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Das Produkt DVD

Trancevisuals

I must admit that until recently, I never paid much attention to visuals at parties. Maybe I was too involved in the key pastimes of drinking at the bar, or recounting ‘hilarious moments in reviewing’ to the assembled throng of hot young bindi’d chicks that always follow psyreviews around (ahem). But lately, things have changed – and you can’t help but notice that visuals have got better. Back In The Day™ it was more or less all about tripping your nut off, dancing in the direction of a Winamp plugin beamed over the top of the stage, but these days as the technology has accelerated, so has the intricacy. And in all I’ve seen (as in, actually sat down and watched), Das Produkt is the most intricate, the most reactive, and the most fun set of graphics-to-music package since the early digital fish of the X-Mix series. Produced by the UK’s Trancevisuals, you’re talking tracks by the likes of Voice Of Cod, Rastaliens and OOOD over painstaking graphic manipulation into an overall package that’s possibly the best bit of stoner-fodder since Super Troopers. What’s key here is how reactive the visuals are. No longer is the VJ having a wanking competition with the musicians; for once they are in gloriously non-masturbatory sync. When new sounds arrive in the music, new elements arrive in the visuals. When there’s a sample, a little guy comes up and speaks in remarkably close synchronisation. The intro to Distortion Orchestra’s Life On Earth, for example, has a sample describing the earth, while we see a spinning orb gradually take on the characteristics of the planet: countries form in slivery grey, before growing blues and greens, and then clouds come in and the whole visual mulch spins off in time with the track kicking off properly. Das Produkt is easy to get lost in – the fractal swarms diffuse, recognisable characters (a bloke, a robot, a chick, and lots and lots of mushrooms) rise up and guide the flow, and dazzlingly intricate mandalas rotate and interact with each other. He’s even made specific shapes and patterns to represent the sounds as they come in – a dark, menacing breakdown sees the introduction of some uncomfortable, spiky cyberstructures, for example. Objects move around the screen just as the sounds pan around the stereo field. Really, you have to see it – no amount of wordiness can explain quite what’s going on, nor the level of significant achievement this represents. Taking a step back, perhaps the most significant thing in all of this is what it means to the hitherto disparate schools of VJ and DJ. The music is pretty decent but by and large it isn’t, in itself, desperately interesting. What Trancevisuals does is to add something tangible to the existing elements of the music, and make them more compulsive. And this is the key. We are starting to see the fusion of aural and visual, and this is one hell of a step on that particular journey.  

9

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