Optronica - Semiconductor/Atlas/Fennesz

So how do you listen to music? Do you concentrate on every note, perhaps following the score as someone at the Mahler gig was doing? Or just let it wash over you, and enjoy the way your mind wanders?

I spent a large part of my visit to Optronica, London’s leading festival dedicated to the fusion of music and visuals, or something like that, contemplating this question. The visual part of the mix was somewhere between the kind of vj (as opposed to dj) experience you get in clubs, and digital art, and was mixed or generated live, so a similar question to that posed above arises – how do you watch it, in the absence of narrative, plot, characters and conventional aesthetics?

I went to a double header at IMAX.

First up were Semiconductor showing two pieces. In the first the visuals were generated by the soundtrack, which was kind of tinkly abstract electronica. The visuals were a bit frantic, mostly lines or polygons, and, large on the IMAX screen, all the frenetic flickering was somewhat nausea inducing. I could see one of the artist’s laptop monitor and it looked much better on that than on the big screen. The best parts resembled a digital walk through of some weird architect’s world where physical objects seemed to grow and mutate organically and a little sinisterly.

The second piece, Brilliant Noise, was much more interesting, and originated from Semiconductor’s period as artists in residence at NASA. The visuals were I think taken from film of activity on the sun’s surface. It started off looking like the northern lights in reverse, but became more abstract and affecting, cosmic and sinewy and Blakean. Again the soundtrack was abstract electronica, I think they said generated by the brightness of the images.

The second half was a collaboration between Charles Atlas (him again – see my review of Anthony and the Johnson’s Turning last year) on visuals and Christian Fennesz on laptop and guitar. Fennesz is one of a number of electronic music makers heavily influenced by those heroes of the noisey shoegazing fraternity, My Bloody Valentine, so there were lots of droney loud guitar noise-soups, although I preferred his quieter ambient moments. Atlas cut up bits of old films with some sparingly used and pretty special effects in much the way a laptop musican would, layering loops on top of each other with variations and variable synching. The result was hypnotic and yes did seem to send my mind racing in a way similar to a pure musical experience, and I found I had to abandon concentrating on specific images and just let the general feeling of them wash over me. Particularly effective was the repeated image of a flame being applied to handcuffed hands which writhe as they try to escape. I also enjoyed a segment where the left side of a face kept blurring which had me wondering if something was going wrong with my neurological system. I would even go so far as to describe some of it as being Lynchian, that peculiar hybrid of the weird and the curiously, emotionally, affecting, and there’s no higher praise in my book


In conclusion, the musical aspects were a little disappointing – nothing new or original there. The visuals were interesting, but at the time left me wondering whether they were as ephemeral as the visuals in a club, or as unsatisfying as the video art that’s all the rage these days. But to my surprise, both the sunspot piece by Semiconductor and Atlas’s work have stayed with me, so I have to allow that indeed there was something interesting and meaningful going on.