Mai is a pseudonym for the composer/musician/producer Steve McCourt. Originally from Dublin, he lives in Shanghai where he is making music combining electronic with traditional Chinese instruments. He has completed a pair of albums titled Arcadia, released on Stolen Mirror in 2018 and 2019. These fuse acoustic and electronic elements into lovely compositions that foreground subtle harmonic changes. Artist website.
This video was created from footage manipulated in the Fusion component of DaVinci Resolve.
This video is my response to the pandemic lockdown: creating powerful noises from those discarded bits of media no-one typically cares about.
Music
The music was created using a custom ensemble in Native Instruments' Reaktor. I have used this application since around 2002, alongside Max/MSP, cSound, and many other sound generating programs and synthesisers. Reaktor includes a rich library of instruments that are easy to decompose, recombine, and hack.
Usually my approach is improvisational, recording sessions of experimentation before extracting the "best bits". But this time I sequenced several instruments, creating an organised rhythmic interplay that was always locked to the beat. Nonetheless, the individual presets ("snapshots") for each instrument were created by intensive experimentation.
The sound is dominated by chaotic oscillators that are my own variants on SOFA by cocolowrez, which in turn was based on work by Justin Tyme and Noisewreck. Authorship becomes an archaic concept in a sharing development community!
The bassline is played on Oki Computer 2. Palelite (my own version of Limelite) provides drums. I used three effects by the amazing Boscomac: Devil Inside, Bit Torsion, and Echophonic. The quality of his work is unsurpassed.
The sequencer was SongSnapper, a rudimentary way of changing presets (derived from KRYPT by Lazyfish).
Video
The video material was sourced from two places. First, I trawled my hard drive for discarded video of live music events. Second, I found footage from old educational films on archive.org.
Experimental film production has a long history of melting, burning, scratching, and chemically altering optical film. I wished to find an equivalent process for digital video: one that began with destruction in order to create more beauty.
I grabbed a copy of HxD, a hex editor for Windows. This allows me to see the actual bytes that make up a file, and to change these at will. When performing file surgery, it's important to leave the header intact, or chances are the results will be unreadable. I determined by eye where the hex codes appeared to settle into patterns of video frames, and started each replace operation from that location. (There might be a more precise way to do this.)
Most of the edits were simple transpositions. In one video of length 82 seconds, I changed all occurrences of "02 8A" to "8A 02" and "E4 FA" to "FA E4". This resulted in no fewer than 34,000 alterations! But the file was still readable... indeed much improved. Colour was introduced to the monochrome original. There was a pleasing banding effect that flashed into place and changed regularly.
Different file formats will produce different results. MOV and AVI containers worked well.
Once I had a body of work, these assets were brought into DaVinci Resolve for compositing, against the existing music. Techniques of montage were applied to create the finished video.
Advance video for the track "Emergence" from Mai's forthcoming album Polis, out 26 March on Wormhole World.
Mai is a pseudonym for composer/musician/producer Steve
McCourt. Originally from Dublin, he now lives in Shanghai. His music fuses acoustic and electronic
elements into lovely compositions that foreground subtle harmonic
changes. He released a pair of albums titled Arcadia
on Stolen Mirror in 2018 and 2019, followed by Gaia on Wormhole World in 2020.
Robin Parmar created this video to honour the early computer graphics experiments of Larry Cuba. Cells of overlapping patterns generate new and unpredictable forms for the eye. A processing sketch is played live to the music, facilitating an organic flow that arises from the underlying grid.
A woman is wrapped in a blanket by four strangers. Couples with broken arms partner on a dance floor. An unconscious young man is disengaged from a steering wheel. "Methods of Hypnosis" uses public domain footage to reveal choreographies hidden in the quotidian.
Premiéred at Light Moves: Festival of Screendance 2015, Daghdha Dance, Limerick, Ireland.
"Division by Zero" approaches pop music as a Moebius strip, twisting the timbres inside out, reconstituting inner sounds as outer structure, drawing out microsonic fragments into extended compositions. Each piece is created as a live improvisation between composer and a software instrument. The visuals are an analogue of this process, abstracting found video into patterns of colour, traceries of their origin. We are pattern recognition engines.
Premiéred at the Drone Cinema Film Festival 2016, Grand Illusion Cinema, Seattle, Washington.
This music was released by Silent Records (USA) under the name 7PRS.
