You know how you’re always complaining to your like-minded internet peer group that, considering how far our society has advanced technologically in last century or so, music/visual-art/culture in 2016 isn’t nearly NEXT-LEVEL enough? (To wit: wasn’t Jaws 19 supposed to be out like four months ago, by now?) Well, praise be to the Lawnmower Man, my friend! Your snarky, secular prayers for greater A.V. synthesis have been answered.
Berlin-based musician and sound artist holymachines (a.k.a. Chris Hill) and Münster-based director, motion designer, and visual artist Aquiet (a.k.a. Sven Stratmann) have teamed up to release their latest glitchy-yet-ambient sound-and-image collaboration (think Oneothrix DJing Jan Jelinek records) on the Average Negative label. It’s called Image Version, and it’ll be released under the moniker “holymachines x Aquiet” April 1 on the future-cool format of USB Card/Digital Download.
But enough pesky details already, right? Let’s talk aesthetics. Image Version employs an art method described by Hill as “genre observation.” Quoth the record’s (disappointingly un-interactive) press release: “rather than catting influences wholesale from contemporary culture, [Hill absorbed] smaller fragmentary snatches, deconstructing them and reassembling them as bold new sonic gestures,” which resulted in “sonic artifacts that meander between ambient, noise and collage.” The resulting constructions were then “layered with Aquiet’s powerful abstracted visuals” to invoke a realm where “reality, virtual reality and simulation collide, conjuring feelings of digital alienation and wistfully evoking the fragmented reality we experience on a daily basis.”
Hot damn. You just gotta experience this leap forward in sound/image sublimation for yourself, right? Too bad your famished ears and eyeballs will have to wait until April to feast upon the goodness… Oh wait — just kidding, no they won’t. It just so happens that album track “Yt,” featuring “vaporized pads, simulated chimes and nervous melodies colliding with crunchy percussion,” is being unleashed (sonically, at least) by the duo today! Check it out with your earholes below, while your eyeballs enjoy their superior view from the art-music high ground.
Image Version tracklisting:
01. Ecology
02. Golden Days, Bold Oblique
03. Brainless Highbrows
04. Yt
05. Plus
06. Ritual Pro
07. Nondescript Recopy
08. Image Version
More about: Aquiet, holymachines
