AVVA:ragtag by AVVA
image: billy roisz, sound: toshimaru nakamura
[2006, BETA SP, DVD, stereo, 5min.]



"Ragtag" - in the sense of impenetrable, a colorful mixture - is the title of a joint work by Billy Roisz (visuals) and Toshimaru Nakamura (sound) which was created under the project name AVVA after a 2004 tour in England. Impenetrable and a mixture also describes the work principle behind "ragtag" well: At first there´s the sound of Nakamura´s mixing board by itself, without external input. Its musical inner workings turn gloomy and skeleton-like, stripped bare by recursive feedback loops. This is input into Roisz´s video mixer and becomes a part of its generation of images, which is no less recursive and self-reflexive than the sound design. The result is colorful, shimmering and impenetrable?between reduced sound and an extensively emptied picture, between a skeletal rhythm and a matrix of video lines, a combination composed in such a way as to be less audiovisual than "technovisionary." The visionary mixture remains within rigid geometric framing: A minimalist rhythm begins, revealing a pattern of lines and stripes, at first solely its top third is in motion. It flickers and hums - in microtones or at high frequency - until a continuous basic pattern covers the entire picture. While the volume of Nakamura´s thumping feedback is gradually lowered, the clicking pulses have infected the entire structure of the image. A tachycardian aesthetic, both roughly trembling and finely chased, has come into being, and it is reflected in distant worlds of sine waves. The feedback concentrate is not removed in its entirety, as a monochrome structure of stripes is superimposed over the picture at the end. Possibly not as colorful, but still impenetrable.
(Christian Höller)
Translation: Steve Wilder