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DRIFT: audio visual synergies

Category: Features, Worldwide, Events & Exhibitions, Music, Film / Animation27 Apr 2007

 

For their DRIFT DVD, Lee Ranaldo and Leah Singer used split screen techniques to put two very different images next to each other and let the audience have their own experience out of this combination.


On April 15th, poet and Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo and visual artist and filmmaker Leah Singer came finally to Tokyo’s Super Deluxe for their experimental DRIFT DVD. Although the work has been shown all over the world since 1991, we hadn’t had a chance yet to see it in Japan! At the venue, film displayed images on a split screen to be overlapped by sound and poetry… Really, everyone in the crowded and overheated place was completely intoxicated with its fantastic world. PingMag luckily had a chance to talk to the couple about DRIFT.
Written by Ryoko
Photos by Sebastian Mayer
Translated by Junko

 

Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo and filmmaker Leah Singer at Tokyo’s Super Deluxe.
First, when did you two start working together?
Leah: Around the time we first met, there were a lot of small clubs in New York and many people were trying improvisation. I was one of them, projecting my images along with the improvised performance. Sometime in 1989, I happened to be the curator for the Handmade Musical Instrument Festival at the Knitting Factory in New York. There, I found Lee playing with images, and we became friends. Afterwards we decided to work together, and it has been going on since then.
What made you think of creating DRIFT?
Leah: For our live performances Lee improvises along with my created images, and I can say that DRIFT is a compilation of our 15-year long history. When we held our exhibition in NY in November last year and launched this DVD.

 

Lee explains: “Different things come to the surface and drift away, then others come up… I think it is a sort of meditation. Each person has both a different vision and a background that gives him/her different feelings or ideas when coming across something…”
Would you tell us a little more about your special improvised performances?
Lee: We only have a rough idea when we play. At each performance, we change the order of films, the content of the text, and the sound we make. In that way, we can always have fun with our discoveries. First we arrange the main element, such as images and sound, and then play around with them. We really enjoy seeing what comes out by accident.

 

Split screen to let the viewer make up his own connection about the images.
Lee: Experimental music is part of the New Yorker music history, and we originally wanted to see what happens if we mix the experimental with other elements. For example, music overlapping on my poem… I mean, we wanted to create different kinds of layers, like layers of sound, layer of words, and music layers, of course…. for the audience to appreciate the same material in different ways. One might watch an image while another looks at the player, and the others might listen to the music…