Last night Jamie XX (of The xx fame) teamed up with Quayola—as part of RizLab‘s series of collaborative projects—to road test the latter’s Partitura sound visualisation software, which he built in collaboration with Abstract Birds. What ensued was a perfect melding of sound and vision. Jamie XX’s laid back pulsating beats gave life to Quayola’s highly rendered graphics, which flowed and formed on 17 meter HD screens, immersing the captivated crowds in their glowing fluctuations. The intricate forms that played out across the canvasses danced and splintered, breaking and reforming in flickering structures, turning music into a visual entity.Someone remarked that it was the best screensaver they’d ever seen, but it was much more than that—a real-time music visualisation tool with 500 different visual parameters that uses algorithms to generate a beautiful palette of colors inspired by artists like Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Impressively, the unfolding graphics are not pre-sequenced, so it becomes an exploratory piece and is addictive to watch. It’s so smooth you forget that it’s actually responsive, as it takes on a life of its own, coming alive in bursts of color and assorted shapes.It was a performance where the visuals were just as exciting as the music, making for a sublime union—and pointing a way forward for audiovisual collaborations. Take a look at the photos and video, listen to the Jamie XX mix below, and act like you were there.
Photos: Alexis Hamilton
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