed image will be 3 feet long and 5 feet high.
"If I was making all of my living from this, that would be absolutely perfect," he said.
Mr. Yumi's unique music and art creations can be viewed at peteryumi.wordpress.com.
n E-mail comments to dgessel@dailyitem.com.
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