Most Successful Virtual Band: Gorillaz "Adding Substance to Pop"

Most Successful Virtual Band: The Gorillaz “Adding Substance to Pop”

Genre: Avant-Pop, Experimental Pop, Alternative Rock, Brit Pop, Trip Hop, Hip Hop, Electronica, Indie, Dub, Reggae and Pop.

Awards: Grammy Award, Two MTV Video Music Awards, NME Award, (New Musical Express) Three MTV Europe Music Awards, Nominated for Nine Brit Awards

Studio Albums Gorillaz 2001 Demon Days 2005 Plastic Beach 2010 The Fall 2010 Humanz 2017

Tours Phase One Tour (2001-02) Demon Days Live (2005-06) Escape to Plastic Beach Tour (2010) Demon Days Festival (2017) Humanz Tour (2017)

Permanent Band Members Damon Albarn- Vocals, Keyboard, Guitar, Bass Guitar, Drums, Percussion, Melodica (1998-Present) Jamie Hewlett- Illustration, Visuals, FX (1998-Present)

Live Band Members Mike Smith- Keyboards (1998-Present) Jeff Wootton- Lead Guitar (2010-Present) Seye Adelekan- Bass guitar (2017-Present) Jesse Hackett- Keyboards (2010-Present) Gabriel Wallace- Drums, Percussion (2010-Present) Karl Vanden Bossche- Drums (2005-2007, 2010-Present)

Animated Band Members 2-D Murdoc Niccals Noodle Russel Hobbs

    The british virtual band Gorillaz was created in 1998 by “Blur” Musicians named Damon Albarn, and Graham Coxon. During a Blur interview Albarn and Coxon met Jamie Hewlett of Deadline Magazine. Hewlett began to hang out after the interview in with Damon sharing common interests. One evening they had a conversation at Albarns while he and Hewlett were watching MTV and Hewlett remarked…

 “If you watch MTV for too long, it’s a bit like hell, there's nothing of substance there. So we got this idea for a cartoon band, and something that would comment on that.” [1]

    MTV during 1998 would have shown the Backstreet Boys, Third Eye Blind, Usher, Matchbox Twenty and other popular artists. These contemporary 1998 pop artists provided good jumping off contextual building points for the two to start creating their ideas and begin their Avant-Pop directed approach. Originally after formation the Gorillaz identified as singular “Gorilla” without the “z” and released their first song “Ghost Train”.

 
   
   Which lives on the second side of the single “Rock the House”, and the second side of compilation “G Sides”. The “Ghost Train”collaboration included Albarn, Del The Funky Homosapien, Dan the Automator, and Kid Koala. The same producers that worked on “Time Keeps on Slipping” by Deltron 3030. Although Albarn still claims, “The first ever Gorillaz tunes was the Blur 1997 Single “Own Your Own”. [2]



    Jamie Hewlett was the artist to bring alive the 4 animated members that would eventually populate the Gorillaz media. This was the first virtual band that the world had ever seen. Hewletts previous comic work “Tank Girl” served as a jumping off point for the aesthetic of the animated members of the captivating virtual band. The virtual band consists of, 2-D who’s the lead vocalist that plays keyboards. Murdoc Niccals that plays bass guitar & vocals. Noodle plays guitar and keyboards. Russel Hobbs is the Drummer & percussion sounds. The four characters are completely fictional and are intended to not resemble any real contemporary musicians or themselves. At this point in time it was extremely avant-garde and experimental in the music video world to be using cartoon characters. It’s even more avant-garde in the sense that the cartoon characters were not resembling any real life musicians. What was really evocative was Albarn and Hewletts creation of a fictional universe for which these characters lived. Viewers can find characters in the video pieces jump from, 2-D book art to 3-D engineered characters side by side with non cartoon footage to create a realistic and non realistic surrealist landscapes. Fantastic revolutionary imagery that really grounded their work arises as being different than other MTV pop. You can find the band currently contributing the creative media on their website, and music videos, social media, and DVDs. Their website (www.gorillaz.com) provides instant interaction for visitors and has an open video during the duration of a surfers visit. The only places to click on the site include the tabs, News, Store, Fan Club Sign Up, and social media links. They currently use a disappearing sidebar that holds the band's visual and audio releases.
    For every Gorillaz release since “Blur’s 1997 Single, Own Your Own” (Albarn's proclaimed original Gorillaz song.) Damon Albarn has served as lead composer. Although every piece of their work serves as a collaboration between a variety of musicians responsible for covering such pop genre avenues. Most would classify the Gorillaz genre as Alternative Rock, Trip Hop, Hip Hop, Electronica, Indie-Dub, and Reggae. Arguably they set out to purify the pop genre itself in all aspects.     Albarn's and Hewlett’s success amongst others have continued to impress. However it’s more appropriate to label their content and visual delivery systems in a bundled critique in which they are extremely Avant-Pop with new ideas of visuals and performances that no one in their time has been releasing.
    The first Gorillaz album “Gorillaz” was a 15 track project released in 2001 and sold 7 million copies, and the Guinness book of world records awarded them the,

 “Most Successful Virtual Band.” [3]

   This award comes without question as they have continued to shape their own intermedial practice throughout their discography, visualizations, and merchandising. Not to mention avid attention to contemporary technological times allows them to develop amongst application releases and virtual projection performances all using the building block fictional characters in artistic environments. This avenue continues to propel their success as an avant-pop artist. The 2001 album “Gorillaz” included 4 very popular singles:

Clint Eastwood (first album release, memorable hit, back side containing song Dracula, vocals performed by Del tha Funkee Homosapien, the genre is electronic dub and hip hop, when Clint Eastwood released in early March, it landed at number 4 on the UK charts.)

 

 19-2000 (used for EA Sports FIFA video game 2002 [4], most memorable as “get the cool shoeshine” vocals by Damon Albarn, with a video of the Gorillaz riding around in their Geep, and mimicking MTV cribs).

 

 Tomorrow Comes Today (the first EP, including Tomorrow Dub, Tomorrow Comes Today Video, and Film Music.) Tomorrow Comes Today was co-produced with Hip Hop producer Dan the Automator, featuring Phi Life Cypher (UK Rap Group) and Del the Funky Homosapien (US Rapper).

 

 Rock The House (a hit amongst United Kingdom charts, vocals by Del tha Funkee Homosapien, during the time being sued by Doppelgangerz for stealing the idea for the “Gorillaz” the video had visuals associated with emotions the band was having, and portrayed some of the characters as satanists in kong studios)

 
 
   The same year as the September 11th attacks, D12 (Hip Hop band commonly in collaboration with rapper Eminem) was stranded in England without Eminem and Albarn invited D12 to the studio to start collaborating on a track on September 13th [5]. This project Albarn felt extremely appropriate as he was experimenting with middle-eastern music at the current point in time. [5] This would be an appropriate project to release to promote working together. This approach would be rather experimental in regards to western pop culture's current view towards the middle east as perpetuated through the media. This release titled "911" debuted in December of 2001.

    
 
   Gorillaz swung into 2002 performing February 22nd at the Brit Awards in London. This performance included 3-D animations on 4 large screens and included Phi Life Cypher rapping during the event. That year they were nominated for four Brit Awards, Best British Group, Best British Album, and Best British Newcomer. However they didn't win any. Dan the automator (Dan Nakamura) added in an Interview about the event...

 "You can't determine in advance how well a thing like this is going to do, It was done for fun, so it's always a surprise when it takes on a life of its own." [6]

     More importantly this notes the artistic vision of the Gorillaz, and processes that Gorillaz and their collaborators kept in common throughout production. Their next visual project built off of the Gorillaz 2001 album. They released the DVD. “Phase One: Celebrity Take Down”. This project included 4 visual pieces, “5/4”, “Charts of Darkness Documentary”, “Gorilla Bitez (Which included multiple skits with the band's virtual characters)” and “MEL 9000 Tour of the website” [7]. They even designed the DVD menu like the band's website starting to depict Kong Studios an important part of the virtual characters environment and personal story development involving Murdoc and Russel, 2-D, and Noodle. The media DVD release propelled the ideas of a film project that was soon abandoned by Albarn and Hewlett after multiple studio meetings with Hollywood executives amounting to Albarn saying,

 “Fuck it we'll sit on the idea until we can do it ourselves and maybe raise the money ourselves.” [8]

     Generally artists that venture down this lane of approach find more reward and control in production. Albarn and Hewlett are addicted to control and sometimes barely agree with each other let alone would be successful taking orders of direction from a studio that doesn't share the same building block vision. It also reinforces the logic of working with what you got. Which is a common theme of production for the group.
     In October of 2004 the Gorillaz released “Rock It” a website video to get fans ready for the album release of Demon Days in 2005.

  
 
   Demon Days hit Japan May 11th, May 23rd United Kingdom and May 24th the United States. The album debuted landing at number 1 and top of the UK Album Chart. Two of the more recognizable tracks:

   “Dirty Harry” was charted No.6 in the UK in its first week as a single release. Referencing “George Bush’s Mission Accomplished” speech, with an image for the cover resembling the film Full Metal Jacket’s.

 

    “Dare” was a number 1 United Kingdom hit and is sung completely by Damon Albarn, more memorable the lyrics “its coming up, its coming up, its coming up, its dare.” In this video 2-D walks around Shaun Ryder of Happy Mondays live real head.

 

     Demon days sold 1 million copies in the UK in 2005. Since it has gone 5 Times platinum (platinum = selling 500,000 copies) in the UK, Double Platinum in the United States, Triple Platinum in Australia, selling a total of 6 million copies worldwide. [9] The 2005 MTV Video Music Awards gave the Gorillaz two awards for “Feel Good Inc”, Breakthrough video and best Visual Effects. They continued to perform “Feel Good Inc” in concert using music video parts in their performance.
     In 2005 Gorillaz also coordinated the Demon Days release with “Gorillaz Figurines” released by designer toy maker “Kidrobot”. The sets varied in editions and had sets of anywhere from limiting 1,000-60,000 limited issues in circulation. Quite genius approach to bringing sculptured on screen characters into fans hands. They released figures simultaneously with videos like “Dare” where character Noodle was sold in limited edition, amongst others. During the 2006 Brit Awards in London they performed “Dirty Harry”, and were nominated for Best British Group and Best British Album. They took the virtual characters a step further and created a fan frenzy when they did holographic performances at the 2005 MTV Europe Music Awards and the 2006 Grammy Awards.


 
   Their April 2006 announcement of Demon Days american tour, sold out in the begining hours. They then announced a plan for a holographic world tour in 2007. Where the cartoons would actually appear on stage using a technology called Musion Eyeliner. Musion Eyeliner would captivate audiences bringing colored lifesize and larger than life holograms moving across stage using the live stage illusion referred to as “Pepper’s ghost. The illusion is not truly a hologram because it places reflective material at an angle in front of the audience that is illuminated by a LED screen below so characters appear to 3D volume. 2006 was a visual high point for the group when Hewlett and Albarn started collaborating with movie mogul Harvey Weinstein from Weinstein company and Miramax films. September 2006 Albarn announced...

 “the band has been a fantastic journey which isn't over because we're making a film. We’ve got Terry Gilliam Involved. But as far as being in a big band and putting pop music out there it's finished. We won't be doing that anymore.” [10]

Little did they know about the projects to come… October 27 2007 the official Gorillaz fansite announced documentary film “Bananaz” would be released. A Film directed by Ceri Levy would document the previous band years. It was released on Babelgum Website April 20th 2009, and on DVD June 2009. Albarn & Hewlett began work on Carousel a visual project that actually birthed the band's third album Plastic Beach, shortly after commenting by Albarn that Gorillaz were done making music. Meanwhile Gorillaz simultaneously etching out the ongoing avant-pop adventure throughout his and Hewletts artistic practice. They didn't know they had a project to start until they were already working in their artistic practices of visuals and DVDs. More importantly they weren't ever done when they thought they were done. Reinforcing experimentation through process at its root. It was also important to their history in understanding that by staying on course they were able to extract and start to work with new ideas and stimulus for creation of new projects.
    Albarn takes a leap when talking to the public saying Plastic Beach, “is the biggest and most pop record I've ever made in many ways, but with all my experience i’ll try to and at least present something that has got depth…” [11]
    They planned on having Plastic Beach collaborations with Snoop Dogg, Lou Reed, Mos Def, Bobby Womack, Gruff Rhys, Mark E. Smith, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, Kano, Bashy, De La Soul, Little Dragon, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, sinfonia ViVA, the Lebanese National Orchestra for Oriental Arabic Music. Here’s some notable popular tracks from the 16 track project.

 On Melancholy Hill (was a synthpop production that had Damon Albarn's charismatic lyrics that helps listeners become pulled out of a gloomy day, and focus on the brightening up the listening session with catchy lyrics “Up on melancholy hill, sits a manatee, just looking out for the day, when you're close to me!)

 

 Stylo (was a electro funk song that collaborated with Mos Def and Bobby Womack “convinced by his granddaughter”[12] to be on a Gorillaz track. You can also hear Damon Albarn through the back up vocals. The visuals use most real life footage of Bruce Willis driving a red Chevy El Camino, while Murdoc, 2-D, and Noodle find time to cause a fast pace car chase.

 

    January 18th they announced that they would be headlining the final night of Coachella Valley Music and Arts festival. The same year Damon Albarn made statements in an interview to defend the integrity and direction of the avant-pop work they have been making. During the same time he was under the impression that the cast of Glee wanted to cover the group's recent songs. To which Albarn said, “The Fox tv show is a poor substitute for the real thing.”[13] At this point the pop media industry can't expect anything less of a response from Albarn given they were soon to be releasing their idea to “Reject the false Icons” emphasizing thinking for yourself and more importantly to have ideas about power of self development and an anti popular culture ideology.
     December 8 2010, “Plastic Beach” was announced to be released for download for free to website fan club members on Christmas Day. The same day they released the album “The Fall” which was recorded on the American leg of the "Escape to Plastic Beach" tour. The Fall ended up being in collaboration with a release of the application iElectribe by Korg. A software development company developing for the iPad, and Apple Platforms. The application had Gorillaz designed interface, including 128 sound samples that were created by the band. Including 64 ready to use loops made by Gorillaz sound engineer Stephen Sedgwick and Korg designers. This is a big leap for any music group in the 20th century to jump into application collaboration and development. Reinforcing ideas that anyone can be an artist and to let fans become composers as well. Shortly after the iElectribe release the Gorillaz announced:

 Do Ya Thing (was a song that partnered with Converse in February 2012, on a project called Three Artists One Song project and included James Murphy from LCD Soundsystem and Andre 3000 of Outkast. The single included a visual by Hewlett and animated versions of 2-D in 3D using green suits to map the directions of the character.





   In April Albarn told The Guardian [14] that Hewlett and Albarn had a “fall out” and future projects were unlikely due to tension building during Plastic Beach and The Fall. Word spread quickly through the fanbase. By the time it does however Albarn and Hewlett had already had their arguments worked out by the end of the same month. It’d be hard to believe Albarn and Hewlett would let a fall out occur at this point, but it was actually weird timing being after “The Fall” Album. This does however nail home the fundamental idea in collaboration, being sometimes you just have to take a punch for someone else's idea or not be afraid to let another collaborators idea weigh heavier than your own. Nevertheless to jumpstart the fanbase and kick things off they started scheming a follow up to Plastic Beach. They planned releasing new content in 2016 with so called upbeat humorous and positive melodies. [15] All the tracks contained nothing less than 125 bpm. One hundred and twenty five beats per minute is comparable to nodding your head repeatedly for .75 seconds up and down.

 “I'm starting recording in September for a new Gorillaz record, I've just been really, really busy so I haven't had a chance. I'd love to just get back into that routine of being at home and coming to the studio five days a week”[16], Albarn states.

    Reinforcing the concept of working in a present place in time conducive to completing projects and building off of pieces to make paths for new ideas. Not to mention the previous Hewlett, Albarn April argument has been referred to as making their collaborative friendship and relationship a lot stronger. In April 2016 Hewlett showed life of a new project on social media platform Instagram showing work on album featuring content from Liam Bailey, Albarn Himself, Twilite Tone, Vic Mensa and Jean Michael Jarre. They also jump started their media worlds and fan base by releasing interactive media stories about what the fictional band members have been up to sense the last project. They featured Noodle, in “The Book of Noodle” where she ended up in Japan tracking down a demon crime boss. Russel featured in “The Book of Russel” which had him on the shore of plastic beach in North Korea, and starved to point he shriveled back to normal size. Murdoc, in “The Book of Murdoc” was captured by the label EMI at sea and told to make another album. 2-D in “The Book of 2-D was swallowed by a whale named Massive Dick and washed up on an empty part of Cabo San Lucas surviving by eating the whale's blubber. They then gave Noodle her own instagram in October of 2016 augmenting her character personality in further clips. This marks a huge milestone for the virtual band as they continue to pave their own road through captivating their fan base and creating new relationships with viewers using compelling character stories on social media.
   This year (2017) has already been a big year for the Gorillaz. A new horizon is born as they are creating a unique festival called “Demon Dayz Festival” to start the 10th of June 2017 at Dreamland Margate, in Margate, England. Now becoming the first “virtual band” to have their own festival. The festival will feature virtual characters Noodle, 2-D, Murdoc, and Russel and other animations new and old, using new lights and installations and more Musion Eyeliner technology.
   The new 2017 project “Humanz” tracklist was initially leaked as one would expect given today's digital age. The actual “Humanz” album was said to drop via instagram on march 23rd saying the scheduled release date was the 28th of April 2017. Showing features of, De La Soul, Popcaan, Vince Staples, Pusha T, Rag n Bone Man, Anthony Hamilton, Kilo Kash, and Kali Uchis... Leading up to the release date singles started appearing on the band's youtube page.

"Saturnz Barz" (a hip hop, trip hop dancehall song with a music video came out in 360 view and normal view. This was a huge release and powerful hit featuring jamaican dancehall artist Popcaan and Abarn. The 360 video was named across the internet by Billboard and NME (New Music Entertainment) most successful debut of Virtual Reality music videos thus far. [17] Which is nothing short of surprising given the band's project history. It defeated the previous VR music video record that achieved 1.3 million plays total. Saturnz Barz actually got 3 million views in the first 48 hours.

 

“Andromeda” (was a visual and audio release on youtube that had an animated planet in galaxy featuring american rapper D.R.A.M. & Albarn is something one would consider post-disco, and alternative dance mixed with synthpop as it is a song one would find accompanied in an 80s club.

 

 “Ascension” was along the same type of visual, where the camera moves along a street on a left to right continuous pan through a dark city scape featuring american rapper Vince Staples. Marking the first of a Gorillaz, and a Vince Staples collaboration. This song would fall into the genre of alternative hip hop and alternative dance. Staples vocals on this piece fit the tempo very well and is extremely evocative.

 

 “We Got the Power” featured Jehnny Beth of english rock band "Savages" and Noel Gallagher of "Oasis". This visual was a stationary shot of the animated traffic jam on a multiple leveled highway. This amongst other pieces serving as a visual metaphor to go with the lyrical message. This track is a synthpop genre and actually has back up vocals by D.R.A.M for a second album collaboration.

 

 “Let Me Out” a trip hop and alternative hip hop track featured Vince Staples and Pusha T american rappers. The visual was the 4 animated band mates over a checkered visualizer that would move blocks around the video. To spread the message that the content doesn't have to be changing too much to be entertaining, that sometimes people just want something familiar, like social critiques on the inauguration of Donald Trump.

 

    Who knows what's next for Albarn, Hewlett, and Coxon, only time will tell as they meander through their upcoming performances and collaborations. One things for sure there's no argument that the Gorillaz are one of the most influential avant-pop experimental collaborative and revolutionary virtual band making compositions beyond music, in applications, merch and festivals. They constantly deliver beautifully melodic yet beneficial social criticisms for listeners, to disrupt the content that normally populates the pop industry and more so western culture through their lyrical content, instrument content and artistic process.
    Throughout their history they operated on foundational conceptual building blocks. Such blocks continued to propel projects based on their day one goals in 1997 since the have been "adding substance to the pop world". There’s plenty of hints and obvious pieces of content that lean us toward understanding Albarn, Hewlett and their collaborators aim. They're continuing to set the bar higher for themselves and every album release so fans and other artists are able to experience music in a visual and audio world that had yet to be explored since the Gorillaz came into the pop scene.
   The past two decades of pop have Albarn and Hewlett and their collaborators to thank for really beautiful pieces of music and virtual/live performances that will help carve out societies concentrations in a new mass communicated light and set forth new methods to approach and talk and communicate on current environmental & social problems, Gorillaz truly serve as revolutionary twentieth century Avant-Garde artists.

Presentation: http://prezi.com/bmto8hg_wpnr/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

 Sources

[9] “Artist Profile - Gorillaz” https://web.archive.org/web/20081115114738/http://www.emimusicpub.com/worldwide/artist_profile/gorillaz_profile.html . EMI. 2006.

 [13] Associated Press (10/12/2010) “Gorillaz: We Won’t Let ‘Glee’ Cover Our Songs”  Billboard.com. http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/954190/gorillaz-we-wont-let-glee-cover-our-songs

[15] Book, Ryan. “Damon Albarn Writing A Musical While Flirting with Blur and Gorillaz Comebacks”  http://www.musictimes.com/articles/7797/20140721/damon-albarn-writing-musical-flirting-blur-gorillaz-comebacks.htm The Music Times. The Music Times. July 2014

[17] Britton, Luke (March 30, 2017) “Gorillaz Break Record with ‘Saturn Barz’ VR video” NME, http://www.nme.com/news/music/gorillaz-break-record-saturnz-barz-vr-video-2030640

[5] Brown, Cass; Gorillaz (2 November 2006). Rise of the Ogre https://scififantasylitchick.wordpress.com/2013/11/10/book-review-rise-of-the-ogre-by-cass-browne-gorillaz/ United States: Penguin. p. 43. ISBN 1-59448-931-9

[3] Cooper, James (19 November 2007). “Gorillaz: D-Sides” http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/6r25/

[16] “Damon Albarn: New Gorillaz Album Coming, Recording Starts in September http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/rock/6634331/gorillaz-new-album-2015-damon-albarn . Billboard, Retrieved 31 July 2015

[4] David Roberts (2006). British Hit Singles & AlbumsRoberts, David. Guinness Book of British Hit Singles & Albums. Guinness World Records Ltd. 18th edition (May 2005). ISBN 1-904994-00-8 London: Guinness World Records Limited

[1] Gaiman, Neil (July 2005). “Keeping It (Un)real”. Wired. https://www.wired.com/2005/07/gorillaz-2/

[6] Grant, Kieran (23 February 2002). “Gorillaz come out of the mist” http://jam.canoe.com/Music/Artists/G/Gorillaz/2002/02/23/745445.html

[12]  Greene, Andy (9 April 2009). “Gorillaz Attempt to Draft Bobby Womack For Upcoming Album” http://everything.explained.today/Plastic_Beach/

[8] Joseph, Michael (2 November 2006). "Gorillaz in the Midst". The Big Issue in Scotland (604):

[7] Mitchum, Rob (5 February 2003). “Phase One: Celebrity Take Down DVD” Pitchfork. http://pitchfork.com/article/record_review/18165-phase-one-celebrity-take-down-dvd/

[11] Morley, Paul (27 November 2009). “Paul Morley’s Showing Off… Damon Albarn”(MP3). The Guardian. 29 November 2009. http://audio.theguardian.tv/audio/kip/music/series/paul-morley-showing-off/1259329339795/8827/AlbarnMorleyFINAL.mp3

[10] Williamson, Nigel (November 2006). "West London Calling". Uncut: 88.

Mazdâ - Aïsha Devi [Review, Interview, Audio, & Visual]

Interview by Daisy Jones, Featuring Artist Aïsha Devi
Source: http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/26801/1/watch-bondage-and-spirituality-collide-in-this-nsfw-visual

Release Date: 2015
Album: Of Matter and Spirit
Genre: Experimental Techno
Style: Abstract Ethereal Techno

JaeOhEsH- I found this song and video after listening to Amnesia Scanner on Youtube, it was referred to me and just the visual thumbnail showing the performance directed by Chinese artist Tianzhuo Chen was enough for me to decide that I would be sharing this video and piece of music. There’s a lot of meaning in the visuals that are accompanied by the high pitched vocals and electronic techno structures. I strongly recommend this piece to any human that has the ability to press play, and without a doubt Aïsha Devi’s answers about artistic process and beliefs in this interview are really quiet impressive and extraordinary.

Daisy Jones: High-pitched, candy-coated vocals, shimmering synth lines and heart-thumping bass are stitched over images of near-naked people wearing rubber masks, drooling at each other and munching on the carcass of a raw chicken in this completely off-the-wall music video for Aïsha Devi’s electro masterpiece “Mazdâ”. If the video, which was directed by Chinese artist Tianzhuo Chen, feels overwhelming, then that might be because it’s so heavy with reference points that they all eventually bleed into one multi-coloured, iconoclastic creation. With symbols such as third eyes, the shiva, swastikas (a sign that was used universally before it was hijacked by the Nazis) and Sadhu ritualism, it can be hard to keep up. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to. We speak to Aïsha Devi so she can tell us more…

Daisy Jones : “This video makes me feel insane! Tell me about the ideas behind it.”

Aïsha Devi: For me, it started with a crush on Tianzhuo Chen’s work, who is the artist who made it. When I saw some of his artwork I totally fell in love. It was so powerful. A lot of the symbols he uses in his work, I use too, symbols that have a religious background but are used in a very iconoclastic way. These ideas corresponded exactly to what I was trying to do in music. So I wrote him an email and he also felt the same connection. We’ll probably continue collaborating together – this is just the beginning. He practices Tibetan Buddhism and he really uses his body as an expression and works on the limits of his body. It’s very close to bondage. But instead of inflicting suffering on your body for spectacle, it’s for enlightenment – which I feel a lot of this video is about.

Daisy Jones: Do you feel like the sound of your music has those same religious, or spiritual ideas?

Aïsha Devi: For me, religion is dogma, tyranny and mind control. If you see the application of religion it manipulates the masses, but also religion is about exclusion. Spirituality is about inclusion. It’s about including every single being in one form. I’m absolutely monist. I think that religions try and make us ignorant and worship icons that are images and outside of yourself. But if you drop this, you start working on your inside. All you can work on is your own energy. When I’m singing I’m in a meditative state and I’m mixing mantras and I’m working on the frequency of my voice more than the significance of the words. After a while, the repetition makes you lose the sense of the words and you come to a state of serenity. In Western Europe, we love words and we love a message. To me, pop music is so connected with advertisement and the format is so close to propaganda. I like to get away from that pop format and transcend that square vision of European music.

Daisy Jones: There is something very meditative about this track in particular – in it’s rhythms and repetition. 

Aïsha Devi: Meditation started as inspirational and then it became a method. I was an outcast and grew up very solitarily and depressed with no friends. When I started art school I met some people that helped me reconcile with humans and I realised that I was not the only person on earth. I was anorexic for fifteen years and had eczema all over my body. But when I started meditating, that all went away – which was a revelation. It was a healing process. Music was already a healing process for me and meditation was also healing. Then both methods merged and became one thing. Now when I make and perform music it feels like a transcendent form of expression, and a healing method.

Daisy Jones: Your new album Of Matter and Spirit is out today. What does it sound like?

Aïsha Devi: I know what I’d like to achieve with it, but I have no idea what it sounds like. I never listen to my music. It feels weird to listen back. But I think it’s very different to anything I’ve done before. I wanted to do something that was conceptually relevant. It’s called, ‘Of matter and spirit’ because I think we’ve lost the balance between the materialistic, external things and the spiritual, internal things because capitalists want us to only believe in what we buy and see and what we have in our hands, which isn’t true.

Excerpt from "New Scientific Tools for the Arts," Ralph K. Potter

Color-Music Attempts

The story of color-music can fill a volume in itself. (2) It had vague beginnings in the time of Leonardo da Vinci and there are some bits of evidence that it may have been in the minds of Aristotle and of others before his time. But the first specific proposal of a color-music was apparently by a French Jesuit priest, Louis Bertrand Castel. Father Castel made the proposal in 1720, and attempted to build instruments for such an art during later years. The next experimenter to carry his efforts far was an American artist named Bainbridge Bishop, who lived in Essex County, New York Bishop began experiments with color-organs in 1875 and built several during the years following. The showman, P. T. Barnum, was interested in Bishop's experiments and exhibited one of his instruments in the Barnum Museum in New York City in 1881. Another was installed in Barnum's elaborate residence in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

In 1893 a professor of art at Queen's College in London, Alexander Wallace Rimington, patented and constructed a large and complicated color-organ. It made use of fourteen electrical arcs at a time when it was considered something of a feat to operate one such source of light. Rimington had what might be regarded as the ideal combination to make development of the tools for such an art a success. While a recognized artist, he had been educated in engineering and in addition he was a courageous experimenter with the means necessary to carry on extensive undertakings. He gave both private and public demonstrations in London and shipped his equipment in a special vehicle for demonstrations in other cities.

The endeavors of Castel, Bishop, and Rimington all ended in disappointment and frustration. When the novelty had worn thin their audiences became impatient and even sarcastic.

During recent years there have been many other attempts to produce tools for a visible music to combine with existing audible music, but they also have failed to realize that objective. Perhaps best known of recent experimenters in the field of projected color is Thomas Wilfred, who has given numerous demonstrations of his manually controlled projector, the "Clavilux," both here and abroad.(3) Wilfred's first interest is in "a silent and independent art of light" and the demonstrations of his "Lumia" are normally without audible accompaniment. He has, however, tried the combination of his art with music. At a demonstration performance in Carnegie Hall, New York City in 1926, he played the "Clavilux" with the Philadelphia Orchestra directed by Leopold Stokowski. But such attempts have not received the applause given his silent demonstrations and a recent discussion of objectives for "Lumia" contains no mention of a possible combination with music. (4)

Despite the negative results of past efforts to combine what has come to be known as "color-music" with the familiar sound-music, two developments of recent years suggest that such a combination is far from impracticable. On the contrary, its prospects look better than ever before. These developments reveal the reasons for past failures and one of them indicates a logical starting point for research in this promising area.

Abstract Films

One of the two encouraging developments mentioned above is called the "abstract film". While the motion picture was still a scientific toy a few abstractionists began to consider the possibility of adding a time dimension to their art. In 1914 a cubist painter of Paris, Leopold Survage, was the first to propose an abstract film in an article entitled "Le Rhythme colore." (5) Survage expected to use colored film techniques, then in the laboratory stage. Synchronized sound was only a dream of the scientists at the time and apparently Survage did not contemplate musical accompaniment. He painted a series of key designs for a film to be called "Colored Rhythm," but the project was interrupted by World War I and never resumed.

Following the war several artists, including a Swedish painter, Viking Eggeling, and a German film artist Hans Richter (now of New York) began experiments with silent black and white abstractions. Also Walter Ruttmann, a German film producer and artist, created a series of hand-colored abstract films between 1921 and 1925. Development of abstract films had paralleled that of the animated cartoon and both were profoundly affected by the introduction of synchronized sound around 1925-28. Film animationists soon learned that visible and audible movements had to be closely related. If they were so related the combination held together satisfactorily; if not the effects were disastrous. In other words, associated movement could provide a strong unifying bond. Artists experimenting with abstract films were also quick to recognize this unifying effect of associated movement and the result was what might be called a "dancing abstraction," more recent versions of which are probably familiar to most of us in sections of Disney's "Fantasia."

The well-known film artist, Oskar Fischinger, now of Hollywood, created a series of such colored abstractions moving to the rhythm of accompanying music following 1928, and his work has had a considerable effect upon the trend of these experiments. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer produced one of his compositions under the title, "Optical Poem," in 1937 and he was associated with the Disney production of "Fantasia" during the initial stage. In and following 1935 film artist Mary Ellen Bute and photographer Theodore Nemeth of New York collaborated in creating several abstractions, two of which were shown at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. At about the same time a British film artist, Len Lye, now of New York, produced a series of interesting dancing abstractions by hand-coloring techniques.

During recent years many young artists have experimented with these dancing abstractions. Representative of this younger group is Norman McLaren whose films have been distributed by the National Film Board of Canada. Most of his compositions are hand-drawn in color directly upon the master film. He starts with a film record of the music to be used as accompaniment. On this film, with grease pencil, he marks accents and movements and constructs what amounts to a score for the "visual." Using this as a guide he then draws the visuals frame by frame on another film.

Forms used in both past and present abstract films are, in general, much like those employed in still abstractions. They include a wide variety of geometrical figures, meaningless shapes that fall outside this classification, and sometimes a mass of more or less accidental detail that approaches surface texture. Production techniques cover the gamut of those employed in representational film animation.

Incidentally, these dancing abstractions offer attractive possibilities for art-science study, but the purpose of discussing them here is only to indicate that in them abstract color-form and audible music are associated far more acceptably than in any past color and sound-music combination. The reason is to be found in the associated visible and audible movement, and research seems almost certain to show no other bond can approach movement in this role.

"Visible Music"

Second of the two developments mentioned earlier as encouraging has grown out of research in the scientific field of acoustics. It is concerned with what is known as "sound portrayal."(6) When the wave shape of a spoken word is drawn out in a wriggly line by the familiar oscillograph, little information concerning that word is conveyed to the eye. But if the speech sounds are taken apart and the tonal components spread out in the way the cochlea of the inner ear analyzes them, the result is revealing. One may learn to read patterns of speech produced in this fashion. Such sound-to-sight translations of speech have come to be known as "visible speech."

By similar methods sounds may be used to form motion picture patterns that, when accompanied by the original sounds, exhibit close audivisual unison. Such motion pictures of music have been demonstrated on various occasions (Before the Acoustical Society in New York City on May 10, 1946 by the author, and since then many demonstrations of a film called "Action Pictures of Sound"). There is nothing beautiful about these scientific motion pictures of music and yet they demonstrate one very significant thing. The visible display seems to belong with the sound accompaniment. Without effort one feels he is seeing "visible music." The screen display could hardly be imagined as anything else.

The audivisual unison in this combination of visible and audible music is much closer than that in the best of the dancing abstractions because the dimensions of the visible music are confined to and correlated with the pitch and loudness dimensions of music received via the ear. Consequently movements in the two correlated dimensions are completely consistent as seen and heard. A question may arise here as to whether it is realistic to talk of sounds as moving. Actually audible movement is directly comparable with visible movement when we consider patterns of stimulation in the brain. Pitch change corresponds to visible movement across the field of view and loudness change to visible movement toward and away from the observer. Helmholtz suggested the reality of sound movement toward the end of the past century, (7) and it is recognized by modern scientists working in the sensory area.(8)

Most artists who have attempted to combine abstractions and music join in a condemnation of unison between screen display and sound. They say, in effect, and quite correctly from a communications point of view, that two art messages in unison say the same thing and therefore are no better (and perhaps even less desirable) than one alone. In relation to the problem of a combined visible and audible music this view neglects one all-important point. There can be no completely intimate visible and audible music until audivisual unison is achieved. Unison is the essential starting point. There is apparently no way to realize expressive departures from unison without first learning how to realize unison itself.

(end excerpt)

Footnotes:

(2) Klein, A. B., Coloured Light. London 1937.

(3) Encycopedia Britannica, 14th ed., Vol. 21, p. 290

(4) "Light and the Artist." Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 5, No. 4, June 1947, p. 247-255

(5) Les Soirees de Paris, Vol. 3, July 1914, p. 426

(6) Potter, R. K., "Visible Patterns of Sound." Science, Vol. 102, Nov. 9, 1945, pp. 463-470

(7) Helmholtz, Tonenempfindungen, tr. A. J. Ellis. London 1885, p. 252

(8) Adrian, E. D. The Physical Background of Perception. London 1946, p. 52



First published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. X, No. 2, December, 1951

above copied from: http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/library/CVMPotterexc.htm

What is Visual Music? Paul Friedlander

What is Visual Music?

I am an experimentalist, seeking new forms.

In this illustration, you see a spinning string vibrating in harmony, this description sounds like a musical instrument, but it is a light sculpture. The vibrating form is a superposition of the second and fourth harmonic: a 'visual chord'.
You can read more about my light sculptures in Art Background. I am involved in developing light sculptures and new uses for the computer creating 'visual music'.
Here is my understanding of three kinds of visual music.
First Kind: Visual Music is a means of converting music to images using a system or set of rules which can be implemented as a machine or computer code. There are screen savers which respond to sound, but apart from synchronisation of sound and image, what do they do? How can they express the content of the music? This idea has been around longer that either the computer or the 'sound light converter' found in night clubs. Some famous people have speculated about this, Goethe for one, and Beethoven also was known to have produced a table of equivalence between musical key and color. Beethoven and Goethe did not agree as to which color corresponded to which key and the whole process of establishing a 'sound light' relationship is an ongoing and unfulfilled activity.
Second Kind: Visual Music is a means of expressing music in visual form requiring the active involvement of an artist, designer or director to interpret the music and find the means to express it visually. This is perhaps too narrow a definition since many of the events and happenings of the 60s involved a collaboration between different forms: theatre, dance music, etc. where no single element prevailed but the performance was a kind of Visual Music. This is also where the word multimedia originated. Rock videos could be said to fall into this category but the most wonderful examples are more abstract and can be spell binding, awesome even. The presentation of a Pink Floyd concert is a perfect example of this second form .
Third Kind: Visual Music has no relationship with music as such, although it maybe viewed with or juxtaposed with music. Visual music is about creating visual relationships which change over time. It is primarily about abstract qualities of movement or changing form or color. This is the kind of visual music closest to my own sensibilities, it is perhaps the most illusive or least understood form. The earliest proponents used mechanical or optical means. The Whitney Brothers started making what would now look like psychedelic (before the word had been invented) animation's in the 50s and 60s. The first great creation of Visual Music to receive widespread notice by the public was the Stargate sequence in the movie 2001. In the 70s, artists like Tom DeWitt and Richard Monkhouse started creating special analogue electronic 'image synthesisers'. More recently with the advent of desk top computers, there has been an explosion of activity in this area. But much of this work is animation which is restricted by the fact that it must have a beginning, middle and end. I prefer a form without time limits, where you can watch for a minute or an hour, it all depends on your state of mind. No beginnings, no endings, no fixed form, ever changing, every time you return to the piece, something slightly different happens.

Before I knew the term Visual Music, with light, light shows and light sculptures I sought to dematerialise, to render transparent and weightless, to create form without gravity, a floating state, abstract, in short what I am here calling Visual Music. Most intriguingly in my work with spinning string, I discovered forms that echoed the behaviour of musical harmony. Intentionality is not my predominant artistic mode, we discover through our work, only after the work 'speaks to us' do we understand our motivation. The string 'spoke to me' and I understood my purpose in creating dematerialised form. The vibrational forms of the string was the work 'speaking to me' but what did it say? I am still interpreting its message but this is what I have understood so far.
The term experimental is used in art to indicate working with new forms. With the Spinning String Light Sculptures I had found a much closer connection to the concept of experiment in physics, I had discovered a new physical phenomena.
In science experiment is used to test theory, but what then is my theory? It is that art is close to science. You could simplify it by saying: physics is about physical forces, art is about mental forces. More generally there is something deeper going on in science and art. Einstein observed that a theory needs to be expressed elegantly. A beautiful equation is more powerful because it can be worked with more effectively. Its elegance gives it utility: Form follows Function was a founding principle of modernism and although we live in a post modern age, the lessons taught by modernists are still relevant, particularly when considered in the abstract. This is not about style or functionality, at issue is the underlying common nature of science and art. In this context, Visual Music throws 'light' on the subject.
The observation that art and science share a common purpose is not new, Leonardo DaVinci would have said much the same and even at the dawn of history Pythagoras declared that numbers were the underlying structure of everything. However this is not a matter of repackaging classical concepts in a contemporary context. Our understanding of the scientific method has undergone a paradigm shift within the last generation. Science is no longer perceived as seeking immutable truths, its method uses human imagination, searching for 'models', which explain and provide understanding. Scientific theories (or models) may not resemble art works but they are creations of the human mind and are subject of strong feelings within the scientific community. While orthodox theories are taught 'as if true', new theories always come along to upset the established truths in a way which mirrors the development of art. This insight has yet to be fully appreciated by the scientific community, let alone the World at large. It is important for artists to understand this, both out of intellectual curiosity and because it is directly relevant to the their own creative process. We are all engaged in a common creative pursuit.
Pythagoras conviction that the universe was made of numbers took its inspiration from music, but more than that, it was a mystical revelation, of which I shall have more to say shortly. The Greeks understood the principles of harmony and those principles remained unchanged until the arrival of the tempered scale which was a revolution as radical as Relativity overturning Classical Mechanics. In the 20th century composers have used mathematical methods for a new purpose. They used the formalities of maths to create a new kind of music which does not repeat: "generative music". Terry Riley was an early exponent of this minimalist approach. He came to London to perform his seminal work, 'A Rainbow in Curved Air' with the Electric Symphony Orchestra, while I was their lighting designer. I find Terry's approach to composition very close to my own intuitions about the way I want to create visual music.
The use by artists and musicians of science and mathematics is a step towards greater power. The purpose of science is to explain and provide understanding but science is much more than a dry process of reasoning, over and over again it has amazed us and transformed our lives. For art to throw more light on the human condition this will be achieved by a combination of passion and reason... although much of the reasoning may be hidden in the finished artwork. Our eyes, minds and hearts will be opened to the fullest by the new experience. The potential is there, we will be more than surprised by the results. Unpredictable, but I hazard the guess that the deepening fusion of art and science will not be artists in white lab coats, quite the contrary, we shall be moved from disbelief to be overwhelmed and astonished by the vision of the future that will unfold.
It is this sense of astonishment, wonder, magic which remains central to my continuing activities as an artist. I am a seeker in search of miracles. It is an abiding misunderstanding of our age that there is some kind of contradiction or battle between art and science, or science and religion. Far too many scientists have launched futile attacks on the magical and irrational, too many evil technologies have been developed from scientific discoveries. Too many people from what was once called the left, the libertarians, the dreamers, the idealists in search of a better World have denounced science. Don't be hasty in your judgement I ask. As artists and visionaries we must rise above such skirmishes, and recognise the power and potential in both the rational and magical. There has always been black and white in magic and so it is with science and technology. It is up to us through our own experience and understanding to discover the positive.
As children, we all have an intuitive understanding of this magical aspect to life. Children are also very good at asking questions. They are playful mystics and questioning scientists all at once. It is this child like quality I seek to encourage within myself and others. The sense of excitement is the fuel of imagination. Life can be like a beautiful beach where we all play. The sea shells we find as children are full of this energy. As artists our creations can absorb this energy from our enthusiasm and concentration on the act of creation. If we are lucky, they come to life, extra energy flows from an unknown source. It is then, when the work itself surprises us that we know that we are really onto something.

above copied from: http://www.praskovi.clara.net/text/visualmusic.html

Towards an Aesthetics of Visual Music, William Moritz

1986

Now that the MTV phenomenon has made it possible to have a viable (even lucrative) career in composing Visual Music, it behooves us to glance back over the history and masterpieces of that genre in order to discover any principles or aesthetics that might render composition more effective or easier.

Since ancient times artists have longed to create with moving lights a music for the eye comparable to the effects of sound for the ear. If they were less successful than composers of auditory music, the sole reason rests in the fact that light is harder to manipulate than air. While dozens of folk instruments carved from wood can easily and instantly produce complex and satisfying sounds, pioneers of Visual Music (like Father Castel) struggled with unwieldy mechanisms (Castel's clavecin oculaire, 1729-1754, employed 500 candles, 60 reflecting mirrors and 240 levers and pulleys) that could produce only marginally satisfactory visual imagery. Still, the lure of a technological breakthrough drove dozens of artists to experiment with all sorts of devices. Not until the perfection of the motion picture could painters of light turn to a common technology which would allow a relatively simple production of imagery and a relatively accurate reproduction of that composition for a mass audience. Thus many of the "Old Masters" of Visual Music are animators - Oskar Fischinger, James Whitney, Harry Smith, Jordan Belson, Norman McLaren, Alexeieff, and Len Lye - just as are many of today's best practitioners, from independents like Sara Petty to the commercial creators of MTV rock videos. Any discussion of Visual Music, however, must remain "inter- disciplinary." "Color-Organs" - those non-filmic instruments invented to project pure light configurations - represent a viable alternative to the film/computer/ video complex, and some of the major figures in Visual Music, like Mary Hallock Greenewalt, Thomas Wilfred, and Charles Dockum, worked only in the color-organ medium. Some animators also performed with color-organs of their own invention, such as Charles Blanc-Gatti with his Orchestra chromophonique or Oskar Fischinger with his Lumigraph. But more important, a filmmaker like Jordan Belson is deeply influenced by Thomas Wilfred's color-organ Lumia, and Belson produces his filmed imagery not exclusively by traditional animation but also by devising pure light projections (like Lumia) which can be shot in real time. Aesthetically, the films of Belson should be discussed beside the animation films of James Whitney and Harry Smith, just as the Mobilcolor projections of Charles Dockum's color organ, with their geometric transformations, should be considered beside the films of Fischinger.

I can not go into a full history of Visual Music here - two of my recent articles provide some general background - but, based on my extensive study in the field, I want to suggest two major stumbling blocks toward the creation of good Visual Music, which should hover in the consciousness of animators who set about composition: the delusion of technology, and the delusion of rhythm.

Technology, as I already suggested, has always been a problem area for Visual Music, since no efficient, supple and easy light modulator exists even today. Most inventors of color organs were convinced that their instruments constituted a breakthrough - Father Castel, for example, despite how ludicrously awkward the 500 candles of his Clavecin oculaire may seem to us, believed that someday every home in Paris would own one - yet almost every color-organ, despite the wonderful compositions they play, remains an eccentric curiosity and a technological dead end. Traditional animation has produced the most successful Visual Music compositions, but, as we all know, 24-frames-per-second hand craft is a pretty tedious business. So the dream of a magic labor-saving device tempts many animators into wasting time fooling around with machines that can usually, at their best, produce merely shoddy work. Computers (and lasers and video) are hardly a panacea for most artists: Computer time remains prohibitively expensive, the manipulation of many graphics programs can be just as awkward and time-consuming as traditional animation, and the nature of the visual product is most often severely limited, so that one can hardly keep a five- minute stretch interesting. The "computer artist," furthermore, usually has to refurbish the raw imagery by traditional film and animation processes, and still the finished product is often more of a "syndrome" than a piece of Visual Music - a particular style of pattern appears and "does its thing" repetitively for 5 or 10 minutes (often accompanied by attrac- tive music) and then stops, for no particular reason.

Remember, no machinery can offer you a sense of graphic design, a sensitivity to color, or a sensibility for choreog- raphy and timing. These skills can best be learned by practicing and studying traditional hand animation, just as an auditory-music composer must leam the rudiments of harmony, counterpoint, melody and structure by playing scales and chord progressions on the piano and other instruments before setting out to compose a symphony.

This leads us to the "delusion of rhythm." As most beginning film students discover, music generally has a "beat" that can be counted mathematically, and since many pieces of music share the same general rhythm, you can couple to a given film various musical selections which not only "fit" to the film but also - according to whether the music has a jolly, sensuous or ominous mood - completely dominate and control the film, giving the impression that the visual imagery has changed to express the various moods. Too much of what passes for Visual Music relies on just such false synchronization. Auditory Music contains much more than a "beat." The would-be composer who sits long hours at a piano playing scales and chord modulations is learning a secret abstract structure of Auditory Music: what makes a melody beautiful and gracious, how syncopations make rhythm more compelling, how harmonies support the highlight melodies, how counterpoints of several simultaneous melodies can develop a synergy that means more than each single melody rather than merely conflicting with each other in a confusing fashion. Gradually the composer also learns to combine the timbres of various musical instruments into complex orchestral textures - and how to vary and time all these elements into particular, satisfying structures that remain interesting and effective even after dozens of repeated hearings. As a listener, you do not have to know any of these technical details, but you can "feel" when a song is more or less interesting.

Even the simplest folk song or pop hit contains the whole thousand-year tradition of intricate musical structure inside it, and the re-play value of auditory music derives from this implicit sophistication. If we are to have a Visual Music with a competitive re-play value (such as a music-video you want to see as often as you want to hear the song that goes with it), we must create visual structures with comparable intricacy, refinement and complexity.

What are the visual equivalents of melody, harmony, rhythm and counterpoint? Can the most satisfactory basis of a Visual Music even be found in analogy to Auditory Music? All of the classic composers of Visual Music have had theories about this, and they often disagreed. Mary Hallock Greenewalt believed that the intensity of light and the subtlety of the gradations of fading in and out were the most important factors. She devised a notation for these dynamics, based on the cycles of the moon, and wrote out light scores for such pieces as Beethoven's MOONLIGHT SONATA. Her great rival, Thomas Wilfred, eschewed Auditory Music entirely, feeling that Visual Music (which he called Lumia) must stand on its own, silent, or it would never be respected and appreciated. He felt that felt that elapsing time and changing hue were the key factors, and allowed currents and clouds of color to flow around his screen slowly with sensuous languor. The Auditory Music analogy to both of these styles of visual composition might be the lush romanticism of Wagner, Scriabin and Mahler, but I suspect that while both artists created some successful Visual Music pieces, the arbitrary limitations they imposed would make it difficult for their pieces to successfully sustain themselves in analogy to much other music - just as, for example, the video imagery Ron Hays did for the LIEBESTOD hardly suits the dynamic complexity of Wagner's thick, chromatic orchestration.

Simplistic or monomorphic imagery may make excellent single pieces when the overall structure is appropriate. Len Lye's FREE RADICALS, for example, with Lye's usual tasteful genius, couples the "automatic" scratches to percussion music which suits the explosive, jagged black-and-white lines that subtly twist and streak and cluster to correspond to the timbres of the different drums, the chant and the metallic sistrums. But this same formula would not work with a rock song or an orchestral dance. The percussive white scratches would match up to the general rhythm and would seem to "fit," on the first viewing, but the auditory intricacies of melody, harmony and counterpoint would sub-consciously demand a more sophisticated complexity that would leave the viewer dissatisfied or bored on repeated viewings.

We can find more satisfactory complements for traditional Auditory Music in the films of James Whitney and Oskar Fischinger. Whitney limited the building blocks of his films to the dot, but in a film like YANTRA, he created an astonishing diversity and complexity of images by clustering the dots to imply solid shapes or aligning them to outline geometric forms, by choreographing the dots into dramatic patterns of movement, by varying textures through solarization of the film stock, and by balancing the colors of the dot figures against the background hues. These variations in form, color, texture and movement reach an apotheosis of complexity in Whitney's later films, for which, by the way, he made extensive observations of various fire, water, air currents, wood and stone phenomena to learn the secrets of design and flux in nature as they relate to pattern and movement in art.

Similarly in Fischinger's ALLEGRETTO, we see a viable visual equivalent for orchestral music, with rhythmic pulsations of circles and matrix hue in the background to suggest rhythm and general key signature, while several layers of shapes in various mutating colors and clusters move in complementary patterns in the foreground to suggest melodies, harmonies and counterpoints. Not surprisingly, ALLEGRETTO is immensely satisfying, and has an almost infinite re-play value. The same could be said of other Fischinger films (including the silent RADIO DYNAMICS) and of the intricate animations of Harry Smith's FILM NO. 3, FILM NO. 7, and "MIRROR ANIMATIONS" FILM NO. 11, in which consciously controlled layers of diverse, balanced shapes, colors and movements flow with a dynamism and structure comparable to what we expect from Auditory Music.

Are there "rules" for the composition of Visual Music? Perhaps so, but not any easy, exact values - no one color or shape or motion is always equivalent to a certain tone or chord or rhythm. And the secrets of constructing a satisfying overall structure must be learned from a great deal of comparative study of successful and unsuccessful Visual Music compositions - and a lot of trial-and-error practice!

Originally published in Asifa Canada Bulletin (Montreal: ASIFA Canada), Vol. 14: 3, December 1986

above copied from: http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/TAVM.htm