Evan Premo‘s music has much in common with the paintings of Jan Sandman. Both artists create haunting and ethereal compositions that seem to embody chrysalism — that cozy tranquility one feels while watching a thunderstorm from the safety of indoors.
One might experience a similar sensation while watching “The Space Between: An Altar for the Unnamable,” a short film by East Calais filmmaker and photographer Andreas John. In the movie, sunlight streams through the boards of a 19th-century barn while Premo, 39, a double bassist and composer from Plainfield, creates what he calls “sonic layers” that accompany Sandman as she paints. Premo describes the 71-year-old Montpelier artist as “a wise woman and healer and very important in my life.”
The film was screened at the 2024 Green Mountain Film Festival, but this week the three artists will bring John’s movie to life in the East Calais barn where it was filmed. They’ll be joined by violinist and singer Laurel Premo, Evan’s sister. The meta event, also titled The Space Between, is produced by Northwoods Music Collaborative, a new-to-Vermont project of Evan’s.
The 75-minute multimedia event will feature the half-hour movie, played in three chapters on a screen hung from the barn’s rafters. Interludes of guided meditation by Sandman will intersperse the film, along with live and recorded music and opportunities for the audience to participate in chanting and vocal drones.
“We’re hoping that people will find it to be a pilgrimage.” Evan Premo
Vermont chamber music enthusiasts are likely familiar with the work of Evan Premo, who previously served as codirector of Marshfield’s Scrag Mountain Music, which he cofounded with his former wife, Mary Bonhag.
For the past 10 years, Premo has also offered concerts on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where he grew up. It was there that he founded the nonprofit Northwoods Music Collaborative, which hosts an annual festival called Beethoven & Banjos, bringing together classical and folk music. The Space Between was first performed as a multimedia event at that festival in 2024. Premo has since opened a chapter of Northwoods Music Collaborative in East Calais.
Though Premo’s music has a distinctively spiritual quality, his musical roots are set in a family of scientist-musicians. His mother, a limnologist, plays the hammered dulcimer, fiddle, mandolin and guitar; his father, a herpetologist, sings and plays guitar. For years the couple ran an ecological consulting firm; they still have a water-testing laboratory.
“Music was always a super-serious side job for them,” said Premo, who’s been a professional musician since age 8. When he was a child, the family regularly toured the Midwest during summers, performing at music festivals and the occasional science conference.
“It’s always been a passion of mine … to bring together science and spirituality,” Premo said. In fact, The Space Between grew out of another project called Primacy of Consciousness. That concert-length work was based on the 2015 book Infinite Awareness: The Awakening of a Scientific Mind, by neuroscientist Marjorie Hines Woollacott.
Although the East Calais barn is spacious and cathedral-like, the seating area is quite small, Premo noted, and thus can accommodate only 60 people for each of the three scheduled performances.
“It’s also a bit of an effort to get there,” Premo said, “but it’s so much about the physical space that we’re hoping that people will find it to be a pilgrimage.”
This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2025.
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