Raster Noton’s visualisation technique
Sunday, May 12th, I saw artists from Raster Noton perform at Issue Project Room, between Park Slope and Carroll Gardens. The environment was intimate and well suited for their music - there were a network of speakers throughout the room which were able to handle the frequency and sound limits these artists play in. There was also a large video screen.
I had previously seen Olaf Bender (Byetone), Frank Bretschneider, and Alva Noto (aka Carsten Nikolai at Mutek in 2004. There the show had a very important visual component, so I knew that this show would likely be an audio-visual one. Actually, Carsten Nikolai also does installations on the side for extra cash, many of which explore this audio and visual relationship. On Wikipedia it says he used principles of cymatics for creating visualizations. Thee principles weren’t apparent in his visuals for the evening.
The visual accompaniments differed from those of Meat Beat Manifesto - they represented the other pole of the sound-visualization spectrum - (which I have yet to lay out). There were no literal visual samplings, video clips of people talking or objects making the sounds being lifted for the music. The Raster Noton aesthetic is abstract in the sense that I have yet to hear anything in their work that refers to something outside of sound itself. With this strict abstraction comes a visual component of abstract forms and colors.
Static and lines, feedback dominated the performances of Alva Noto, Byetone, and Signal (Signal is the collaboration consisting of all 3 artists). It reminded me of Scott Arford’s Static Room
What stood out among the 3 was Bretschneider’s performance. It was done in such a way that the visual and sound components seemed to be interdependent - he seemed to be playing his visuals - or his music was coming from a visual instrument that we were all watching on the screen.
(Sorry for my lousy clip that doesn’t do it justice)
This is a good example of differential dynamics.
Most of Frank Bretschneider’s visuals were white light on black, mostly consisting of cylindrical or spheroid constellations that were directly affected by the music. When I asked him after the show about how he hooks his music and visuals up in real time, he said most of it is done beforehand, and he uses Modul8 for basic things like having amplitude control the visuals. “I like to keep it simple” he said.
I was a bit in disbelief when he said this, since his visuals and sounds seemed to be so inseparable. It definitely looked like one could generate the other - which is the mark of a good audio-visual work. There is an inseparability, which I think both this highly abstracted pole, ad the direct video sampling method can accomplish.
Tags: electronic music, visualisation