Merkaba visuals performed to a live set by The Great Mundane on November 21, 2009 at Living Sundays in Chicago.

A fine night it was, we came ready to record hours of original material. These are strong 4 minute segments, suitable for online viewing. Performance visuals are a challenging form to document, as they are embedded in the vibe and momentum of the night, the chemistry between the artists and the crowd, the scale of the live projection and the mass of a big sound system. The fluidity and indefinite duration of a performance is also impossible to convey in web videos, compressed in scale and klipped out of time. But, like photographic documentation of sculpture or dance, you can hopefully get a sense of what we were up to.

I was playing SD downsamples of my 1600x800 8:3 klips, and SinR8 was digitizing the mix via a DAC into his hackintosh.

VDMX beta 7.4.5 gave off a little weirdness, when an interface window refused to update itself, but playout was unaffected. Very few gremlins for such a deep, expandable performance software, but they do like to appear at the venue for some reason.

These A/V segments are all straight, no realtime effects or audio reactive inputs, just like I used to do it in GRID.

After only 3 years, I've finally ripped, re-encoded and uploaded some choice sets from 2006 to my merkabaVJ YouTube page.

It was after 2 years of the Abstract Science residency at Sonotheque, and we all were really steady in the groove. Chris Widman and Dave Siska were bringing great artists every month: I really enjoyed the set with Atomly especially. The thing with Future Music is, it can be 3 years later, and the stuff still sounds fresh, even if it is more familiar now to more people.

Here's a nicely synched visual mix to a DJ set by Chris Widman

This visual mix to the music by Dave Siska was all done with Grid from Vidvox, 2 DVD players, mediated by a V4 from Edirol. No realtime effects at this time, all basically edits, cuts, with a fair bit of luma-key overlays.

We have now reached cruising altitude with this visual mix to the music of Atomly

Hearing this stuff massive on Sonotheque's Funktion 1 system is incredible: the bass can vibrate the clothes on your body, the high end is incredibly crisp and present, yet you can converse without yelling.

The visual material is more accessible than the older drum-n-bass stuff I have up on my YouTube page - but Merkaba visuals is all about covering an extremely wide range of styles - there are some more wild d-n-b sets from that time that are on the way . . . in a month or three.

On the merkabaVJ YouTube page for review are a few VJ faux pas in there, but live sets are rarely flawless, and the little gremlins served as reminders not to do some of that stuff anymore.
[ahem - V4 quad-symmetry]

...and on these blogs, dubious statistics are cited, sometimes even in the title.

Like, for example, every ten minutes, the world community of live visualists, VJ's, create 159 new klips for use in their sets.

22% percent of these klips are found to kinda suck, and so are never played out, but between 5 and 9% have something about them that makes them versatile and strong, and they always get dropped.

So, thanks for checking out my very first musings on the state of performance visuals.

Let me tell you, it will get better from here, it has to. Because all the statistics above, I completely made up.

But I've been making and playing live visuals for a while now, and future posts from me will bear the stamp of some Deep Thought, allright?

Thanks in advance, as they say.