Synesthesia inducing 22 visual imagery audio-reactive clips released by Number Eleven.
Audio reactive clips, hand-made by our artist Number Eleven are released and available to watch on youtube.
Here is the story behind this surreal and abstract imagery as the artist tells himself:
When I started the project Number Eleven, I was obsessed with audio-environment, something I could describe as having a feeling that you are in some sort of environment, an effect that would bring an entire scenery and action into your closed eyes, through your ears.
The idea came before I resurrected my music creation, it came when I started to listen to Autechre’s Incunabula and Amber, which I thought had a lot of environment effect to the listener. I used to listen to them, on my crappy Chinese made fake Nokia BH503 headphones, usually at a complete darkness, I even covered all computer lights, the lights on these headphones, so they wouldn’t blink, and wouldn’t interrupt with the visual imaginations the music would bring.
When I started creating my first track, I wanted to bring this environment effect there. So you can hear the effects I always use in my music – ridiculous amounts of reverb, delay, and sounds that are not “here”. They are somewhere, “there”. Not in the middle of your head as you listen to the music on the headphones, but somewhere more distant, maybe outside the windows, or in the neighbour’s balcony. As the sounds sometimes could be described as distant explosions, they wouldn’t really differ from my real life situations, as explosions in neighbour’s balconies are getting quite common.
Why the hell I’m muttering nonsense here about explosions in my neighbour’s balconies? The point is that it’s an unexpected event, an explosion (literally) of sound, that would scare you and make a surge of adrenaline in your bloodstream. Using this idea I wanted to give the same shock effect, but having just a random blast in music doesn’t deliver that, it would be perceived as a glitch, as it’s experimental music. But when you are progressively taken into an environment, an area where your unconscious imagination takes place, an unexpected sound would give you a flash of something, not giving you enough time to visualize it in your head.
That’s how I got the idea for my very first track, the number one track from Indefinable, Behind The Limits of Imagination, meaning that you are defining the sound you heard, before actually imagining it, understanding it, giving it a meaning, a form, a shape, a place, and a purpose what it’s doing. That was my idea, and I’m not actually sure I still use it today, but I keep the environment thing, and if you don’t listen to my music this way, I don’t care, you can listen to it while composing an explosive substance.
Then I ran into some problems. The first one was that nobody invented a post-cognition unconscious brain imagery reading machine that would record imaginary shaved chipmunks in .mp4 format. Then there was a limited amount of energy drinks a human liver can metabolize, because the process of drawing the “things” or “structures” I’d like to call, takes a ridiculous amount of time because I’m doing it manually, drawing it by hand. Nothing is generated here, I draw every single variation of the visual line by line.
The visuals are in greyscale colours, as I don’t want to overflood everything with unimportant information, keeping it simple with only the shapes. Each sample in the music has its own unique shape and some variations of it. The synths rarely have their own visuals, because I think they are a reaction to the action in the place, at least that’s how I visualize them.
Every album has its own environment details and ideas. And you can see them progress into the next one, track by track, see what’s happening in the place. Steal a projector from anywhere you can, hook it to a computer, and play these two playlists. See how the horizon twists from the first album, coming towards an indefinable circle (or a sphere) through structures, then turning around with stuff getting corrupted and lost flying around without their place, that was just sitting around just a few tracks back, and then getting stroke with bars that interrupted the sensation of road, in the rain of the structures that were lost and flying, now having a static shape, watching the horizon twist again, then snap, and see how everything leaves the place, as if it’s preparing for a storm.
Instead of imagining it, experience it. Indefinable and Blur visuals – 22 clips of imagery.
Indefinable and Blur, released on Electron Emitter, physically as 2xCD digipaks, and digitally as 32-bit wav or free 320kbps mp3