Words-Samara Moss
Photography-Françoise Lamy, Alex Comyn, Matt Cheetham
Not quite DJ and definitely not VJ, but once so eloquently described as ‘next level shit’ by Grandmaster Flash, the British electronic duo of Addictive TV, aka Graham Daniels and Mark Vidler, creates music with a real difference; it’s music you can see. In their extraordinary work Addictive TV delve deep into movies and videos hunting for sounds and images to sample, creating dance music that fuses everything from fidget and electro to drum ‘n’ bass and even rock. They create their music keeping the audio and video samples together, so their fans get to see more than just a DJ or just graphics and visuals; they actually get to experience music in a genuinely unique way.
Crossing the clubbing and digital art divide, Addictive TV have appeared everywhere from super club Womb in Tokyo to the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Shanghai, and of course at Glastonbury Festival! The guys have supported The Chemical Brothers and Goldfrapp and have created commercials and video installations for the likes of Adidas, Red Bull and EA Games. Even Hollywood studios including Paramount, Universal and 20th Century Fox, have all used their movie mashing talents to create amazing trailers!
We got them to turn off their laptops to catch up with them ahead of their appearance at Hexstatic’s Holotronica, this Friday 23rd whilst in the midst of working on their new project ‘Orchestra of Samples’, working with musicians from around the World.
SM-Hey, how are you both? Have you had a busy year?
MARK-Good, looking forward to Friday.
GRAHAM-Yeah, 2012’s been a really mad year! It started in China playing Gatecrasher’s New Year’s Eve event in Shanghai and roller-coastered as the year went on! A surrealist gig this year for me was at Birmingham’s NEC for Channel 5’s “The Gadget Show” – we did 3 performances a day for a whole week! Also this year, we’ve started performing with a completely new set-up. We’re working with the software designers from Resolume in Holland and with Native Instruments in Germany which is working out great, we unveiled all our new kit recently at this year’s Amsterdam Dance Event conference.
MARK-Yeah, this year we also produced a really cool remix for the Japanese game company Capcom for the release of Street Fighter x Tekken, sampling the actual game and building a literally kicking, thumping track! We’ve also worked a lot this year on our forthcoming project ‘Orchestra of Samples’, collaborating with loads of musicians in different countries, filming them and then sampling those recording sessions to create new visual music. But the strangest thing for me this year though was having a documentary crew follow us around for months, doing a TV programme about us for French telly! Having a mic on you at all times can be dangerous!
SM-How did Addictive TV start?
GRAHAM-It’s really developed over the last decade in different stages as oppose to being created one sunny morning. Back in the day, I was producing television like the ITV1 music series “Mixmasters” – but was also VJing in clubland at the same time and performing AV shows in an earlier incarnation of Addictive TV, when mine and Mark’s paths first crossed only in 2005.
MARK-Yeah, I’d been mashing up and producing bootlegs for quite a few years at that point with my Go Home Productions project and EMI had gone to my management to see if I was interested in making a cleared album of mash-ups. Graham was asked to direct the music video for the track ‘Rapture Riders’ on my “Mashed” album, and the rest, as they say, is history!
SM-You don’t just mash images, you mash music. Which is more difficult technically?
MARK-Mmmm, it’s a bit like saying ‘what’s better – apples or oranges?’ They’re both the same in that sense, and especially with what we do, as we remix and mash both together at the same time. In other words, it’s not just pictures edited to music, it’s music built from sampling the sounds in the video – so you can “see the music”. Does that sound mad? It’s never an easy one to describe!
GRAHAM-Yeah, we like to start at the point where sound meets image; we’re really into the idea that you can see the building blocks of our music, so we like to work audiovisually rather than purely in sound or just image, we like the effect of hitting both the eyes and ears at the same time. Look around you, our brains constantly fuse images and sounds as part of everyday life, so we think ‘lets make use of that’! Especially as our work is based on figurative samples, like seeing someone play guitar or film clips where you can see how a sound is made – such as a crashing car or someone speaking. So as far as technical difficulty it’s really just a process of working with sound and pictures together at the same time till we get it right!
SM-What sort of sound can you expect from an Addictive TV set?
MARK-Loud beats and thrashing guitars! LOL
GRAHAM-Yeah, we’ve created a lot of new work in the last year or so, some of it will be the first time we’ve played it in London; like a remix of Jack Black’s band Tenacious D from their “Pick of Destiny” movie and a drum ‘n’ bass remix we did of a well known Bollywood tune. In the summer we also finished a new mash-up of Daft Punk and Kraftwerk (‘Robot Rock’ and ‘The Robots’) with all the Transformers movies – so called it Daftwerk Transformation. We played it for the first time at a big festival in Switzerland and the crowd went mental!
SM-Which do you prefer DJing or VJing, and why?
MARK-Errr, well, we don’t do either really – so I can’t quite answer that one. I might technically do what a DJ does but I’m not playing other DJ’s tracks if you know what I mean.
GRAHAM-Yeah, ditto. We use software that DJs and VJs might use separately, but not rewired in the way we use it and as Mark says, we don’t play other peoples tracks like a DJ would. It’s all our own original material or our own remixes. We’re much more of a crossover hybrid act, rather than DJs or VJs, which is why we don’t really use those terms.
SM-DJ sets with visuals are becoming more and more popular, why do you think this is?
MARK-Well, looking at a DJ is soooo boring!
SM-Do you think more DJs will try their hand at putting on AV (audiovisual) shows themselves? Or do you think there is still a place for a separate VJ?
GRAHAM-Yes and no. To perform really good AV takes a hell of a lot of work and effort, far more than most DJs would probably want to put in by themselves which is why there’s not many acts doing what we do. And so here’s the answer to the second part of your question, yep they’ll always be a place for a separate VJ or in fact visuals team. Just look at Amon Tobin’s ISAM project – can you see anyone doing a whole show like that on their own?
SM-Getting down to the tech, what sort of equipment goes into VJing? What are your recommendations of the best equipment?
GRAHAM-Yeah, as I say we’re not really part of the VJ scene as such because we merge audio with visual, but we recently stopped using Pioneer’s DVJ video turntables which we actually helped develop and test with Pioneer over 10 years ago now! So now we’re using this new customised version of Resolume’s Arena software in conjunction with Native Instruments’ Traktor with two MacBook Pros wired up together, so my simple recommendation would be to get a decent laptop and Resolume software – the best visuals performance software on the planet!
SM-Why do you think you have been so successful on the electronic music scene? Twice voted number one VJs in the world by DJ Mag, as well as hyped by the likes of XLR8R – that must have felt like quite an accomplishment?
GRAHAM-No idea, we just do what we do if you know what I mean. Perhaps it’s our attention to detail in our work, I don’t know? But it doesn’t come much better than when you get a film-maker like Slumdog Millionaire’s Danny Boyle or French director Marc Caro loving your work and asking you to remix one of their films! In fact Marc Caro, the guy who directed “Delicatessen” and “The City Of Lost Children”, came to a gig of ours in France – we didn’t know he was there, and he came backstage, raving about our show, and I was star struck as “Delicatessen” is one of my favourite films.
SM-What have been some of your biggest achievements? You’ve played all over the world, including Womb in Tokyo and Glastonbury Festival. You must have some amazing highlights?
MARK-Being part of the successful record breaking attempt at the world’s largest ever silent disco back in 2011 in France is probably one, 10,000 party goers all wearing headphones! It was an awesome and utterly weird experience and when we finished, the relief of having pulled it off for the pair of us was huge! We’ve been very fortunate to play in so many great places around the World, highlights for me have been ski-resort Chamonix, where we played outdoors in the town square right in front of the massive snow covered Mont Blanc mountain, quite a sight! And in Brazil, we got to support Rita Lee from the 60’s psychedelic band Os Mutantes. I was in total awe standing on the side of the stage watching her!
GRAHAM-A real endorsement of our work was back in 2006, when we were asked to officially remix a Hollywood movie – this was the first time ever that any artist had been allowed to do this, but New Line Cinema, the guys behind “The Lord of the Rings”, saw our work and decided to take the plunge and get us to remix Antonio Banderas’ forthcoming movie “Take the Lead”. For me, recent high lights have got to be playing in both Tunisia and Egypt a few months after the revolutions there. In fact, the Tunisian festival was run by guys who’d revolted in the streets, very humbling and very inspiring.
SM-You’re playing next at Hexstatic’s Holotronica. What do you think about Stuart’s efforts to take VJing into 3D territory?
GRAHAM-Be good to see his show, I haven’t seen it yet – all credit to him!
SM-How do you see the future for VJing?
MARK-Well, I’d say to be more audiovisual! But I would say that…
GRAHAM-Yeah, I agree. For me it’s crucial to have a strong music to video connection to create much more of an experience that music can’t do on it’s own. It’ll be really interesting to see what all the other acts are doing this Friday at Village Underground, as I see the whole night is all AV.
SM-What’s next from Addictive TV? Have you got many projects in the pipeline?
GRAHAM-Right now we’re just finishing up on a remix of the classic 60’s film “Blow-up” for the French-German TV channel Arte for a special anniversary edition of their cinema show which will be online in December. And then there’s a great project in Italy we’re doing for a music festival which involves, without giving away too much, filming sounds in quite a different way, and audiovisually remixing them for their event next year.
MARK-But our big thing keeping us busy for the next year is the project we mentioned at the start, Orchestra of Samples. We’ve been filming this on-and-off now for nearly 2 years with musicians around the World in places like Senegal in West Africa and in Mexico City and all around Europe, we’ll most likely carry on for another year. But we’ve created a bunch of original tracks now from our ever growing AV archive and the feedback we’re getting is really positive, so can’t wait to be locked back in the studio again to crack on!
Samara Moss is a journalist and music promoter based in London.
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