Sounds+Screen

Artists soundtracking edited versions of their favourite films live.
Pay what you can afford at the door.
An event brought to you by UKAEA + Combat Recordings + Chaos Theory Music

For this instalment we have:
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[Force Majeure]
La Jetée – Chris Marker (1962) – 14 minutes
Meshes of the Afternoon – Maya Deren (1943) – 28 minutes

“I choose these films as they were amongst a bunch of older avant-garde films that set off my passion for cinema as a teenager. The stark monochrome images are also a good match for the general sonic palette of my Force Majeure musical alias.

I went for films that were fairly short in duration so that I could build a live foley instrument that would allow me to perform in real-time along with the movement, montage and edits on-screen. This is further underpinned by analogue drones, distorted ASMR recordings, electro-magnetic static and bolstered with gesture-based software interaction for further performative aspects.”

Force Majeure is the latest live performance project from Nick Ronin, a London-based audio/visual artist with twenty years of gigs and artistry behind him.Although a devoted fan of synthesis, this project is concerned with how far recorded audio – vocal noises and foley sounds – can be manipulated and processed into thoroughly electronic realms. All of the final Force Majeure output is the result of this granular, spectral and effect processing and all of the sounds have been recorded and performed by the artist. This project is a new stepping stone in the artistic career of someone who was born from the more rave-orientated British underground DIY scene. It provides a good opportunity for him to explore the more experimental and abstracted side of his musical tastebuds. This side of his personality has seen previous outings under his main persona, in collaborative project No Signal – and found lurking at his own audio-visual performing arts event Crux.

Musical reference points include:
Somatic Responses, Speedy J, Roel Funcken, The Haxan Cloak, The Bug, Phuture Doom

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[Amousement] – Nosferatu

2022, an artificial intelligence finds an old file named “Nosferatu” (1922).mov

2022 is the 100th anniversary of “Nosferatu – A Symphony of Horror” (*Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens), a silent German Expressionist horror piece starring Max Schreck as Count Orlok, a vampire who preys on the wife of his estate agent and brings the plague to their town.

Amousement: “For this beautiful masterpiece, I imagined a computer/droid watching this movie. This gave me the idea to explore machine learning techniques and the implementation of artificial intelligence in the creation of artistic content. I started with some simple software, and little by little discovered a world of possibilities. I fed a processor with a series of keyframes extracted from the movie, then started exploring the possibilities of audio style transfer and feeding the same processor with portions of the soundtrack and letting it reprocess the material. The result was a series of new frames and audio composition, where the AI strongly modified and re-interpreted the original content. This was then reorganised into a more linear and appreciable series of sounds and images that will be processed again live during the show.”

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ACCESSIBILITY:
- The entire venue is wheelchair accessible with accessible toilets
- There’s a short, shallow ramp outside leading up to double doors, which open both ways,
- There are two steps and a longer sloping wheelchair ramp to the left leading down inside to the venue
- All toilets are non-gendered
- The bar is to the right on the same level as the front doors and accessible toilet