Joshua White is considered the forefather of VJ culture, and his Joshua Light Show as an initiatory spectacle of image-sound synaesthesia. As early as the late 60s, Joshua Light Show’s visual worlds revealed entirely new perceptual spaces in which rock and roll could begin to become transcendent beyond the world of hallucinogens. Now, at the invitation of tranmediale and CTM, the Joshua Light Show ensemble turns its projections on the potential of contemporary avant-garde sound, with all the profundity and delirious sensuality this implies.
Oneohtrix Point Never provides accompaniment in a collaborative improvisation that transforms the concert into an overwhelming multimodal experience. Moreover, the ensemble of up to ten players uses a whole arsenal of devices such as film, slide and overhead projectors, color wheels, prisms and mirrors, to conjure a seemingly endless and breathtaking diversity of colors and shapes.
The Brooklynite Daniel Lopatin is the man behind Oneohtrix Point Never. His previous album, Returnal (Editions Mego, 2010), was made using vintage synthesizers to create widescreen ambient landscapes. His latest album, Replica (Mexican Summer, 2011), manipulates samples from 80s TV commercials to construct evocative tracks of unexpected emotional depth. Although Lopatin has complained about people using the word "nostalgic" to describe his music, the term is rather apt. But Oneohtrix Point Never is not about dissecting retro aesthetics or glorifying some alternate version of the past (as may well be the case with his other project, Ford & Lopatin). In the best sense, Replica does indeed conjure a feeling of nostalgia: as if someone has hacked into your vaguest, most distant memories and reassembled them as clear recollections of things that never really happened.
Oneohtrix Point Never's performance is the second of a three-part concert series entitled The Ghosts In the Machine, co-presented by CTM and transmediale.
Latest tracks by Oneohtrix Point Never
