Barnes, Digger
Near Exit 27
Over the past 10 years, singer-songwriter Digger Barnes has been documenting his life on the road and capturing it on record. Tales of longing, melancholy and morbid charm are his trademark and the material of the "Diamond Road Show". The "Diamond Road Show" is a peculiar type of road movie - a bastard bearing the DNA of cinema and concert alike. Digger Barnes developed this show-format alongside his friend, painter and video-artist Pencil Quincy. In previous years many miles were traveled to bring the "Diamond Road Show" to people at home and abroad. Yet here too, the outsider breaks with the norm: Instead of bringing the film show solely to clubs or cinemas, the tour, not unlike the road itself treads unfamiliar territory. Barnes takes his road trip to cemeteries, chapels, old gas stations, boxcars, squats and doesn't even shy away from psychiatric institutions, high-brow theaters or airplane hangars. Being constantly on the road, Digger Barnes' life and the fictional episodes of the "Diamond Road Show" merge and become inseparable. Barnes' latest record "Near Exit 27" is a prime example of the dissolving of the boundaries of fact and cinematic fiction.