When do you travel out of town to see a hometown group? When it hasn’t played here for months — a year and a half ago at Artspace, actually. Plasmodium, a duo featuring Bio Ritmo vet Bob Miller and longtime Richmond musician Jim Thomson, was working on an album back then, which it is just now finishing. Plasmodium’s rebirth happens during a special series right down the road in scenic Charlottesville, where it will offer the most unlikely of mountain music every Wednesday night in January at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, 414 E. Main St. Dubbed a future music series, the nights will offer prerecorded drum loops, live horns and keyboards. Plasmodium creates improvised sets that depend heavily on the mood of the time, Miller says. The group got its initial inspiration from a DJ Krush album, but now includes elements of jazz-rock, spoken word and theatrics. It’s art music with tongue firmly planted in cheek. “It’s got a sense of humor,” Miller says.
— Wayne Melton, Style Weekly

"I use the term "performance art" very hesitantly and loosely. We are mainly into musical improvisation with a side dish of theatrical improvisation within whatever environment we find ourselves in. If there happens to be a bar regular who likes to play spoons and dress up like Elizabeth Taylor, we welcome them to the stage. The music that we play comes out of the music of the tradition of life and our lifestyles. People basically can expect what we expect out of the show: a subtle interactive phenomenon. We are self-proclaimed clairaudients. Clairaudience is the psychic ability to hear things that are beyond the range of the ordinary power of hearing, such as voices from the dead or the living. One night while playing in our practice space we channeled an entity named Clive Buckledown who is this guy who works a graveyard shift in a convenience store and owes his life to VISA. He usually visits us for a session when we perform and tells his story while we go into a trance..."
— Jim Thomson, interviewed for C'ville Weekly

The art-jazz-electronic duo Plasmodium has a CD out titled Clairaudience, blending fusion, sampladelia, grunge, and twisted Southern humor. At the music's core are jazzy grooves performed by Jim Thomson (drums, vocals) and Bob Miller (trumpet and keyboards), augmented with loops, samples, and electronic treatments a la the "labfunk" of Recloose or Atjazz. Miller's nimble trumpet is a versatile lead instrument, moving from traditional muted phrasing to wah wah-ed electric guitar shrieks.

Veterans of the Virginia music scene centered around Richmond and Charlottesville, the pair has an interesting provenance: Miller gigs with the salsa group Bio Ritmo, while Thomson drummed in the 80s for the nuclear mutant hardcore outfit GWAR. Although mainly jazzy, Clairaudience spins a dazzling range of musical fictions, from "Tristay"'s reverbed rockabilly lament to the paranoid psychedelic dirge rock of "Space Eye" (think Alice in Chains meets Air, if that's possible). The daily indignities of hapless convenience store clerk "Clive Buckledown," recited in a deadpan, detective-story monotone over sensuous electric piano loops, recall the white psycho jazz rap of Kentuckyan-by-way-of-Dallas MC 900 Ft. Jesus.

In a more Cagean mode, the sound collage "Rethinking the Raven" presents echo-treated field recordings of a suburban smart guy spouting increasingly ridiculous, palsied nonsense syllables into fast-food driveup intercoms. ("Sir, can you drive to the window so we can take your order, we can't understand you.") The track is funny on a mean spirited Jerky Boys level, but also seductive, with the sound manipulations turning the baffled or bored utterances of the franchise employees into quasi-world music. One clerk's digitally twinned "I don't know/I don't know (I don't understand what you're saying)" becomes poignantly melodic through repetition, resembling an eerie call-and-response chant. In "Dr. Octobongopus" a bored lounge MC introduces the stage act of a polyrhythmic, multi-armed, but basically lame bongo player in a routine that is pure deadpan surrealism.
— Tom Moody, digitalmedietree.com

Eclectic, adventurous and, at times, shamelessly silly, Plasmodium wears a variety of arty genres before taking off the mask to reveal the clown face underneath. A collaboration between Hotel X percussionist Jim Thompson and Bio Ritmo trumpeter Bob Miller, the CD is firmly in the wiseass rock tradition, a witty combination of avant-garde and pop elements by players who love serious music but just can't keep a straight face.

The early songs are deadpan. The opening ambient piece is followed by "Sin," whose angst-drenched lyrics over drum loop and bass riff sound like a collaboration between Brian Eno and Morphine. The next song, "Ancestor," could be out of the Bill Laswell world-funk songbook. "Space Eye" may be the best piece on the album, walking the knife-edge between clever and stupid with the assurance of early Pink Floyd.

But there's no going back after "Dr. Octobongopus," an audaciously self-conscious one-joke bit of a sort seldom attempted since the breakup of the legendary Bonzo Dog Band. From here on it's all jokes, first the field-recording drive-through comedy of "Reimagining the Raven" and finally the hard-boiled, paranoid convenience clerk yarn.

It's fair to question how well this will stand up over multiple listenings; the humor is fairly obvious, and even the most brilliant recorded comedy tends to fade as fast as the flavor in gum. But it's got a beat, and you can dance to it.
— Peter McElhinney, Style Weekly, April 28, 2004