Live Visuals for Oddarrang

OiOi provided visuals for the record release concert of the new Oddarrang album Cathedral. The visuals were designed by respecting the overall look and feel of the album and scripted to match the songs individually and as a whole. The promotion video is for song called Prayer. It is recorded from the VJ set and it is the opening track of the new album.

So, how did we end up doing this?

It was after the 17th Funky Elephant Festival when we got an email from CARTES (Centre of Art and Technology Espoo) in which they asked us to participate and provide visuals for some of the Café Louhi concerts held in autumn 2011. After seeing the list of planned concert dates and artists we decided that Oddarrang was the band we would definitely want to do visuals for.

Not a typical VJ set

As we don’t like to do things the ordinary way, we decided to make this a new project for us: not a typical VJ set but a scripted visual layer to support the beautiful music of Oddarrang.

We contacted Olavi – the heart and head of Oddarrang – and asked if he would be interested to collaborate with us. He turned out to be a very nice guy and also willing to help us. He told us that he had actually thought about having this kind of scripted visuals for the music, but didn’t know where to find people for it. What a good coincidence!

Olavi sent us the new album and we took it to an intensive listening. After a while, we sat down together with him and told him about our visions and plans. He showed us images from the new album cover and we got a good hunch about how the visuals would support the overall look of the album.

Strong cinematographic soundscape

We decided to film timelapse videos of nature and sky and use them as base material for the visuals. We also filmed floating ink in water to make different organic moving shapes. Mirroring these videos in black and white gives a very powerful combination of organic chaos and symmetry.

In addition to the video material, we wanted to make something completely dynamic and computer generated. We designed a visual scene for all songs combined of video and computer generated graphics. These elements were controlled, in addition to our Midi controller, with audio tracks from each of the five instruments from the band.

Here are some excerpts from the album release gig: