sound by putting my hand on a big slab of vinyl and moving it back and forth was a 2 fingers up to ‘proper musicianship’ and the cultural elitism that seemed to have a monopoly on defining art. We started making music out of turntables and cassette decks. It was cut and paste – it was collage, montage – it was cut-up, but I didn’t understand the cultural and historical context of that until quite a while afterwards. In some ways, journalists who started asking questions about this were a spur to finding out more about it. I’d read William Burroughs but hadn’t particularly made the connection between cut-up text and cut-up sound. My fascination is in finding the connections between things. I have the science background but I’ve always been interested in art – and that’s always run strong in my family too. C.P Snow wrote a famous essay in the 50’s called The Two Cultures bemoaning the fact that specialists in the fields of science and art/humanities really
didn’t have anything to say to one another, and I think that while he made a critical point, there have always been people who have tried to bridge the divide, and perhaps since the time of Snow’s influential essay, those efforts have accelerated. Just the use of digital technology and the internet alone have aided communication, connection and linking up areas of experience. Also think that the psychedelic experience and the experimentation of the 60s and 70s helped break down barriers between cultures and form cross-disciplinary links. I do like to find other areas that are related to what we’re doing and seeing what the connections and the analogies might be. A large part of what we’ve been doing the last 24 years is taking ideas and techniques from music production /DJing and finding or creating the analogies with visual production/ VJing.
Image - Maybe Logic Quantum Circuit - created with Granul8