BigShinyThing

Video artists Addictive TV were back in town on the weekend, after a marathon session of live Olympic mashups in Europe. Braving the London weather on Friday night, they played to a crowd so enthusiastic that at least one of them had to be dragged half-naked off the roof.

This was Addictive’s third annual outdoor gig at the South Bank, which has become a highlight of the BST summer calendar. This year was even more fun for us, as they invited us along to document the evening photographically. Our photos are up on Flickr.

We caught Punx Soundcheck’s mighty DJ/AV set last Friday at our favourite Shoreditch monthly, Film Noir. Launching their new album Black and Gold, they treated us to a storming 90 minutes of hard electro genius, with visuals from Machines are Gonna Kill Us, and Miss OddKidd guesting on vocals.

But don’t take our word for it — get on down to the NFT on Thursday 24th January, to catch them live at the Piccadilly Nite Versions #1 Launch Party. See you there.

[Photo © Darrell Berry 2008]

Last night we went to Cybersonica’s Late at Tate night. Some very fine things, including loops of Illustrious’s spatialised audio in the Rotunda, accompanied by visuals from Body>Data>Space (shown above), and the Modified Toy Orchestra’s set of circuit-bending retro electronica, fittingly introduced by Brian Duffy as

No laptops, no MIDI, no instruments that work.

All good stuff. We’ll be uploading more pix after Easter. And of course there are already many photos from others on Flickr and some footage (not ours), on YouTube. Enjoy.

[Thanks as always to Lisa Devaney]

This is a guest list only event so please email us if you would like to come along. Addictive will be presenting at 6.30pm.

United’s address:
The Griffin Building, 83 Clerkenwell Road [Google Map]. Telephone 020 7915 7575.

Note that Addictive are opening for the Chemical Brothers this weekend…

Playing for the Raindance Short Film Award party, Addictive (who we have raved about before) performed their Laurel and Hardy (remixed as the original Ska act — you know it makes sense) and Sex Pistols mashups as well as some of their ‘greatest hits’ — the Italian Boj and Quentin Tarantino vs. Queen. A foray into the commercial world — the remixed trailer for Antonio Banderas’s ballroom dancing film Take The Lead – was also shown.

Visuals really do speak louder than words so check out their site, Samurai.fm and some ‘looks like it was shot on a phone’ footage on youtube.

We ventured outside of our Zone 3 safety zone this week to see Addictive TV present their cinema project Eye of the Pilot at the Waterman’s Art Centre. Before the main feature they treated us to a compilation of their greatest hits as well as Optronica shorts.

See their stuff for yourself (lo res) at Samurai.fm.

Addictive are next playing in London on April 5th at The Garage with German electro punks Warren Suicide. Go. See.

More about the 150-odd events running outside this summer are available on the Watch This Space 2005 site. The Addictive TV VJ event was part of the Optronica festival (featured in What Goes On 20th to 24th July 2005).

The Addictive TV site says:

Voting them number one in their 2004 Worldwide VJ poll, DJ Magazine said of London based Addictive TV, “If there ever was a truly ground-breaking bunch of guys in the VJ world, it’s certainly this lot.”

The group of VJs, DJs and producers have been championing the art of the VJ and pushing it into mainstream media for a decade now; performing, producing TV shows such as their seminal DJ:VJ music series Mixmasters for ITV1 in the UK and releasing DVDs (Addictive TV set-up what’s acknowledged as the first VJ-oriented DVD label back in 1999), releases have included Audiovisualize, the Mixmasters compilation series and DVD cult classic Transambient.

Teaming up with the UK’s The National Theatre to launch the Watch This Space outdoor strand, Optronica presented Addictive TV performing their AV show The Eye of the Pilot live on the fly-tower of the National Theatre building. With giant projections visible across the River Thames and an original soundtrack from Addictive TV featuring live guitar from Alejandro de Valera, the aerial travelogue remixes the incredible 8mm colour archive of French airline pilot Raymond Lamy, filmed during his global travels back in the 1950s.

The following night at the Optronica club night, Addictive TV performed a special short live AV set, where The Streets meet Elvis and The Italian Job gets completely remixed.

The images shown are about the height of a double decker bus and were projected onto the side of the National Theatre facing Embankment.