Reis Demuth Wiltgen with Emile V. Schlesser
“I can see colors dancing in my head. I tried to capture that and bring it to the screen,” explained the multimedia artist Emile V Schlesser (b.1986) at a special presentation of synaesthesia, his immersive multimedia collaboration with Luxembourg post-rock jazz piano trio Reis Demuth Wiltgen. Synaesthesia is an hour-long suite of original music by the trio, performed with live visuals by Schlesser featuring cues from bass, piano and drums, “so you can paint with your instrument like a painter!”
Synaesthesia is a condition or set of conditions most commonly thought of as a cognitive trigger in its “projective” form: simply put, when you hear a specific sound, you see a color. In music, Alexander Scriabin and Oliver Messiaen used synaesthetic associations to create their compositions, and many musicians have reported varying degrees of music → color synaesthesia from Aphex Twin and Thom Yorke to Billy Joel and Pharell Williams, not to mention the ongoing case the Mixed Head of disgraced rapper Kanye West.
Developed over three years and performed over three performances over three days at the Op der Schmelz center in Dudelange on the Luxembourg-French border, the immersive experience of synaesthesia took place in “360 degrees” – so to speak. The group of Marc Demuth Bass, Michel Reis piano and Paul Wiltgen Percussion, performs behind a screen onto which the main focus of the graphic is projected, stretching around the side walls of the auditorium, with a mirrored wall behind. You’re in the group, but of course the band in front of you catches our attention. We are encouraged to move, but nobody does. It definitely feels more like a concert than an installation.
Musical artists performing through visual means are nothing new today, whether it’s Jean Michel Jarre’s spectacular public performances in Paris or a DVD of Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain projected over a metal band at the Purple Turtle in London – but there is an art form of merging the visual and sound elements, and this is necessarily made possible by technology. Triggering visual events from a sound in real time with no latency is essential and requires quite a bit of processing power. I heard a figure of 80,000 euros was given for the development of the synaesthesia show. It is technically and logistically enormously impressive.
The music is translated into synchronous and personable colours, shapes and movements in a range of colorful graphics ranging from geometric to organic, all degenerated live on location. Lines and star fields, explosions, gradients, grids and cellular striving, respiration, saturation, exhalation, vagitus. Explosions, sparks, smoking, flames, slamming, twisting and crossing, unfolding, cellular imagery, white lines on the deepest blue that squirt and ooze with a cosmic wonder about the potential to plunge into vast otherness. There comes a point when the phosphorescent microorganisms of the deep sea and the interstellar, giant lightship of the deep cosmos become indistinguishable – brittle stars are echinoderms that crawl across the seafloor.
Synaesthesia is not site specific. I thought it would be awesome if it could be taken to other immersive venues of all kinds. A few years ago, Simple Things put together a series of planetarium sessions at the Bristol Planetarium, and there’s the IMAX treatment too – many cinemas are now set up for immersive multimedia. With the closure of rehearsal rooms and the dominance of multidisciplinary interested urban music and laptop artists, music of all genres is becoming more synaesthetic, so to speak.
The music is strong but to be honest the experience feels more like a sequence than a suite. The individual pieces can be performed in any order. For lack of a better term, there isn’t much sense for a “narrative” to involve the emotions more and bring development and a sense of despair and resolution. Among well-known piano trios. The music can be roughly compared to Phronesis (but less technical) or EST (but less iconic). They made me think the most of the British trio GoGo Penguin, who share that taste and euphoria of dance music and those left hand block chords and melodic right hand and borrow those CD skipping inspired stops in the beat.
Synaesthesia should bring respect and new followers to Reis Demuth Wiltgen. Joshua Redman is already a fan and performs her compositions. The group have a new record planned with him and Vince Mendoza after recently performing with them and an orchestra. Small-town groups can be difficult to break out of, even places like Luxembourg that put their money where their mouth is when it comes to soft-power culture punch. It would be great if they could visit some planetariums…
by AJ Dehany