Fennesz and Charles Atlas, BFI Imax, 15/03/07

 

Another week, another festival on the South Bank; this time the audio visual spectacular Optronic featuring cutting edge music set to visuals on “the UK’s largest screen”.  I haven’t been to the Imax in years, and I had forgotten just how big that screen is.  Standing at the bottom and looking up made me quite the dizzy; this feeling intensified as the evening progressed, and I would end up leaving quite delirious.

Semiconductor performed two pieces.  The first involved their self-developed software throwing up images in real time onto the screen to correlate with the music being created.  This began with punchy fractures of sound being represented by fractal bulletholes, and progressed through more complex sounds (still Raster-Noton like in their minimalist aesthetic) begetting increasingly confusing rushes of 2D and 3D shapes, polygons and structures, until eventually the music seemed to be giving birth to new life forms in front of our eyes, black-winged red boxes thrashing hyperactively to agitated click-rhythms.  The second piece was developed in a NASA lab (literally), and featured - the mechanics of the first in reverse.  This time music was reacting to visuals - manipulation of awe-inducing (especially on Imax scale) images of solar flares produced rowdy cosmic static.  The notion of space as a calm and silent place was subverted; instead we had space as an angry, violent, unpredictable force.

I found the Charles Atlas visuals quite moving.  Footage from pre-war movies of faces showing extremes of human feeling (laughter, screaming, anger, death) was looped and digitally treated - splashes of colour would illuminate the images, before they were consumed by flock and fleck.  Images of men flexing their muscles contrasted with images of women dancing, with the spectre of war casting a pox on both their houses, soldiers charging and bombers diving.  Fennesz’s improvised reaction to this matched the depth of the visuals with aplomb.  Beginning with what sounded like one of William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, he piled on the guitar and the distortion, filling the cavernous space with white noise and low-end rumble.  At all times was the music sympathetic to the visuals (so much so that I would find it hard to believe that elements had not been pre-arranged), structures emerged from the segments of repetition, building in power as the images became distressed and entangled with one another.  At last, someone has found a suitable use for the Imax cinema, we should hope that Optronica becomes a fixture in the calendar.