Dead Sea-based producer and sound designer Yogev Freilichman comes together with Mexican video artist ERRANTH and Jerusalem art collective Excessive Productions to present Tectonic, a live, improvisational AV performance captured at ZIRA, a multidisciplinary space in Jerusalem dedicated to new and challenging art forms.
“I wanted to explore several intersections between noisy textures and club-focused beats and try to distill them down into one single-cell organism,” says Yogev Freilichman, the Dead Sea-based producer and sound designer who, following releases with Failed Units, Zabra Records, A Flooded Need and Eternal Search, translates his club-centric take on experimental noise and improvisational synthesis in Tectonic, an extended reality performance captured at ZIRA, a multidisciplinary space in Jerusalem. Presented in collaboration with Mexican video artist ERRANTH and Excessive Productions, the Jerusalem art collective who also make AV works as Wackelkontakt, Tectonic combines virtual architecture, IRL, DIY structures, lighting design and digital effects to draw Freilichman’s sound out through multiple media in a performance that takes place in multiple sites of reality simultaneously. As though in response to the fragmentation of the form and medium of live performances during the Covid-19 pandemic, Tectonic skewers the contemporary lack of consensus surrounding where reality is happening, in which worlds, online or organic, we truly exist and whether a performance in a virtual environment is any more real, or true, than one happening in physical space.
“Skeletal forms of sounds collide with each other throughout the performance, feeding off one another, building a chaotic, glitchy soundscape,” continues Freilichman. “After the music was composed and the performance recorded live, the video went through a heavy treatment process that used the raw footage as material, transforming it into a grainy and dystopian visual hallucination.” U.I. features imposed on the frame reflect visual motifs within the virtual environment, red scanner lines extended out across a gnarled, alien object, an ossified biological form suspended across an everlasting beach, across which Freilichman’s discordant sounds echo infinitely. “The music that Yogev builds, his broken rhythms and disruptive breaks, sounds that hit with the dimorphous noise of post-technological landscapes, allowed us to modulate and emulate in image the intraposition of granulates and clouds of points that collude with his atmospheres, to converge with the textures of his sound and the forms of his rhythms,” explains ERRANTH. “The exploration of image and 3D modelling also encompasses scenarios focused on the contemplation and meditation of the body and space, taking into account not the human body, but the amorphousness that gives the dissimilarity of the de-configuration of being.”
“The format of separating oneself into territories, into entities and in forming a conjunction of sensations, allows us to go through personal questionings about the lethargy of the real, or about the dosage of emotions and post-global agencies that have to do with the immediate sensations of the connection to the Net and its’ slackness of information, to the manipulation of desire and to the recharging and reproduction of patterns. Therefore these forms are semi-deserted spaces, which if they were real would be easy to get lost within. The performance allowed us to emulate these issues by way of null interpretation, or empty signifier. Taking this into account when observing the staging of the clip, within the illumination and the disposition of the capture we started to generate a subtle accompaniment, but accentuated it to the disruptive.” As Freilichman’s performance glitches into silence, ERRANTH pulls focus on the now transfigured alien totem, illuminated with otherworldly light, floating in a vacuum, as though suddenly transcendent of conventional spectrums of sound, an empty signifier, surging with information indecipherable by human minds, a glowing icon to the dissolution of the real, both virtual and actual.
A recording of Tectonic is out now on Kaer’Uiks, presented as part of their SIM series featuring ABADIR, ZULI and Grischa Lichtenberger. Tectonic will be released as a full live AV album in 2023.
For more information about Yogev Freilichman, you can find him on Instagram and SoundCloud. You can also find ERRANTH and Excessive Productions on Instagram. For more information about ZIRA, check out the space’s website and follow them on Instagram.
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