When I arrive at Gen Ken and The Enchantress of Bioluminosity’s home to interview them, they offer me a choice of spring water from Westover Spring, Richmond Spring, or Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. Ken tells me he just attended a workshop at an ashram and passed through Berkeley Springs on his way back to stop and fill a jug of exotic spring water.

Gen Ken is Ken Montgomery, a sound and visual artist, and The Enchantress is Andrea Beeman, a dancer, performer and choreographer, and their roots in the DIY and experimental art and sound scenes are deep. From 1989-1992, Ken ran Generator, known as New York’s first sound art gallery and, both together and separately, they’ve performed at festivals and galleries around the world, most recently several shows in Greece and Italy. Since moving to Richmond three years ago, they have been enriching Richmond’s lively avant garde music scene — curating shows, performing and collaborating.

I opt for the exotic Berkeley Springs water and Montgomery hands me a postcard he sent me a year ago that got returned by the post office for some reason. But calling this a postcard is like saying the Sauer’s sign is a logo. This postcard is a work of art, collaged and stamped, with text and drawings all over it. Creating and exchanging mail art is something Montgomery has been doing for decades with artists all over the planet.

“When I was a little kid, my best friend moved out of state and I was heartbroken,” he remembers. “We stayed in touch by sending stuff in the mail. So maybe that was the origin of it. And in the early ’80s, it kind of dovetailed with cassette culture.”

He further explains that there wasn’t access to “really alternative DIY experimental music in terms of distribution or record stores or whatever.” It was the zines where you got addresses and traded cassettes with people. “That’s how I made a lot of friends in Europe, sending cassettes back and forth, kind of related to the mail art postcard thing,” he adds. “The biggest influence maybe in my artistic life, you could kind of call him my mentor, was Conrad Schnitzler, the Berlin composer-artist. I had bought records of his when I was young teenager, and he had his address on the back of one of the records. I sent a postcard and a cassette and that developed into a correspondence and a friendship and just kind of took off.”

Beeman’s dance practice is rooted in Middle Eastern and Indian dance. She is trained in these styles and has performed with companies all over the world. She draws on these genres when performing as The Enchantress of Bioluminosity.

“The luminescent dance is so different [than Indian dance] because it requires a different sonic palette,” she says. “I wanted to embody bioluminescent creatures.” She recalls that she went to an aquarium where they had amazing jellyfish, and she was like, “Wow, I think that I would like to move and glow like the jellyfish. [So] I found an Italian fabric designer who made a fiber optic outfit that glowed in pitch black; it looks just like a jellyfish lit up.

“But now, my latest thing is trees,” she says.

Beeman often incorporates the natural world into her dance, from sea creatures to orchestrating water dances near waterways in New York and now Richmond. (Now the variety of spring water I was offered makes total sense.)

I ask her what she loves about trees: “I’m learning to be a tree steward here. It’s an official thing in Richmond. They take care of the urban canopy, and I’m hoping that eventually there’ll be some tie in with movement,” she explains. “[Trees are] just so majestic. I mean, look how long they’ve been here and they’re still here and they’re so grounded, yet they’re in the wind. They have such presence. They seem very wise.” She adds that in New York City, you walk around surrounded by millions of people, “but here there are a lot more trees than people. The buildings are taller than people in New York and here, the trees are the tall ones.”

During the pandemic, the couple decided to move away from New York City. They were looking for smaller towns that were artistically vital and close to nature. Richmond made their list because Montgomery had performed at 1708 Gallery in the late ’90s and knew there was an energetic sound art scene here; though his longtime friendship with Richmond musician Tommy erfinger, whom he calls the Mayor of Noise, might have more to do with it.

“When Tommy was really young, maybe in high school even, he made a cassette that I got through a zine that I loved. And when I went to Munich for a performance, I bought 10 copies of his cassette and told people that this was the best music coming out of America. It was called, ‘Fucked by the Fickle Finger of Farmville’ by Buttfinger. [erfinger] had taken a Butterfinger bar and cut the ER out. It was all this collage stuff off the radio and TV. It’s really comedy, but real noisy and cut up. And I loved it.”

Gen Ken and erfinger perform together regularly, and Gen Ken and The Enchantress have been performing together for decades; I saw a short set of theirs at Circle Thrift a couple of years ago. “Every gig we do, we seem to do something different,” Beeman says.

Improvisation and transformation

“We usually have some kind of theme even if we’re the only ones that know what it is,” adds Montgomery. “I set up the instrumentation and the palette of things that I want to do, but then on top of that, it’s very free-form, and I’m keeping my eyes on her, and as she changes or moves I respond to it sonically.”

He says when they first met “a long, long, long time ago,” he had really gotten into “pure experience, doing performances in total darkness with no visuals.” He notes that Schnitzler really influenced him: “He wanted to perform in total darkness and just have it be an audio experience.” Montgomery says he was exploring that a lot when he met Beeman, who was coming from Middle Eastern music. “I was coming over totally electronic, so how are we going to come together on something?” [Her bioluminescence] was this visual element that would come in with a reason in the darkness of the sound.”

Andrea jumps in: “And then also we were doing the more playful things with the lamination rituals.”

While Montgomery seems to eschew the performance art label, much of their work toes the line — lamination rituals especially.

“I had a laminator with a contact mic that would amplify the sound of the laminator,” he says. “We would make these performances that we called lamination rituals, we would do a performance and there would be costuming, and after we would get people from the public to bring things that they wanted to laminate. They’d each have a one-on-one experience. Andrea would pass out plastic pouches for everybody like the Pied Piper going out into the audience and luring them to the laminator.”

“We did [a ritual] at The Kitchen in New York,” Beeman says, “where we made thin pancakes and laminated them and I wore a dress made out of laminated pancakes. I still have it.” Of course, I also had to ask if it got moldy: “Actually, not if they’re sealed. But several have opened a little and they’ve become pancake dust. And they’ve changed color, but the transformation is part of it.”

Transformation is certainly part of their work and life as artists. Whether they are improvising movement and sound at a gig, researching and taking inspiration from the motion of jellyfish, water and trees, or transforming postcards into art and sending them off into the world. They continuously allow their practice and artistic creations to change and merge and grow.

Next up, the Enchantress is planning to participate again in the National Water Dance this spring. “Water dances bring awareness to taking care of the waterways and [have] a community component,” she says. “It was so hard to find water in New York. I mean, yes, there are the rivers there, but getting near them to dance is very hard. I had to have permits. Here, people are much more approachable. I just called people at the [Byrd Park] Pump House and said, I want to do a dance.”

Gen Ken has some ideas about putting together a local Richmond sound artist mixtape.

“I want to do something like that in the next year,” he says. “I really enjoy the scene here. It’s really vibrant. And I’d like to maybe create an album of people that I think are really, really good and who wouldn’t do it on their own. They’re just doing their thing and that’s really refreshing after New York.”

A friend of his from New York who was on tour when he played in Richmond said that he was really impressed, and “he’s seasoned and played all over the place … But here, he’s like there’s a real audience here. He was shocked.”

Also it helped that the venue gave all the door money to the artists, especially to the traveling artists. “So he was also like, ‘Oh my God, we got paid more here than we did anywhere else!’ So yeah, Richmond’s a special city. You have a really enthusiastic audience who are really interested.

“What more could you ask for as a performer? Besides a huge budget.”

Find out where and when Gen Ken and The Enchantress of Bioluminosity are performing next on their Instagram accounts: https://www.instagram.com/egnekn/ and https://www.instagram.com/enchantressofbioluminosity/