#Monchan Monna

[adddmg]

BO NINGEN - Kizetsu no Uta

[wbg1991]

Interview: Daisy Dickinson (Adrena Adrena)

I recently interviewed Adrena Adrena for Fused Magazine. You can buy the mag here: https://t.co/kWbmTpxO04 

Here’s the interview now that the mag’s been out for a while...

A giant white bubble dominates the stage, looking like the ‘Rover’ in The Prisoner. Yet, what Adrena Adrena do with this giant inflatable orb is truly hypnotic, leaving an almost cosmic imprint on the memory.

Adrena Adrena is the audio-visual collaboration between visual artist Daisy Dickinson and ex-Boredoms drummer E-Da Kazuhisa. Dickinson transforms the giant spherical screen into an orbiting projection of shimmering galactic clouds, earthly terrains, miasmic entities and star-like luminescence. To this Kazuhisa’s jazzy post-rock drumming gathers a transcendent momentum, mixing floating electronica with explosive crashing percussion.

I’ve seen the Adrena Adrena collaboration twice now - at New River Studios and at Iklectik, both in London - and twice I’ve found myself sucked into its mind-bending psychedelia. Chatting with Daisy after the latter performance it’s clear that the whole effect is completely deliberate. She says: “Projecting visuals onto a spherical surface creates an almost hypnotic effect, we wanted to give the illusion of an otherworldly nebulous orb suspended in mid air above E-Da’s drum kit. It’s quite ritualistic in a way, with the audience gathering around the orb like moths to a flame or cavemen around a campfire.”

‘Ritualistic’ is certainly the right word, as the whole performance builds and builds before crashing down in the almost literal image of a drum rolling down a wildly splashing stream, rotating to a sort of euphoric climax, a visual breakdown into the bare elements of the performance.

It’s in the clever interplay of the mediums that the performance gathers its true coherence. With the Adrena Adrena performances, and with the shows that Dickinson has curated elsewhere, the relationship between the audio and visual elements has been complex and fluid, and it’s never obvious whether its the audio or visual that is supposed to come first.

This tension between the visual and audio elements creates an entirely distinct medium, and this is a vital effect of Dickinson’s craft and aesthetic. She tells me: “With the events I’ve been running I’ve tended to steer the curation towards projects that are pushing the boundaries of audio-visual art, where the visual element plays an equal importance to the sonic element.”

“I’m interested in artists who are challenging the whole idea of AV performance as a concept, like Noriko Okaku and her project OvO with drummer Monchan Monna, where it feels like your being led on a narrative journey. Other artists, such as Sculpture, also place equal measure on the sound and visual and I think it creates a really interesting dynamic.”

It’s vital to the medium that the visual performance is not an accompaniment to the audio, but that the two go hand in hand. She says: “I think there’s a big difference between an audio visual collaboration that is born as an AV performance concept, as opposed to creating visuals for an existing band or artist who already have clearly formed songs and concepts in place.”

When we inevitably discuss the recent MFO collaborations with Fennesz, Stars of the Lid, and Tim Hecker, she becomes enthusiastic about the prospect of the visual performer being as much of a drawer as audio for average concertgoer.

She tells me: “I think it’s great what MFO is doing and the way he approaches audio-visual art. His performance concepts go beyond the conventional projections on a white screen backdrop, mapping onto unusual surfaces like he used in his collaboration with Ben Frost for the ‘The centre cannot hold’ tour, where he projected onto mirror foil as he felt it’s metallic shine echoed that of a leaden sea. Or his ‘Ephemera’ performance where he set up a strip of LED lights surrounding the audience that, coupled with fog, created the illusion of an infinite horizon.”

As we talk more generally about the audio-visual scene at present, she tells me of her sadness at the recent death of Paul Clipson, whose collaborations with Grouper and King Midas were particularly influential for her. She says: “I was so sad to hear about Paul Clipson’s recent death as I truly thought he was one of the best live visual artists existing today - his collaborations with Grouper and King Midas Sound were incredible.

“But I also really like the work of Pedro Maia, who has been developing the ‘Live Cinema’ concept, working with analogue cinema and manipulating images in real time to react with sound, in collaboration with artists such as Fennesz, Vessel, Panda Bear and Shackleton. Alongside Pedro, there’s an array of other talented Expanded Cinema artists around in London at the moment such as Sally Golding, Karel Doing, Fritz Stolberg & David Leister of Kino Club.”

When I suggest that audio-visual collaborations better suit instrumental or abstract genres because a vocal element could dominate, she insists: “I think it definitely works with vocal-led music as well. Damo Suzuki joined us as a special guest at our performance at the ICA in January, which added a whole other dimension to the performance. Although I do think music without vocals tends to leave more space in peoples minds for more complex visual pieces, in the same way that vocal-led music doesn't tend to be used in film soundtracks over scenes with dialogue.

“When I'm making visuals for a vocal-led band, I tend to select more ambient visuals with less information to give space for the vocalist to take the fore-front - I guess it’s important to respect existing band dynamics as well.”

It’s clear that Dickinson, whether through the Adrena Adrena collaboration or elsewhere, is at the cusp of a new generation of innovators in the increasingly distinct and diverse audio-visual medium.

“I think as technology develops, it’s providing more and more possibilities for artists to push the boundaries of performance art and immersive experiences,” she concludes.

Adrena Adrena have just released the 7” inch ‘Cybals/Toys’ and are touring the UK this summer.

Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aeoKVeq3OU

In addition to the 7", 'Cybals/Toy' comes an accompanying book featuring photographs by Dickinson.

[amusicblogyea]

Gimme Your Answers: An Interview w/ Bo Ningen

Photo by Cat Stevens

It’s going to be a busy fall for Japanese punk four-piece Bo Ningen. In support of their new album III, the band will soon embark on a US Tour supporting Kasabian on September 26th-October 9th and then have a UK Tour alongside Band of Skulls on November 1st-14th. View all tour dates here. Before supporting Kasabian at Toronto’s Sound Academy on September 30th, we spoke with…

[holly-warbs]

Felt inspired by their amazing gig, so I did a few sketches.

[wbg1991]

Audio/Visual - SCULPTURE, ADRENA ADRENA & OVO

The ‘Audio/Visual’ night at New River Studios put on by Daisy Dickinson in December at the end of 2016 was already interesting in terms of form, being explicit about the event being of a definite collaborative and multimedia nature. A greater visual emphasis compared to audio is hardly rare within the broadly ‘inter media’ realm of performance this show could be categorized within, or indeed within the growing popularity with which lights and visual effects are greeted in the live music world. What was pleasing about this particular show was how the music seemed to flow freely in response to the visuals rather than the visuals acting as mere accompaniment or sideshow.

Dickinson clearly has a fine eye for collaboration, having worked with 90s post-rock group Seefeel on tour and worked on videos with Perfume Genius and Deerhoof among others. With this particular line-up she bought together three well-seasoned and innovative collaborations, each bringing an improvisational live-ness to the fore. While Dickinson’s tour and video work is obviously of some repute, it was the performative nature of both the visual and audio in each act that made for free flowing and stimulating experiences.

First up were OvO, a collaboration of Bo Ningen drummer Monchan Monna with media artist Noriko Okaku, with their performance of ‘Untitled no 2’. Reeling through old footage of old childhood holiday style film to sparse and spatial cymbals, Okaku slowly vocalises memories in stilted spoken word and the piece gradually fragments and decays into cartoonish glitches and edits from the film, taken along by growing percussiveness such that the visual fragments of childhood begin to dance with themselves and their distortions amid intensifying post-rock noise. Through and from the chaos of Okaku’s visual overloading of memory ablaze in its own fragmentariness, Monna crashes into a frenetic swirl of beats and cymbals to the concluding all white screen left behind by Okaku.

The overall impression the piece leaves is of the growing feedback of a memory retracing itself over and over again to the point of complete distortion such that the original content is subsumed in visual and audio noise. It’s pure frenzy as the mediums ebb and flow in intensifying exchanges of energy. You’re left with the idea that the very act of memorizing is an act of creation and the breadth of Ovo’s audio and visual timbres and intensities serve to show the full palette available for doing it.

Second was Dickinson’s latest collaboration with E-Da Kazuhisa, the drummer for Boredoms and Seefeel. The act is visually intriguing before even starting, with a giant white balloon hanging above Kazuhisa’s drum kit. This planet-like screen has orbited various music and film festivals throughout 2016 and is accompanied with a DVD release featuring many of the images of a drum falling down a rocky river that were on show here.

For this particular performance the ball shimmers between galactic clouds, earthly terrains, volcanic heat, and glacial iciness. The set begins nocturnal and dense, the balloon a particularly luminescent moon, but as the initial sludginess of Kazuhisa’s drumming floats through into a more electronica and jazzy percussive splash, Dickinson’s projections become magmatic and sulphurous, psychedelically cosmological, and thawed with ice. The music and visuals don’t so much flow as spin and expand like the galaxies, but as the performance comes to its close, the aforementioned images of drums rolling down an English countryside rocky stream emanate along with accompanying percussive downpours.

The performance is both elemental and epic, drawing you into its transcendental rhythmic and visual orbit before landing you in the grounded and earthly realm of the physical drum hitting the rocks in the splash of a river, drawing attention to the wonder of the earth and our sensuality on it. Undoubtedly the visual aspect is preeminent here, which is not to say that the audio is submissive, but more to say that its purpose is to accentuate the terrains and cosmologies of the shifting visual globe. Indeed the crescendos, jilts, spaces and crashes of the drumming weave into the visual to elevate and embolden the overall grandiosity of the collaboration.

Concluding the night were Sculpture, a collaboration between producer Dan Hayhurst and animator Reuben Sutherland. With Hayhurst creating Warp style beats and glitches using various tape loops hanging to his side, the closing act also acted as a sort of entrée to the after-party as the audio/visual stage would soon give way to DJs in the bar. Here the focus was again firmly on both the audio and visual aspects as Hayhurst’s Aphex Twin evoking experimentalism proved the perfect accomplice to Sutherland’s circling pop art-y visuals.

Using a turntable to spin collages of comic book style animations and psychedelic patterns, the performance centres on the live camera feed of these circling images and his use of his hands to move and play with them – he was, in a literal sense, DJ-ing the visuals here. The result was an always shifting and mesmerising pattern of visual loops, fragments and gestures that combined with the concurrent audio shifts and patterns being played by Hayhurst to create an overall sense of constant energy and exploration.

The Scultpure collaboration was perhaps the most inherently musical of the night, not just because the music itself was more prominent but because the visual itself was. Sutherland’s visual techniques themselves were clearly mirroring that of his collaborator. The piece didn’t so much create new forms through the combination of medias but rather it embraced the vibrancy of the acid techno aesthetic and intensified it through innovative and playful visual wizardry.

As a whole the night wasn’t so much concerned with making grand points about audio/visual as an art form distinct in itself, but rather it was more impactful as a showcase of the energy and vibrancy that the two mediums can make and inspire in each other. While the visual elements were perhaps more prominent in the OvO and Adrena Adrena collaborations, the line-up succeeded in that in each collaboration the visual elements drew upon the momentums and flows of their musical counterparts to themselves flow musically, giving greater impetus to and elevating the imagery and visual artistry on show.

www.daisydickinson.co.uk www.newriverstudios.com www.tapebox.co.uk www.adrenaadrena.com