octex

Being a designer by day and musician by night, I have always been interested in relations between music and pictures (still or moving) and always thought that visuals add another dimension to the music. That's why my live performances have often been accompanied by VJs, that provided the visuals.

Over the years I had a chance to collaborate with some amazing visual artists like Matthew Biederman, Neja & Aka, Nenad Popov, Stanka Brjevec...
While all of them presented a good, sometimes amazing visualization of my music it always remained their visualization and not my own as I imagined it in my head. That is why I always did all the "non live" video work by myslef.
But a bigger problem I always faced was synchronization. Not so much rhythmical synchronization but synchronized progression of both music and visuals as the person doing the visuals doesn't know what I'm about to do, what direction will I take...
One way to solve this would be to have a pre planed progression or even exact song order, but I want the development in my live performance to remain improvised, spur of the moment thing. I shouldn't compromise the music.

This made me think of the ways to control the visuals and music at the same time by myslef. And looking at the way most VJs work I realized its really similar to the way I play music. I trigger audio loops and control them, they trigger video loops and control them... There should be a way to do this both at the same time.
And I found a way by building a MAX/MSP Jitter patch, that takes the same controls that I use to control music in Ableton Live but applies them to video. This enables me to control video without even thinking about it which means I can still devote my entire attention to playing music, which I think should still remain the main focus.
Early very limited versions of my visual system were already tested live last year at CynetArt festival in Dresden and Chilli Fest in Ljubljana, but first public beta test came last month in Club K4 in Ljubljana. And now the system is finally ready for prime time.

Octex is now available for booking as an audio/video performance.