Somnaphon “Anthology Of Errors” VHS
Somnaphon creates glitched/data bending digital audio and visual synthesis. Signals run into each other creating psychedelic, colorful matrixes of broken digital cell rendering. Who knows the signal flow of this glitch artist but it seems geometry is running amok, backed by a minimal but all present digital noise/ambient soundtrack,. Visual , architectural loops with varying but repeating Colors, shapes, and planes bend, distort, tear and melt into each other through digital loops of circuit bent video pulses. Out Of Body Records usually releases all analog artists, but with the release of the Somnaphon VHS, OOBR presents these eleven tracks digitally moshed and twisted visual experiments in an analog format, compared to some of Somnaphon’s other online works, “Anthology Of errors” has a distinct hybrid digital/analog feel, often times appearing as digitally glitched out scenes of confusion presented and pressed onto analog tape, or reprocessed through analog devices. Somnophon does a good job at masking, or rounding out the digital aesthetics of “data bending music” for a more 1970’s analog feel. Cascading pillars of pixels, lines, and rogue color palettes gently , yet meticulously morph and pulse into and out of each other to create visual poems of distorted geometry. Mirrored madness through the multiplication of destroyed and wrong pixels creates a visual journey or errors inside the first ever broken computer- error in, error out, blood in, blood out, bad human in, bad human out. Despite subscribing to the “data bending” strategy of visual construction, which can often display a somewhat limited visual palette, Somnaphon employs a wide array of image creating techniques, which morphs, pulses, generates and multiplies over the entire eleven tracks, creating an obtuse visual representation of what is possible with “data bending” .
The sounds compliment the images quite perfectly, at times, to a point, where it seems they are often coming from the same source. Glitchy, choppy, digital distorted pillars of failing and flailing spikes and pulses and apparent silence create a synesthesia effect within the work itself. Lots of digital reverb coat the structures of computer hard drives crashing into a sea of blackness. Sharp electronic blasts, spurt out chopped up transmissions of broken morse code ; sending a message out into space to the unknown. Sometimes more beat/loop oriented, and other times more sporadic and random, Somnaphon keeps the sonic and visual palette fresh and ever changing on “Anthology of Errors”
At times more painterly images are formed and other times, more rigid minimal, geometric structures and rendered and bled into new forms of their previous incantations. Somnaphon is seeking to destroy and redistribute the pixel, to create “anti digital-digital art and music” and this VHS is the perfect introduction to just that! Beautiful packaging , as always from this label, complete with the STOP PLEASE REWIND sticker!!
D E C A Y C A S T Magazine 