I was watching a video by Nobuo Kubota which came along with my latest Vtape newsletter. It was brilliant. No surprise. I watched him perform in Toronto when I was in my twenties, when I was still discovering that music could contain almost anything, provided someone possessed the imagination and nerve to put it there. I never knew him as well as I did his bandmates, Michael Snow and Casey Sokol. My relationship was mostly watching from a distance.

Architecture, sculpture, sound and performance were not separate departments to Nobuo Kubota. They seemed like different openings in the same room. The voice could become an instrument or an absurd sound could suddenly reveal itself as a complete idea. Watching him again reminded me experimentation need not be solemn or sealed inside its own importance. It can be funny, playful and full of wonder. The intelligence always there, and the mischief.

The video also reminded many brilliant artists exist beyond the machinery of recognition. Their work does not fit the convenient story an era tells about itself, so it waits in archives and newsletters until someone encounters it years later and feels the room suddenly enlarge. That was my experience. I was once more the young person at the Music Gallery, realizing that art could give form to whatever had been living inside us without language.