Misha's Blog

A celebration of EMPAC’s opening with video drums.

EMPAC’s Opening Gala after-party in October 2008 was headlined by the legendary musician and producer Madlib. The ever-innovative VJ collective Vidvox was asked to take advantage of the one-of-a-kind cylindrical screen hanging over the stage and asked me to join them. I played the electronic drum instrument we created for the event that controlled custom video synthesizers.  We began rehearsing and realized we could be a Live Video (VJ) band which led to performances under the name LMNOPF Presents.

For the Kid Koala show at Revolution Hall in Troy New York we rigged up a butcher paper screen over the dance floor. We projected mashed up websites, text, and live digital painting with video synthesizers powered by our VJ electronic drum set. The drum set was actually just a drum controller from the video game Rock Band that we piped into the VDMX software.

LMNOPF Presents: Prefuse73 EMPAC

We were excited to VJ for Dan Deacon but at the last moment Dan got hurt and couldn’t come.  In the end Prefuse73 came instead, and I was already a fan after having seen Prefuse in Brooklyn a few years back.  I was excited to bust some video drum groovers for this noble purpose.  The show was great all around and we shared the bill with Skeleton$ and Luciano Chessa.  Skeleton$ showed us their crazy vintage electric guitars which had super ancient shitty pickups paradoxically getting louder (though noisier) as they degraded giving the band all sorts of microtonal range.  Luciano Chessa did a fantastic rendition of Marinetti’s Futurist sound poem Zang Tumb Tumb.  I’ve known about this poem for years but have never heard it read by an Italian live, especially one with such theatrical fervor.  Below are some stills from our video show that night.

Throughout this time we were backing DJs such as Back From Japan and even playing holiday parties.  Another highlight was VJing a music performance battle by Disposable Rocket Band and My Robot Friend which I curated and for which we created a video performance called Citizen Burger.  We mined video from the Nintendo game Burger Time as well as video of David Lublin walking around and eating many different hamburgers from several restaurants while wearing a specially designed POV camera harness. Below is the flyer I created for the event.