TRISTAN LOUTH-ROBINS
| VORTICISMS (2002, 2015)

Vorticisms (2002, 2015)
Short film to accompany 2002 musique concrète composition.

Vorticisms was an electro-acoustic composition created at the end of 2002. The composition comprised my final assessment for the first year of my Music Studies degree at the University of Adelaide. Vorticisms was played back at the end of year recital that year and in addition to the composition there was a graphic score distributed to audience members. Regrettably, the score is now lost.

I've always been fond of this composition, which represented my first attempt at a musique concrète-style of composition utilising collage techniques with found and pre-recorded sounds. I particularly like the variety of sounds utilised and the way they are represented, manipulated and blended together using a variety of studio techniques. Overall, I find Vorticisms to be a satisfyingly unsettled piece of music, with quivering tonalities, hazy textures, occasional silences and abrupt interruptions.

The accompanying film was assembled thirteen years later. I thought it would be interesting to make a short film using one of my earliest electronic music works as a template. I felt that the structure of the Vorticisms composition suited the sort of film I was interested in creating: a hazy, slightly surreal collage of moving (yet mostly static) images; no specific visual narrative - rather a sequence of unsettled imagery unified by loose allusion and metaphor.

The film's source imagery consists of relatively mundane scenery shot on a digital camera between 2009 to 2015, visually rendered by a strange and unique process built into the camera. The imagery appears as it was shot through the viewfinder: scenery and objects digitally smeared or distorted with vertical lines and other artifacts, coloured by an intense purple hue.

The digital camera was perfectly serviceable up until a wedding party in early 2009, whereby attempting to drunkenly take a series of photos on the dance floor ended with the camera hurtling towards the ground and making a sickening clunk. Picking up the camera I switched it back on and noticed that it still worked...to an extent.

I've kept this camera since then and occasionally used it on a whim to capture a variety of scenarios, anticipating that the camera’s built in process might transform the otherwise mundane into something visually interesting.