HUE is a performative installation by composer Simon Goff, visual artist Sebastian Kite, and choreographer Lisanne Goodhue, combining said disciplines into color-themed environments unified by sight, sound, and movement. HUE investigates spaces between artforms and the gray area between artist and audience. Goff, for example, added MIDI controllers to the installation, getting audience members in on the collaboration as they walked through the space.
HUE (the performance) inspired HUE (the LP), Goff’s upcoming Hiddenseer Music release, out on clear vinyl. Furthermore, continuing the partnership between Goff and Kite, there is HUE the audiovisual album, premiering below.
Strobe warning emphasis…
“Yellow” being especially strobed. Beginning with layers of ethereal violin and flicker shape visuals, motion builds through clicks and snaps into a pulsing eye-fry session. Vision mixes strobe flashes into phantom shapes and brief random colors, harvesting patterns from the information overload.
Your optic nerve in ashes, “Blue” brings a welcome pause-glacial by comparison-as blocks of digital ocean support a stirring wave of minimal violin tones.
Those cool blues are a fine lead-in to “Red,” an exercise in audiovisual spacing. Electronic pops and zaps support plucked and bowed string patterns, sounds that synch with various red shapes jumping and filling the screen.
“Green” displays an expansive contrast in visual hues. Goff’s score is appropriately varied and spatialized, a matrix of composed sounds and field recordings, at once geometric and dreamlike.
“Orange” starts with a wash of grapefruit-colored shades and busy synth threaded with violin and punctuated by samples. A songform emerges, as do a set of rectangular orange fields, their surfaces distressed by hypnotic flickering.
“Violet,” the shortest piece and shortest wavelength, dwells in lower sonic registers, an elegant closing of stacked afterimages.
HUE the audiovisual album is of course a different experience from the performance installation. There are tactile and participatory tradeoffs to be sure. But in taking a multimedia approach to close listening and close watching, performance and album alike achieve moments of beautiful synesthesia wherein an observer may become fully immersed in combined light, motion, and sound.
More about: Lisanne Goodhue, Sebastian Kite, Simon Goff
