Evan Riddel
Western Herald
Kinetic Affect, whose slam-influenced, introspective spoken word performances have been reaching the ears and hearts of many in and around Kalamazoo, will release a new album, “One Day to Live” Sept. 18.
The album release party is set to take place at 7 p.m. at Club Fire, located at 1249 Portage Rd. Performing with them will be the musicians who give the duo’s productions their signature sound, Kirk Latimer and Gabriel Giron.
Latimer and Giron, both Western Michigan University graduates, first met as rivals for a spot on Kalamazoo’s national slam poetry team.
“I ended up taking the title that year, but Kirk was right on my heels from the first year coming out,” Giron said.
“I knew this guy was going to be really good. I had no idea what I was doing at the time; I was really in a learning stage.”
Where most artists on the team would fight to top one another, Giron and Latimer quickly joined forces and put together their first production, Word Weavers. After its success, they abandoned the competitions entirely to focus on insightful and original poetry.
Now, hundreds of performances later and with two albums under their belt, Kinetic Affect is celebrating the release of their latest album.
The subject matter they tackle usually has audiences squirming in their seats, as their pieces discuss divorce, bullying, the hardships of life, and how people pull through it.
Both Giron and Latimer have had plenty of hardships to work through. When he was a teenager, Latimer watched as five friends committed suicide in a three-month span.
“I remember wanting to kill myself. I remember being in that same state of mind as the other people,” said Latimer.
“When you see all the news media coverage for five suicides that quickly… you feel like maybe you should be dead too, or maybe you should have been dead instead of someone else.”
Growing up, Giron watched as his family fall apart and turned his anger towards his classmates.
“My senior year of high school, I was voted class bully and class poet because I didn’t want people to get close enough to me to be able to hurt me so I put up a façade.”
After barely passing his senior year, Giron joined the military. While stationed in Germany, his life changed completely.
“Seven months into my enlistment, I was diagnosed with stage three testicular cancer,” he said.
“It started in my right testicle and it spread all the way up to my neck, in clinical terms, it metastasized. I had a 14 by six cm mass of cancer in my abdomen. I had cancer behind my lungs and all the way into my neck.”
He fought the cancer until December 2003 and refocused his life towards his dream of living as a poet. He came back to Kalamazoo to major in film and creative writing at WMU.
Around the same time, Kirk Latimer was on his way to becoming a teacher. Both men shared a passion for slam poetry and spoken word, and soon after they met, they were writing and producing performances together.
Kinetic Affect’s unique brand of rapid-fire, heartfelt delivery reaches most everyone preformed for, elementary school children, college students, adults and senior citizens.
“Our poetry tells a lot of our personal stories. That’s the thing that’s different from the other spoken word or slam poetry right now,” Latimer said in an attempt to describe Kinetic Affect’s style.
“Our work is very much about focusing on the internal. Understanding how you project yourself out into the world that you experience. A lot of self awareness comes out, but we do it in an entertaining format so that this self awareness that we put out there is inspiring and catches people on fire, metaphorically.”
In addition to being a force to be reckoned with around west Michigan, Kinetic Affect recently filmed a spot on the NBC show “America’s Got Talent,” and are the first spoken word group to appear on the program.
“We help illuminate… what it means to be human,” said Giron. “What we try and do is open that doorway for honest communication.
A lot of what we’re going to say is going to be highly opinionated. A lot of what we say, you may not agree with and we’re okay with that.”
Not ones to rest on their laurels, Kinetic Affect has a busy schedule for the upcoming months with performances lined up for the next Kalamazoo Art Hop, amateur night at the Apollo Theater in New York City, and outreach programs for children and teenagers.
“A lot of what we do is help people start to do the hardest thing,” Giron said.
“Which is try to be honest with others, but really, start to be honest with ourselves, because that’s really the easiest person to lie to.”
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