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Addictive TV – the next Level of the VJ
Described so eloquently as ‘next level shit’ by Grandmaster Flash, when they supported the great man in San Francisco, Addictive TV are certainly that. Using DVD turntables and laptops, their live sets are a state of the art audiovisual phenomenon, driven by their fast paced audiovisual remixes and video mash-ups.
Trail-blazers in the art of audio/video remixing, Addictive TV meticulously sample everything from movies to concert footage, music videos to sports events, and their intensely detailed style has been praised by creative innovators like Jeff Mills, Goldie, Stereo MC’s and the former Kraftwerk frontman Karl Bartos.
The dynamic duo have blown away audiences in over 40 countries now – from China to Brazil, Japan to India, all across Europe and event Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Even Moby described them as ‘a tough act to follow’ when they supported him at the opening event of SXSW 2008 in Austin, Texas. Reviewing that show, US music magazine Paste said “Addictive TV completely blew my mind! …a compelling pop culture audio/visual avalanche!”
Crisscrossing the art and club worlds, the duo have performed at venues as varied as the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the London IMAX cinema and the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Arts, as well as headlining at some of the coolest clubs on the international circuit, including Womb in Tokyo, Rex Club in Paris, Paradiso in Amsterdam and Razzmatazz in Barcelona.
In 2006 they became the first artists to officially remix a Hollywood studio movie when they created the award-winning web viral for New Line Cinema’s “Take the Lead” starring Antonio Banderas. They’ve since remixed Iron Man for Paramount, Max Payne for 20th Century Fox and most recently the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire.
Addictive TV also created the ‘Sportive’ video installation for the Adidas ‘Gongzhen: Sport in Art’ exhibition which toured seven cities across China in the run-up to the Beijing Games. Business Week said of the piece said ‘It’s a really mesmerizing film and a wonderful use of digital technology to create something that’s beautiful and compelling on many levels.’ In 2008 they broke new ground remixing the Olympics live for television for a major EU funded and IOC sanctioned project looking at new forms of television.
How would you describe yourself – audiovisual artists or musicians? I mean, do you come from more of a film or a music background?
GRAHAM: Both really, which is probably why we do what we do. Tolly is a trained pianist and worked as a composer before DJing and my background was in producing TV and working on films and adverts as an assistant director. I was also VJing back in the day, so brought a lot of what I knew into being a VJing in my spare time. So what we do now is a total fusion of our backgrounds, I mean we’re a music act but we work with film if that makes sense.
TOLLY: Some people call what we do DVJing because we use the Pioneer DVJ DVD turntables in our live shows to mix and scratch just as DJs do with vinyl or CDs, but we tend to prefer audiovisual or AV artists to describe ourselves. To us, music is absolutely as important as the pictures, they are totally one and the same thing.
And for readers who haven’t seen you guys perform yet, explain what you do…
GRAHAM: What we do is a fully audiovisual set of totally synced music and images; it’s a mixture of remixed films and music mash-ups, where everything you see, you also hear, and vice versa. Our music is mostly kind of rock-influenced breakbeat, plus some drum ‘n’ bass, and we remix all manner of cult films and music icons; from the original Italian Job – where the music is actually made from the sounds of the car engines – to Eminem remixed with Edith Piaf.
TOLLY: Actually, a good example you recently posted on your site, is we’ve just created a new drum ‘n’ bass track by actually sampling a classical Orchestra. The idea came from the BBC series Maestro, that Goldie should have one! I mean the BBC took Goldie out of his comfort zone of drum ‘n’ bass, by making him conduct a classical music orchestra – so we thought we’d put him back in the world of drum n’ bass but with violins and cellos. So we remixed the orchestra, sampling everything from violins to kettle drums, and created a mad drum ’n’ bass track made from those samples, with Goldie conducting.
GRAHAM: And unbelievably, we found a perfect drum ‘n’ bass drum loop played on a kettle drum from the 1812 Overture! It’s amazing to see something like just fit, I mean finding a bit of drumming written a couple of centuries ago that works as a loop for drum ‘n’ bass kind of shows that music at it’s very roots always follows the same rules.
You guys are also known for Hollywood knocking on your door asking you to remix movies for the web, like you recently remixed Slumdog Millionaire – how did all this start?
Graham: Well after a very clever guy at New Line Cinema – the studio behind the Lord of the Rings – saw our remix of The Italian Job, he decided to approach us with the idea to create a web viral for their Antonio Banderas film Take the Lead. That was the first time ever that a Hollywood studio had given over a whole movie to get the remix treatment, we in fact got all the film’s raw footage to play with. We remixed a number films for New Line including Samuel L Jackson’s Snakes on a Plane – that was brilliant. Then other studios like 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures joined in with their films like Max Payne and Iron Man. And more recently, as you say, we made a remix of Danny Boyle’s Oscar winning Slumdog Millionaire – well obviously we remixed before it won it’s well deserved Oscars!
Tolly: Yeah – we’ve just been asked to remix the new Fast & Furious action movie with Vin Deisel, so start on that soon. But not all of them come off though sadly, we were asked to remix Gus Van Sant’s Milk starring Sean Penn, the film he won the Best Actor Oscar for, but sadly it didn’t work out.
…and did you like “Slumdog Millionaire”?
Graham: Absolutely. I’ve liked the work of Danny Boyle ever since Shallow Grave and having got the gig to remix Slumdog Millionaire was a great way to start the year. The producers had seen a big article about us in The Sunday Times and checked out our work, our work was also shown to Danny Boyle who liked the idea and they called us in and basically said ‘how about it?’ British films have a whole different vibe to Hollywood movies and Slumdog in particular is really fresh and brilliantly captures the vibrant humanity of India and the slums in particular.
Tolly: Yeah, but as a remix it wasn’t easy to do though, and it took several attempts and a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get something that really worked and now hopefully our remix is doing its bit in persuading people to go and see it too…
What about the music or the beats in your live-sets – you say produce them?
Tolly: Yes, all the music we play is our own, we don’t use other people’s tracks in that sense that a DJ does – when we remix films we entirely create all the beats and drum loops ourselves built around the samples from the film, it’s all our own music. And when we remix other music, say a well known rock track, again here we’ll end up adding our own beats to the mix written around the basic track structure.
Graham: Yeah, DJing with or taking existing tracks and simply laying film samples over the top of them has never really been what we’re about, we’re much more interested in creating new work.
Got to ask, whether music remixes like your Goldie Drum ‘n’ Bass Maestro, or films like Slumdog Millionaire, how you find the samples that you use? Could you describe how you work on a remix and how long it takes?
Tolly: It takes ages. Could be anything from a week to three weeks to make a piece, from the start of sampling to audio mastering and grading the final video. We start by sampling the material, finding things that both look good and sound good, where you see the action causing the sound, be it someone talking, or playing an instrument, or doing something percussive. Then we start to compose with those samples and gradually start building up a basic track which evolves just like any other kind of music producing. It’s not rocket science, but it’s taken a long time to work out the best way to do things.
Graham: It’s like most things that are eventually worthwhile, it’s painful and fun at the same time. I think you’ve got to be a bit of a masochist to be an AV artist.
Checkout addictive.com for more info.
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