On Thursday 15th September in London, Ben (Synthetics) will be performing his inaugural full audio/visual set for the opening night of the Hackney Film Festival at Platform Bar, Netil House, Hackney. He’s been toiling away over the summer on this new material and it’s exciting to have the opportunity to showcase the project. The 45 minute presentation combines soundtrack style atmospherics with more polished compositions, timed beautifully to his visual aesthetic. There’s no sneak peek yet, but expect videos to be posted online shortly after the event. More info on the gig here

Tonight our old group member and co-founder Anders Carleö will make a sudden and unplanned comeback on the Världskulturmuséet stage at the Way Out West festival in Gothenburg, Sweden. We don’t know if it’s the V.I.P. ticket to the sold out festival or pure love for the VJ game that tempted him but whatever the reason it’s fun to see him attack the screens once again. We haven’t gotten any confirmation which musical artists he will be working with. The schedule says that Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, Butch and Wolfgang Gartner will be playing tonight.

Here’s the visuals we did for Nomaton at the Volt festival in Uppsala on June 11th. There were less last minute preps this time and we could enjoy more of the festival. We even took some time to go sightseeing in Uppsala the day after. There were more people at the festival this year (despite the awesome weather) and the organization was good as always. Thanks to Patric, Joel and everyone else involved! And last but not least to a big thanks to Johan Holm of the Vidots who simulated a blowjob on Mike mid set and thanks to Anders Carleö for getting that and the rest of the gig on camera.

Maybe this is a new tradition: letting people know about our gigs before they actually take place. Instructions will be performing at the Volt Festival in Uppsala, Sweden on June 11th. This year the festival have buses going back to Stockholm after closing time. You can buy tickets in advance if you follow the link on their web site.

Mike found some old footage on one of his hard drives and rendered out a new bigger version of the Kernel Panic intro from the 2007 Pixelvärk VJ Jam.

There is an older smaller version shot at the event in an older post. Worth to note is that all the animations are made in Modul8 and managed live by Ben with a MIDI controller.

Here’s a little video we edited form our performance at the VJ Festival at E-Werk in Erlangen, Germany. The video is shot by Erik Schneider.

You can find a report from the festival on the Swedish VJ Union blog.

On friday we’re off to Erlangen in Germany to participate in a VJ Festial at E-Werk hosted by the F.E.T.E. crew. It’s a new festival and they have marketed it as a small but maybe just small to German standards. They have an impressive lineup of 8 VJs, 11 A/V live acts, 3 movie screenings and 7 installations and 9 DJs. Instructions are being blessed with DJs Ana and Julietta from the Munich Club and DJ/VJ agency Harry Klein. We’re looking forward to our performance on Saturday night as well as the rest of the festival.

Last weekend (18th-19th Sept) saw a hugely successful inaugural Hackney Film Festival take place in East London. The non-profit event is set to be an annual fixture, aiming to celebrate the work of Hackney based artists and provide a platform for local film heads. Short film and animation screenings began on Saturday at the classic Dalston Rio Cinema at 3.30pm running through until 6.30pm, followed by an evening of live audio-visual performances from 7.30pm-2am at The Others in Stoke Newington. More film and music video screenings took place at The Drop in Stoke Newington on Sunday afternoon. The event directors were overwhelmed by the high standard of film submissions, and the final shortlist screened was hugely impressive.

Synthetics was asked to play at two events – the live audio-visual evening on 18th and a festival fundraiser gig at Korsan Bar a month previously – alongside an awesome A/V line-up: The Light Surgeons (performing True Fictions), Quayola (performing PTA), Tom White,(performing MOILING), Joe Catchpole, The K E R N S, Alex Sedano, Triggerset, and Blinkin Lab.

The fundraiser gig was more of a party VJ/DJ jam, whereas the live A/V event on the 18th was geared towards the discerned viewer, with sofas and chairs arranged to watch the performances. There was a big triple screen set up which The Light Surgeons and Quayola had optimised their sets for – and I’ve never seen so much technology arranged on 3 workbenches to make it happen. The venue was packed and Synthetics’ visuals received some very warm comments. It was a privilege to play alongside such industry heavyweights.

Once the video documentation has been collated it will be posted online.

Thanks to all involved and roll on next year!

Ben (Synthetics) did visuals for Villah Nah at The Drop, London on 7th July. Tom Bunning did the camera work for this video. Ben also performed visuals for Villa Nah at the Flow Fesival in Helsinki on 13th August.

Synthetics & The Midi Thief were invited back to the Volt festival to do visuals for Le Petit Orb, a smaller version of the legendary British techno group The Orb. Unfortunately we had to work almost up until the gig started due to a computer crash the day earlier so we missed some of the other acts we really wanted to see. Volt had once again a nice line up with everything from the more obscure and experimental electronic acts to high energy techno DJ sets.

We had decided to go 16:9 this time and it introduced some problems in combination with our technical setup. This is one of those situations where Toby Spark’s D-Fuser DVI mixer would have come in handy. But apparently you can do 16:9 through an Edirol V-4 mixer and even record from the mixer to DV-tape if you do some clever squishing.

The VJ set went very well and our graphics were more in sync than ever before. Maybe loosing a little bit in eccentricity but what the hell, it was tight! We had tried to get hold of Alex Paterson and Thomas Fehlmann through their management before the gig to be able to gain some knowledge about how they had planned their performance. We never managed to get hold of them that way but I bumped into them backstage a few minutes before the gig. What a dynamic duo, the calm Fehlmann contrasting the rowdy Paterson, something that was also very present on stage.

We thoroughly enjoyed the Le Petit Orb gig and Volt 2010 and we wouldn’t mind coming back next year.