A great week for live music in Wellington was rounded off last night with Sign of the Hag, Riki Gooch and Omit at the Pyramid Club. The A/V duo, Sign of the Hag, featuring Erica Sklenars, aka Lady Lazer Light, and Dan Beiben from Orchestra of Spheres, were truly exceptional. Dan generated a deep rhythmic pulsing kind of techno while Erica projected gorgeous animated visuals….but here’s the thing – they used spinning wheels – yep, real, wooden, treadle powered ones! Dan has rigged his wheel with contact mikes and sample triggers into a laptop, the beat dependent on the speed at which he treadles, while Lady Laserlight has evolved Zoetropes, the pre-cinema animation devices of the 1800’s, into the digital age and mutates drawn animated sequences into images surrealist, haunting and truly spectacular. Watching these two artists, hunched over spinning wheels, creating a digital audiovisual performance was really something. They are performing next Saturday 19th as part of Exploded Cinema at the Film Archive. Next up Riki Gooch gave a short and tantalizing taster of his cool abstract electronic/noise side project Nil Nil and was then followed by a rare appearance by reclusive Blenheim based artist Omit, who exhibited his incredible artwork for the first time ever – around 200 pointillist black and white drawings – and performed his hypnotic and mysterious minimalist electronic music. The sounds were exceptionally crisp, kind of like the crackling of synapses in a cloud of humming electrons and I discovered later that he uses no samples or computers, which means every sound heard is generated by real electronic devices. Awesome. For anyone interested, Omit’s three Zines are available from Central Library’s Zine collection.
Posted on: Sun, 10 Aug 2014 04:37:52 +0000
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