Sometimes the show really must go on

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This article was published 31/01/2025 (220 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Karen Asmundson never wanted to be a solo artist.

For the entirety of her creative career in Winnipeg, first with groups like Celine’s Real Killer (“They called us Portuguese industrial punk lounge,” she says with a laugh) then with the art-rock duo Querkus and finally Ghost Twin, Asmundson has been a collaborator, contributing to music that reflected the disorder and disjointedness inherent to life on Earth.

In name and in creative approach, Ghost Twin was a union between two kindred spirits whose separate weirdnesses began to merge in November 2001, when Jaimz Asmundson and Karen Dunham met at the extinct punk club Wellington’s on goth night.

“Jaimz had more eyeliner on than I did,” says Karen, whose hair at the time was blue.

For the next 22 years, the couple worked together on creative projects, first on Jaimz’ films, like Goths on the Bus (“an absolute masterpiece of Winnipeg filmmaking,” according to Universal Language director Matthew Rankin) and later in the musical realm.

After Querkus broke up, and after he learned about Jawa, a live video-editing technique, Jaimz proposed they start a band: he’d manage the software and she would provide musical polish.

“I was intrigued, but I had just had this tumultuous band drama,” recalls Karen.

“Maybe I don’t want to introduce that energy into my marriage. I wasn’t sure, but he convinced me, and it ended up being something that we did. Another layer of our relationship.”

Ghost Twin released a pair of cult-favourite albums through the boutique Art of Fact label. Their performances blended Jaimz’ technical wizardry with Karen’s spectral songcraft, and their music videos were just as fractured, fluid and unpredictable, marrying haunting soundscapes with visual collages of life beyond the mortal coil.

“Think of the reanimated corpse of composer George Frideric Handel performing in a dimly lit German goth club in the ’80s,” one alt-weekly mused. Per Stylus magazine, Ghost Twin “makes you feel your skeleton.”

“It’s so great finding someone as weird as you are,” Karen Asmundson said in 2015, ahead of a Ghost Twin Halloween concert for Hell Night at Ozzy’s.

But losing someone as weird as you are is an indescribably strange feeling.

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“The day Jaimz died was the first day I’ve ever lived alone my entire life,” Karen Asmundson said last week at a Pembina Highway cafe.

It was 384 days since her husband, a beloved artist and the programmer at the Dave Barber Cinematheque, died suddenly at the age of 42, with an aortic aneurysm striking on New Year’s Day 2024.

“That was really hard to get used to — being alone in my house, like, ‘This is my life now. I live here by myself.’ I had to medicate myself a lot just to sleep at all. I was a mess,” she says.

“I did the basic things I needed to do to look after myself. Social life. Maybe go to yoga class, I made a lot of soup. All the things to make you not feel like jumping off a bridge.”

She took eight months of sick time she’d accrued as a city forestry technician. She started writing about her grief, sharing updates to Facebook.

“If I overshared this crazy woman in mad grief — Here! You take it — it meant I didn’t have to remember it anymore,” she says.

The response was supportive. “People kept telling me I should write a book.”

In April, she and Jaimz’ father, Graham, took the late filmmaker’s ashes to be scattered in Montreal, where Jaimz was born, during a solar eclipse, but the journey wasn’t without its cosmic hiccups.

“Airport security always zeroed in on Jaimz because he had so many electronics,” recalls Karen. “Then this time, they wanted to swab the bag of ashes. I was like, ‘Jaimz, buddy, they’re out to get you one last time.’”

When she returned, Karen dealt with her husband’s archive of personal projects, continuing many of them in his stead, including DashJam, an in-the-hopper interview series with local musicians who play synthesizers hooked up to a vehicle’s dashboard as they give a personalized tour of Winnipeg.

“Jaimz was a fantastical ideas man, and he was pretty good at finishing things, but was a lot better at starting them,” she says, smiling.

“He had a lot of stuff on the go, and it’s either I’m going to finish them or nobody else will. That’s the reality.”

She was only doing things that felt good, which meant making music wasn’t in the immediate future. But midway through 2024, Karen started to feel a shift.

“There was a point that enough of the clouds lifted that I was able to see a future that had me in it, doing stuff,” she says.

“There was no choice. Either I had to suffer or figure out who I was now. It was this process of figuring out who I am and what I can and want to do,” she adds.

“I’d ask the void, ‘Jaimz, what do you want?’ And the answer I always got back was, “Do what you want. I’m dead, so just figure it out.’”

“Well,” she thought. “I love Ghost Twin. I love performing. I’ve worked hard for this and I feel like I’m capable of doing it. And why should I give it up?”

So last summer, Asmundson enlisted “honorary Ghost Twin member” Michael Falk (Les Jupes, Touching) to help her finish production on an unreleased Ghost Twin EP of covers from the extended David Lynch universe, including a personalized version of Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart by Julee Cruise, featured in both Twin Peaks and in the late filmmaker’s Industrial Symphony No. 1, a collaboration with composer Angelo Badalamenti.

Ahead of the EP’s scheduled release in April, Asmundson convened a new lineup for Ghost Twin — herself, Pat Short, Alison Hain and a cardboard cutout of Jaimz that friends created for his funeral — which will debut Saturday night at the Handsome Daughter.

“I wasn’t sure what I could carry with me from my previous life, but as it turns out, Ghost Twin is one of the things I felt I could hold onto,” Asmundson wrote recently on the band’s Facebook page.

“I wasn’t willing to let that go, and I know Jaimz wouldn’t have wanted me to. Ghost Twin was one of his many, many gifts to me.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com