http://catthompsonguitars.wordpress.com
https://musicforestinstruments.wordpress.com

Sept 2019: These days focusing on building Spanish guitar, mostly flamenco.
http://catthompsonguitars.wordpress.com
2018: I’ve been up here in the mountains in northern ;Thailand for more than three years now and it truly looks as though it is for the long term. Still making instruments, Shamisen, Kora and now guitar. Very easy to practise everyday gratefulness here!

The old bio: I am living a somewhat nomadic existence mostly in the western plains of Canada, oftentimes in remote places where I have found myself living in a tent for five or six months at a time. I work/play as a composer, vocalist, musician, writer, instrument maker, visual & material artist. Over the years I have done a fair bit of composing in the Canadian contemporary dance world. Most recently making a full length piece called Speak, Love for Montreal choreographer and dear friend Sasha Ivanochko. My work has been seen and heard in Canada, the USA, Ireland and Thailand and seeks to find a path away from industrial civilisation to one of balance with the wild. O hell, what I really mean and wish for is to bring the damn horrid industrial beast quivering to it’s knees never to rise again! Or maybe I’m just trying to avoid having a regular job. So far, so mostly good. (On the regular job front that is. The ‘bringing industrial civilisation to it’s knee’s’ aspect is proving to be a little more tricksy.) Much of my music work over the last 12 years has taken place during residencies at The Banff Centre often during the rather cooler fall and winter months.

During the spring and summer of 2011-13 I rode solo, on horseback, over 2500 km linking through patches of almost lost native grassland in southern Saskatchewan and Alberta. For a number of months in 2013, I continued the journey through SW Alberta following the mountains, grasslands, foothills and plains of the eastern slopes of the northern Canadian Rockies. On this last trip I took my self-made tsugaru shamisen along for the ride playing often in very beautiful places. I found that it is a much more vigorous instrument than many may give it credit and seemed able to deal with m