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MUSIC YOU CAN SEE
GRAHAM: Visual music has been around for a long time, and not just in recent decades: installation
artists like Nam June Paik were creating work in
the 1970s that could be described as such, and way
back to the 1930s animators and experimental filmmakers like Jordan Belson or Oskar Fischinger
ith a multisensory focus and an innate interest in the eclectic, Addictive TV is not your average DJ duo. Based in London and comprised of Graham Daniels and Mark Vidler, the electronic pair is known for their extensive use of sampling. While this technique traditionally entails extracting and adopting auditory excerpts solely from songs, Addictive TV takes it a step further; in addition to audio samples, they also work with visual platforms – including movies, television, trailers, and advertisements – to create “music you can see”. For their latest project, Addictive TV has taken this approach to an international level. Featuring over 150 musicians, Orchestra of Samples seamlessly merges the musical performances of unacquainted artists across the globe into mixed-and-matched audiovisual montages. To find out more about this exciting endeavor, we chatted with Graham and Mark of Addictive TV, as well as several of the musicians – Humberto Alvarez, Wang Chung, Laetitia Sadier, Francesco Russo, Henry Dagg, and Motörhead’s Lucas Fox – featured in Orchestra of Samples.
were way ahead of their time creating beautiful visual music.
For us and our work, there’s no one single
inspiration I can pin-point. It was something that
developed slowly over time in my days as a VJ, from
messing around with old public domain footage and
NASA archives to trying out audiovisual remix ideas with sampling movies. And that’s what led to some
studios in Hollywood contacting us to remix films – and that was all well over a decade ago now!
PSYCHADELIC INFLUENCES
MARK: For me, my biggest personal artistic
influences stem from the Psychedelic period from ‘66 up to the present day, and that incorporates
music mainly from the UK and USA garage band: Krautrock from Germany and South American Tropicalia. Film-wise, again the same period
from trippy exploitation and biker flicks to late
seventies science-fiction stuff and Italian Giallo
cinema. Broadly speaking, I’ve always been drawn towards ‘experimentation’ and any medium that likes to think ‘outside the box’.
GRAHAM: There are plenty of musicians and
filmmakers who inspire us, but directly relating to our work there’s very few because hardly anyone
else does this. German audio/visual act Bauhouse were definitely an early influence though, as was
Canadian audio artist Akufen (with his style of ultra chop-up micro edits) and, of course, the early 90s American godfathers of AV sampling, Emergency
Broadcast Network, who we’ve ended up knowing over the years and working with.