Videosonics
Events / Performances
The Challenge
As the sequel to our first rendition with the Cinefamily theater to produce a remix to the live-score event, Videosonics amplified the visual acoustic spaces explored through Audiodrome to articulate a subterranean scrolling audiovisual narrative— one where subject and other are placed within the act of listening itself.
The Solution
Entering the realm of Videosonics, we are placed in context with a program of ideas permeating the concept of noise in music and distinguishing ‘noise’ as a style within music itself. Forced to unlisten, we navigate images spliced to soundtracks of layered dissonance. Listening between rather than relying on movement enacted or visible onscreen— we experience how noise and music, performance and perception, theater and film, cross over into one another, as oscillating fragments relying on each other’s mutual undoings to transvalue their inherent materiality.
The Result
Atmospheric underworlds commenced with a live-score performance by Live For Each Moon to hypnotic myriads from Crocodile. Cyclical ceruleans melded into dark, layered labyrinths conjured by a live set from Pod Blotz (Suzy Poling) against a kinetic shortcut of Funeral Parade of Roses. Xiu Xiu’s synthesis of acoustics with unexpected instruments colorized the mesmerizing horror of the beautifully grotesque Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees. Closing the final act in a crimson saturated screening, Xiu Xiu provided an exclusive preview of their short film exploring the dark undertones of Asian fetish in Carnal Orient. Combining avant-garde aesthetics with grind-house shocks, each cinematic diversion obscured boundaries between fiction and reality, desire and experience, and disrupted the often ubiquitous tapestry of watching VS feeling.