One weekend, two wildly divergent events

Greetings once more my fair fellow travelers.

It’s been one hell of a week, but it’s been worth it! A lot of hard work leading up to an interesting weekend of magically diverse contrasts.

Friday and Saturday saw the Anti-Gravity Chamber booked for two very different events. Friday evening saw our first live VJ performance at a private dinner held to launch a new (debut) novel published by Sceptre at the strange Aladdin’s Cave that is Dalston Boy’s Club in North/East London, an old Victorian hall, originally built for instilling pugilistic discipline into the waifs and wastrels of East and North London, today it is appropriated for disciplines of an aesthetic variety. The evening comprised an elaborate multi-course dinner, derived from themes from the novel, catered for by Number 68 Project and the acclaimed Anglo-Germanic cuisinatrix, Caroline Hobkinson. The VJ performance incorporated a sequence of images specially edited as an additional lighting element to enhance the dining experience and the looped sequence was projected on the table cloth using the house video projector mounted at a very high angle on stands erected on one of the balcony arcades flanking the central hall.

Having not worked with projecting digital video before, this was an interesting and challenging new experience. Although the evening was a great success and none of the punters went away dissatisfied, I myself was not completely satisfied with the results. For example, at the range I was forced to project from I couldn’t get a very sharp optimum focus using the projector provided (although in my admittedly limited experience with projecting standard def video the image tends to lose its integrity to pixel separation and doesn’t stand up as well as celluloid when blown up to large sizes) and also, lacking the necessary scaffolding I was unable to project vertically and at closer proximity, meaning the edges of the frame fell away from the table, obscuring meaningful parts of the image at times. Ideally I would have like to fit the image on the tablecloth sharply cropped to its ratio. Furthermore, I would have loved to have several projectors rigged up so that the edges of the frame appeared adjacent to one another, entirely covering the table in moving images! Working with only one projector is easier to handle but not as much fun as the multiple projector nirvana the Chamber is gunning for…

However, the limited resources necessitated a great deal of creativity in finding solutions. Spontaneity, know-how and improvisation is what we thrive on – as Burroughs’ Doctor Benway was fond of asking, ‘Did I ever tell you about the time I performed an appendectomy with a rusty sardine can?’

Not only was the available equipment limited but the event was a short notice booking.The video was cut and graded in a manic few days and in a memorable recce at the venue 2 days before the event we turned up to set up and test the equipment in the middle of a life-drawing class! As I entered the premises for the first time, there on the table upon which I was to project my images sat an immobile, postured, entirely naked lady, illuminated by studio lights. The entire recce was spent dodging the dour, impassive sketchers, who were obviously unimpressed by our disturbing their creative serenity to flash lights in the eyes of their muse.

But these (self) criticisms are impetus enough to try again and improve upon what was essentially an experiment and learning experience. Besides, the diners seemed to be fascinated by eating off a continually shifting and changing illuminated tablecloth and no doubt the impeccable service, exquisite slowly-digested meal and flowing wine in such salubrious and visually striking surroundings made for a sumptuous evening. Furthermore, there is a distinct feeling that this event was the first of many VJ assignments to come…

A sample image of the diners meeting and greeting before the dinner features below. Further images will appear in future, courtesy of the event’s official photographer, documentary filmmaker Sam Hobkinson.

Admiring the scenery at Dalston Boys’ Club

From the gentle, rarefied atmosphere of sumptuous classy dining we plunged headlong into the ear-splitting, beer-soaked sweaty bowels of uninhibited hard rock. Saturday afternoon took us driving in a taxi loaded with all the Chamber’s equipment up North London’s Holloway Road, just south of Nag’s Head, to the Gaff, the area’s best known rock, metal and punk venue. We were there to provide the visuals for a stoner/sludge/doom rock and metal weekender called Loud Howls.

grrrr...

We arrived at the Gaff around 3pm in the midst of the first band’s set (Nottingham’s Bodukwe, who play self-styled ‘instrumental voodoo’) and promptly dived in to mount our white sheets on the back of the stage as soon as their set was over (black walls eat light like ogres eat flesh). Erecting our newly acquired stands (indispensible PowerDrive stands, the sturdiest on the market) for optimum positioning in the available cramped corners proved tricky with so many bands all stashing their equipment in the same places (10 bands in one day!) and with highly talented poster artist Michael Cowell, stoner rock fanzine Bad Acid and straight ahead American rock band Sun Gods in Exile‘s merchandise stand all jockeying for punters in one cramped space, getting the projectors ready to go as event organiser Jack Dickinson’s band Stubb took the stage proved hard work, but soon enough the band were bathed in the warm glow of psychedelic abstraction, having initially launched into their set before a naked white backdrop. The fun continued from that moment until late in the evening, closing with the spaced-out psychedelic (and hyper Hendrix-derived) blues of Outskirts of Infinity.

Outskirts of Infinity

Of the many bands who played throughout the day, too numerous to mention all, our favourite was Alunah, who combined 60s West Coast psychedelic influences, such as Jefferson Airplane, with grungey metal. I particularly felt that Alunah (and Outskirts of Infinity during their interstellar excursions that were redolent of early UFO in their pre-metal space rock incarnation and a slicker early Pink Floyd) were most suited to our lighting set up.

Alunah

Although plans to mix in some special 35mm Ektachrome slides were abandoned due to limited wall space and limited powerpoints, the imagery in Alunah’s lyrics (a song about the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and another song that seemed to refer to Dionysus) nicely echoed one of our ‘picture liquid’ wheels: a very rare 1970s artefact acquired over the christmas holidays during our break for winter regrouping. The picture wheel depicts a pagan Bacchanalian scene in which lascivious satyrs and centaurs cavort with naked women before Greek style temples, all in a clear negative etching which allows the light from the projector to pass through the coloured oils that commingle inside the forms of the figures. Another of these picture-liquids was projected on the far wall showing the court figures from a deck of playing cards. On the main stage, to the left of the Bacchanalian scene (which filled the right flank of the stage) were exploding oils and a spinning geometric vortex at the centre.

shadows of metal battling the lava vortex

Although it was hard work getting all the equipment there and setting up after a hard night’s work, it was all worth the effort and the enhancement of the stage lighting was well received. Many reached for their cameras when the lights went on and the organiser was very pleased with the results, offering us future bookings. None of it could have been achieved without the contribution of my beautiful assistant, my lovely wife Mariko (another culinary genius) to whom I dedicate this blog entry. She was there every step of the way and always thinking ahead of me.  She fought off illness to help me set everything up and to carry very heavy equipment into the venue with me – what a woman! Three cheers for Mariko!

Although metal’s not the ideal sound for the Anti-Gravity Chamber aesthetic, I’m quite partial to a bit of it occasionally, myself (the unpretentious disregard for image-consciousness and open, friendly atmosphere also being a most welcome attribute). And besides, the event was a fun way to try out some of our most recent acquisitions.

So now we’re back into recouperation and reflection mode. The kit has been neatly ordered and packed away, ready for our next outing on Friday 7th May at Sweet But Deadly’s Acid Gallery upstairs at The Garage in Highbury, North London. We’re looking forward to a return to our regular visuals slot in a new venue (which we have yet to recce, that’s coming up in the next week), which will require yet more additions to the arsenal and more challenges in adapting to the dimensions of yet another London venue – but it’s unlikely to be as madly contrariwise an experience as this past weekend…