Why an AV show?

I like my visuals crisp, graphical and, dare I say it, minimalistic. In most clubs, even if the visuals are quite nice they are pretty much never in time to the music, never mind locked to the beat or even individual sounds! The idea of doing visuals that were in time, and in some way, synaesthetic has been at the back of my mind for many years and integrating visuals with my live set has been bugging me for a few years. I discovered a program called Isadora that is amazingly flexible. You can basically get it to do anything, if you scratch your head enough. It’s like a cross between programming and building stuff in Logic’s environment. It’s only recently that laptops have been up to the job of running music and visuals in synchrony – and it’s still pushing what it can handle.

I’ve always thought of music in a kind of visual way and vice versa when I do video editing. Rhythm is very important in both.

It’s also partly just wanting to do something different. Something a bit extra. When doing a live laptop set, there’s always a danger you can look like you’re just checking email or something. So I thought that something that magnifies what you’re doing onto a projector would help. I also changed my live set to be much more improvised and midi orientated rather than just playing loops. This was necessary to drive the visuals program by triggering stuff with midi and gives a much more *live* live show. A lot of the visuals have have a different events triggered for different noises. Some of it is triggered by audio and I even use the iSight camera in certain sections for that real life interaction thing.