/// SOUND OF THE YEAR AWARDS
AWARDED BEST INNOVATION IN A SOUND TOOL OR TECHNIQUE BY:
MFT LABS
THE SOUND MUSEUM
/// Coming soon...
/// Mashrooms Recording Studio - turning a home into audio visual live performance recording studio
/// Audio visual music collaboration platform
WORKS
Based on the exploration of music from a visual perspective, these works unveil visual narratives of sound, unreplaceable ephemeral moments of audio recordings.
With cutups of filmed live performance we create linear and non-linear interactive experiences; works that invite the construction & deconstruction of music, delve into perception processes and explore links between individualism and togetherness.
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a song is greater than the sum of its parts,
the parts are essential for the song to exist.
MUSICJELLY MASHUP - IOS APP
Through the years we have been directing the creation of this app. This ephemeral version was released for Spring-Summer 2021 for the duration of the Basildon Open Labs Festival 2021 (scroll down to see project).
It's a non-linear short video-loop recorder and multi-channel launcher which depicts mosaics of humans, instruments and characters converging into long mashed-up linear pieces of music, created by triggering different video-loops within up to 6 channels that work in perfect sync.
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This app will be published in 2022 under the name Mashrooms Mashup to become part of The Mashrooms, a platform for visual music collaboration & creation.
AUDIO VISUAL MUSIC MACHINE
2014-EVEREVOLVING
Constructable/deconstructable, this post-digital installation is an interactive composing instrument and mashable audio visual sampler: loop-based, multi-channel, hypnotising and non-linear journey of over 3billion possible permutations that syncs people, objects, locations and sounds in perfect time.
Representing a multicultural landscape and controlled by the audience, here John Cage, Bjork and Brian Eno’s experimental visions of music meets William Burroughs’ concept of cutups and Alan Lomax’s approach to music archiving from a visual perspective, creating a whole new genre that embraces diversity.
AVMM is an interactive audio-visual participatory experience containing years of documented improvised filmed live performance: short videos of musicians, vocalists, dancers, spoken word artists and other sounds brought together into an ever-evolving mosaic mixed by the audience using the launchstation’s touchscreens. The projection wall is the canvas onto which people trigger these videos and create visual sequences of music, with up to 6 channels playing together at once.
With hundreds of artists, AVMM is an inclusive human collage where the parts make the whole and the whole is affected by the parts. The audience becomes the composer, constantly creating new meanings, invited to explore how we perceive the constant flow of these meanings and the reciprocity between individuality and connectedness emerging from this endless piece.
The AVMM has exhibited at places like Barbican Centre, Roundhouse and Cairo Palace of Arts amongst others.
Musicjelly project
THE NEW MACHINE SERIES
2013-2021
This twelve-piece touchscreen installation is the fruit of years of experimentation with the recording process of psychedelic band (and fundamental tentacle of our work) The Nyco Project, in an exploratory exercise of the idea that a song is greater than the sum of its parts, but also that the parts are essential for the song to exist.
The New Machine I, II & III are presented in EP format and created with cut-ups of original filmed live performances and brought together into moving paintings. They are in total twelve deconstructable video-collages that respond to touch for full & selective listening. Each touchscreen has 3 sets of headphones for a shared intimate experience.
In The New Machine III, "Don't Say A Word", "Mamma Doom", "Wipe Me To Forget" and "You Bring Me Hope" embody a new form of interactive EP installation that invites perception expansion, by delving deeper in the musical experience and the concept of connectedness, and unveiling the visual narratives absent in an audio recording.
The series combine analogue & digital and look at both the tendency of our brains to merge the parts of a perceived reality into an individual meaning (how we typically perceive music), & the link between the parts and the whole, creating further meanings - an exercise in awakening awareness of the movement between individuality & togetherness as a reciprocating process.
The New Machine started as an artistic concept and with the support of Arts Council Funding England. In 2013 the first series released as an ephemeral app, The New Machine II exhibited temporarily online in 2015 and with The New Machine III we're completing the EP series.
Vinyl LP "The Twelve Seasons" with audios of the entire series are only available at exhibitions & by contacting Strange Pill directly.
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The New Machine III has been featured in Aesthetica Magazine 's Anthology "Future Now: 100 contemporary artists" and became an online piece finally in 2021.
The Nyco Project
Exhibition + live performance.
ASTRAL MUSIC PROJECTIONS
AUDIO VISUAL MUSIC MACHINE II
MASHABLE HOLOGRAPHIC INSTALLATION
2015
AMP is a mashable holographic version of our Audio Visual Music Machine, a futuristic participatory experience containing holograms of musicians, vocalists, spoken word artists & other sounds, brought together into an ever evolving mosaic that is controlled by the audience by using the station's launch pads. The holographic theatre is the blank canvas onto which people trigger these artists to create holographic sequences of music.
The installation was built in collaboration with MDH Hologram (providers of the holographic technology), Studio Tangram, sound artist WIll Marsh, creative technologists Sean Henry and Oscar Wyatt and 62 different artists filmed and recorded in a London warehouse in pre-demolition limbo, turned into holographic studio. AMP is a mashable collage of performers where the parts make the whole and the whole is affected by the parts. The audience becomes the composer, constantly creating new meanings, and is invited to explore how us humans perceive the continuous flow of these meanings and what emerges from this endless piece.
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Astral Music Projections exhibited for the first time at Kinetica Museum's 10th Anniversary exhibition in 2017.
Musicjelly project
PROPAGATION
2018
‘Propagation’ is a digital video art wall piece made up of twelve screens, separated in two walls of six screens each. It was commissioned by Kinetica Museum for The Vaults’ immersive production, celebrating 50 years of Disney’s Fantasia and created in collaboration with video-artist and animator Daymotif. Presented in two walls with six screens each, this experimental digital installation depicts twelve muted visual narratives of sound - some with animations and some with computer generated image-, produced with audio frequency variations of the classical pieces and other sounds of the film, inspired by the film's psychedelic sound waves and palettes of colours. Bach's Tocatta and Fuga in D Minor turns into a molecular triad, and Tchaikovsky joins with Schubert in a multi-coloured radio wave. Sounds are presented visually in slow motion, in reverse and multi-layered. Collectively, the ‘Propagation’ artworks offer a perceptual journey that explores how we perceive through visualisation and how our minds fill the gaps when other senses are censored.
Propagation exhibited for the first time at The Vaults (London, Waterloo) in summer 2018.
Strange Pill & Daymotif.tv
DECONSTRUCTING MOZART & BEETHOVEN WITH
THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC
BARBICAN CENTRE COMMISSION
2015
Filmed in New York, this is an interactive audio visual installation created for the orchestra’s biennial residency at the Barbican Centre. Here the visitors were able to deconstruct the projection of two classical music pieces using a touchscreen in the centre of the room. For the first time people were able to hear the instruments of the orchestra in isolation and explore different combinations of sounds in a multi-sensorial way, entering the world of each musician and understanding their individual role within the big picture.
We filmed the individual musicians playing at once in independent isolated booths whilst following their conductor. The recording sessions were separated in groups of musicians and filmed and recorded in just two days.
The interactive pieces, with 15 and 18 musicians, showed in 2015 in a 5m screen and a touch-screen control station at the Barbican Centre’s foyer.
The audience was able to deconstruct and reconstruct Mozart’s Jupiter Finale and Beethoven’s 7th Symphony’s 2nd Movement, to delve deeper into the composers’ minds.
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The two pieces were later turned into web apps and placed online.
Musicjelly project
We're currently working in turning our home and studio into hyperlow video latency & 0-latency live multi-room recording studio. We're also building music creation & collaboration platform.
BASILDON AUDIO VISUAL MUSIC MACHINE
/// SITE-SPECIFIC VIDEO-MASHUP EXPERIENCE
BASILDON OPEN LABS FESTIVAL 2021
Collaboration project with Together in Musical Expression (TIME), a local charity that aims to provide access to music for everyone.
In one of the most culturally deprived towns in the UK, we were given the keys of an empty shop in the town centre and turned it into a pop-up gallery with our AVMM installation and a music recording workshop where our Musicjelly iOS app was used to
capture the performances of local musicians, passers-by and special needs groups to create a Basildon Anthem, showing that everyone can make music, enriching the cultural offer of Basildon, bringing a sense of community from a creative perspective and exploring unity through diversity.
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This project won the open call largest bid for Basildon Open Labs Festival curated by Creative People & Places.
IRENE TAYLOR TRUST COMMISSION
2018
NON-LINEAR
Commissioned by the Irene Taylor Trust, these mashable Musicjelly palettes were created with the people taking part in ITT’s Sounding Out programme and its facilitators.
Sounding Out is a two-year training programme for ex-prisoners to create music and inspire their futures in alternative creative ways. This commission is another expression of our exploratory principle "a song is more than the sum of its parts, and the parts are essential for the song to exist"; and like all non-linear Musicjelly pieces, explores the concept of visual sampling as a new way of creating music.
The interactive palettes contain a collection of selected moments of improvised filmed live performances, recorded at The Premises in East London, and presented as two separate non-linear mashable palettes of different clips:
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DECONSTRUCTABLE LINEAR PIECE
HUMAN
Also commissioned by the Irene Taylor Trust, this linear interactive Musicjelly video was created with Inside Out, a band that emerged from the ITT’s Sounding Out programme.
This piece is also based on the idea that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and the parts are essential for the whole to exist; and like all Strange Pill's linear pieces, explores the audio visual deconstruction of a song as a new way of experiencing music and expanding our aural perception.
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The performances were filmed and recorded at The Premises in East London over a day and then brought together into this moving mosaic.
THIS DOUBLE PIECE COMMISSION WAS SUPPORTED BY
