Black Research _ Interview with Fausten

You did the AV show to support the album on the 21st April? How did that go? Would you mind telling us a bit about it?

Derek: Hehe well  it was a 50% success, as in, the audio was fine but the video fucked up – it was too much data for the stream to handle, it kept freezing and crashing. So 15 minutes in, we cut our losses and went audio-only. Which was a shame as quite a lot of new visual work had been prepared, and Emoresh had come over from Paris for the session.

Technically, it’s the most ambitious thing we’ve attempted so far. 1 person doing audio, one person doing audio and visuals, and one person doing visuals. 2 computers running visuals, 2 computers running audio, an infra-red camera recording studio movements, all feeding into one laptop for streaming. The stream was tested twice beforehand, but on the day we still had silly problems like the audio not routing correctly, video cables suddenly stop working, or the autofocus of the HD webcam going blurry because the room was dark.

Fortunately it was a studio broadcast, so we didn’t have additional stress like having to guard the equipment or rig/de-rig quickly.

Any plans for bringing it out and about?

Derek: Sure. The AV show’s been performed a few times already, notably at ill FM and Combat parties. The next big one will be at Burn the Machine, a 3 day festival at Subland in Berlin this November. It works quite well live, and I’m including the use of an infra-red camera in future shows. The cam feed can be mixed and effected in realtime.

I saw you were both at that Norberg Festival back in 2011 and thee was a seminar. Were both of you presenting? Is the education or sharing knowledge aspect important o you?

Derek: The seminar was just me. Julien arrived a day earlier and performed that night, while I had to leg it back from Greece then fly out again to Sweden on the same day. He was pretty drunk by the time I did the seminar! The UK crew were at the front of the seminar, heckling 🙂

I like doing the workshop/seminar thing, as it forces me to understand the gear better, and also think about problems what wouldn’t normally occur. It can be quite a challenge though, switching out of autistic “performance” mode into “teaching” mode to deal with a room full of people asking questions!

With regards teaching AV at Norberg Festival, well, AV is still a relatively new thing compared to audio. It’s suddenly grown simply because the average new computer is now powerful enough to handle the data processing load of the visual element. As such, the form hasn’t institutionalised yet and there is still no “right” way to do it. The point this is leading to is: I’m happy to demonstrate how the Combat AV stuff is done and it definitely works, but it’s just one of many approaches. And whenever I bump into mates who do it, I get reminded there’s so many other ways to do it, and new stuff to learn.

A few years ago I taught Ableton to Shackleton and Vex’d, we used to be neighbours. Teaching full-time something I’d like to get into for the long term, I can demonstrate stuff fairly well and at least it would be more interesting than the current dayjob!

Make it happen 😀