The video and his maker: KillingFrenzy video accompanies Oneohtrix Point Never during Decibel 2010 (see video below).
An intersection of contemporary music and video art—and live performance.  BY NEIL LEVENS

**SEE THE LINKS AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE for more information on the software, artists, and organizations mentioned in this article.

Music was not my first love. In fact, by my standards, it took quite a while for me to warm up to the medium that has now seemingly taken firm control of my life and wallet. The transition happened somewhere in that blurry adolescent period where angry white boys with microphones mean everything in the world, but before that, I was truly only ever interested in illustrations or paintings: the graphic arts. I grew up with it, was nurtured by it, and when it came time to broach the world of sound it had to happen through channels I could understand more readily.

That came in the form of bands and musicians that had some grasp and integration of visual art with their music. Whether it was in their music videos, album artwork, or live shows, I would always be pulled to something that looked as good as it sounded; something that pulled my imagination from all directions without having to explain to me the explicit nature of my journey.

At the risk of not only sounding grizzled but also cliché, the entire culture of music consumption has changed drastically since the days of my death metal hair and combat boots. True Audio is churning into mp3, lavish CD designs have been whittled into file tags in a software program and those of us who didn’t have a choice in purchasing the music we grew up with now find ourselves amongst a generation that has never paid a dime for their...well, art.

While it’s easy to survey this contemporary landscape with woe and despair, that’s just a superficial appraisal that borders on sheer blindness. There is a direct convergence now between the advances of technology and the new methods being employed in the one arena that can’t be easily downloaded, tagged and encoded: the live performance. Much to my excitement, many of these new techniques are embracing the visual experience as a relatively equal partner to the music.

Adding a visual element to live music shows, or a living environment, is hardly a new concept, however. Larger and particularly popular acts have been employing them for years, but in ways that are typically outside the grasp of smaller bands, venues or video artists. In addition, they are usually a peripheral element to add ‘gloss’ to a show. Notable exceptions being Tool, Neurosis, and in some instances, Nine Inch Nails, all of whom have typically involved dedicated artists for their live shows, to the point where the line between rock concert and art installation blurs considerably. NIN opted for lavish live visuals when performing songs that didn’t require the same melee of their thrasher repertoire. During the mid-90’s, it was for their anthemic ‘Hurt’ (a huge projection scrim over the stage featuring decaying animals), and during the Fragility North American tour it was during their quiet and introspective triad mid-show (three large LED panels with images manipulated by David Carson and Rob Sheridan). Frontman Trent Reznor has commented that it was useful in distracting the audience from the slower material, but I would contend that it pulled minds away from the mosh-pit and into a different headspace altogether.



Brian Eno took the installation idea a step further when his seminal work, Music For Airports, was appropriately played at the LaGuardia Airport in New York, and Tomas Dvorak, a personal favorite of mine, has done some wondrous work in this area. But installations lack a visceral component of the typical live show and are often not even a performance.



THE TOOLS & EGALITARIANISM

With all those seemingly disparaging advances in technology, two things have happened: one, in the age of software sharing, live video performance software has become much more competitive, much more abundant, and more readily available to visual artists who don’t have the thousands of dollars of a record company to support a big show. Two, musicians are now concentrating on the live performance for exposure and income (as music sales continue to drop), and they’re embracing visual performances as an integral part of their show.

In the last decade the trend of growing availability of studio quality tools for musicians working on a shoestring budget at home has been paralleled in the video performance world. Cheap and effective software has hit the market for amateurs in the field, including Modul8, ArKaos, VJamm, and open source projects such as Onyx-VJ and CoGe (even ppooll could be used in a pinch). Video controllers for live manipulation have also become smaller and more affordable, incorporating MIDI to take control of visual elements like the Numark NuVJ and the more expensive but popular Edirol V4. Even MIDI turntables are starting to be used as video controllers, a method that turns the video performance into something tactile. Keyboards could even be used in a super low budget setup.

Contributing towards this growing trend of egalitarianism in the sphere of art and music is the heretical filesharing element. While this opens the flood-gates for truly sub-par music and graphic art, it puts a lot of power into the hands of excellent artists who might never have been able to break in without the cheaper, DIY options.



AN ELECTRONIC EMBRACE & DECIBEL

Arguably, electronic musicians have headed in this direction a lot sooner than their rock counterparts. While many solo laptop artists such as Ben Frost and Lawrence English have that magical little nuance that allows them to hold an audience from behind a laptop with little in the way of visual aid, most others continually fight the confines of being trapped behind their computer and not being able to use their bodies as a visually expressive element.

“Some are trying to take the focus off the performer and put it on the music,” says Leo Mayberry of KillingFrenzy visual art. “With that in mind, video is a way to get peoples head space into the environment rather than the guy on stage stabbing at a laptop.”

Last September, I was fortunate enough to attend the Decibel Festival in Seattle. It may have slipped under a few radars, but the real treat was that Decibel was promoted (and effectively executed) as an electronic arts festival. Along with many astounding electronic music acts were a plethora of visual artists exploring the cusp of a brand new era in live performance. The Optical showcases at the festival underlined this trend that culminated with Fennesz’s real time collaboration with Lillevan, an artist whose physical performance was right on par with his abstract inventions beside Fennesz’s powerful washes of noise. It perfectly demonstrated the importance of the artist beside the musician, reacting to each other in something signficantly more complete and emotional on several more levels than either installation or the typical band performance (though we were all sitting down and not very sweaty, which just never feels right when you’re reaching some metaphysical catharsis).

Zach Walker of Living the Dream Productions, who provided some of the powerful visuals for Ghostly International’s showcase (Ghostly is a label that has built itself some acclaim on their keen eye for visual representation) at Decibel, says he believes that visuals will be an expected part of any music show in twenty years. “The brain wants to make the audio and visual work together,” Zach suggests, “and if you get it right you can create a greater overall experience for the people involved.” And I couldn’t agree more.

Like the Fennesz/Lillevan collaboration, Walker went about his task with the same propensity for real-time performance as a musician when arranging his visuals for the showcase. "I pick the content that I bring based on the music that will be played and sometimes create new content for a show depending on how deep my involvement in the event or show is. Whether there will be LCD’s, TV’s, computer monitors or projectors for the show also influences the equipment I show up with and how much of the setup I am involved in."

“Improvisation is a big part of every show I do,” he continues, “and I manipulate my moving images the more I am interested in the show, generally. Unless you are doing a tour with a group where there is a very set show, I think there is only so much preparation that can be done and the rest is improvising to the music.”



Other shows rely more upon preparation than performance, and then allow the visuals to breathe a bit during the course of the show.

Leo Mayberry’s approach for Decibel followed a more set show because of its more dedicated graphic nature. “A sit down event where the audience is glued to the screen may be 90% preparing the material and 10% performing it." Though, “I’ve definitely done shows that were more collaborative, where the video and music were evolving at the same time. Ambient and experimental music seem to work really well for this, as everyone has enough time to respond back and forth to what’s going on...for a typical club night, I might just go with what I’ve got.”

For those ‘typical club nights’, it’s not uncommon for the visual performer to take center stage. During the DJ sets at Decibel last year, it was striking to see how often the projection screen was front and center, the DJ and ‘VJ’ pulled back and away from the dancers and general enjoyers, usually working together on the set. It really lets those of us with little capacity for bodily rhythm outside of shoegaze knee-swaying to still enjoy the night without making complete asses of ourselves. More seriously, it appears like an offshoot of the color-happy raver culture, with light, music and dancing creating a whole new moving art piece out of the club or bar itself. Think about how many times you’ve seen a dark, insanely and frenetically lit club in a movie and then tell me that seemingly random orchestration (oxymoron?) isn’t art. Without an observable performer and without an original performance, what you see and feel is vital.





SETTING THE STAGE

The more set shows can breed entirely new styles of performance altogether. When Alan Wilder took his Recoil project on the road last year, many of us were a bit dubious as to how his one man avant-electro sound would hold up in a live venue, or if he would even approach the music at all (his vague promotion of the tour could have almost been contrued as an ego-serving meet and greet). His Seattle performance at the Triple Door in October shattered any negative expectations.



The screen took center stage and far from being an abstract reaction to Recoil’s music, concrete images and a hazy storyline turned what could have been a DJ set into a strange and visceral installation, akin to NIN’s Fragility tour. Guests peppered Wilder’s stage show last year, turning his static studio sound into something breathing, reactive and ever-changing, creating a mood of improvisation and instability that fostered a similar atmosphere as to a possibly more relaxed rock show.



HYBRIDITY: FOR BETTER, FOR WORSE

Certainly, the more recent availability and affordability of tools for visual artists interested in music performance has been key in the proliferation of visually aided performances. But the reason it has seemingly melded so naturally and sometimes imperceptibly is because music and graphic art are the two mediums we have as humans to express ourselves without the restrictions of language, or culturally influenced consciousness. Music and visual art don’t explain themselves or guide our interpretations in the same way as literature, drama or comedy. These two familiar relatives are now being fused together on a more ‘street-level’ basis, and not only within electronic music, but by a whole new insurgent culture of musicians and artists who are trying to put value back into music consumption by creating a different experience for fans.

As with the home recording boom, it’s perfectly conceivable that as video and music collaborations become easier and cheaper to pull off we’ll see more but with less attention to quality. We could also witness the removal of intimacy with performers as shows become more lavish and technologically distant.

There is a profound desire currently to offer and experience something new in the way we are exposed to our art. Causes could be argued simply as coincidences, or vice-versa, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it won’t be limited just to the realm of graphic performances paired alongside music. But as musicians and artists alike are encouraged (or forced) to think outside the box by reacting to (or against) popular trends, we’ll be witness to some startling new hybrids and performance styles as music and the graphic arts find common ground in our collective and individual imaginations. For those of us who have always had unreconciled loves with both, we can take these developments as blueprints for future innovations, and damn good art in the meantime...that’s well worth the admission fee.