ivo-multimedia.com

ivo-multimedia.com

2010 – 2011

Posted on: July 27th, 2011 by robin No Comments

(ATP) @ Alexandra Palace London review

So ATP moved from Butlins to London for the weekend…I was unsure when they announced it that if indeed this was a good idea? I felt that ATP without the chalets, holiday camp and seaside wouldn’t really feel like the ‘atp experience’ that I’ve been so fond of over the years. Replicating the atmosphere of holiday camp in a swanky Palace could have potentially been a disaster but I think the ATP organisers just about pulled it off. There were defiantly some teething problems; such a daft one way crowd control system that meant you could only move from one room to another in clockwise path and the food courtyard was so rammed it took nearly half an hour to procure a pie with some mash and on the Saturday morning they opened nearly an hour late. But compared to the first Field Day this was fine. Anyway Onwards with the review.

The London Snorkelling Team

These guys were very refreshing to watch. They were part musical comedy, audio-visual collage and English Jazz fete band. They mixed weird skits about Voodoo seances and a shipping forecast with anecdotes about the Amish and Chemists. weird. The visual aspect of the performance utilized an overhead projector kind of like what they used to use at my primary school for assembly and used ohp paper to draw a variety of odd characters (crabs, pirates, murderers, robots) onto the film and move them about by hand to give the feeling you were watching a low budget cartoon. Considering the years I’ve spent messing about with live digital projection and it’s increasing use in live performance it was cool to see people making projection this way.

The music is a weird composition of a English fete band playing Lounge Jazz and would be the ideal accompaniment/soundtrack British cartoons from the 70’s like Mr Ben and Roobarb and Custard. Their Debut album ” Audio Recording And Map” is out via Touch Recordings

Helen Moodey

I wish I could have gotten the time to see this/her but I was hunting out some decent food. The whole idea of Black Sabbath replicated via Cello loops would have been good listening. What I heard was reminiscent of Bela Emerson. I hope she will crop up on a festival bill that I’ll be at some point with any luck.

Foot Village

I thought they would be a really energetic, visceral and raucous experiment but it just tired really quickly. The setup was like Boredoms, an all drumming all singing 4 piece but having listened to a lifetime of Samba band music due to mother’s participation in local groups I kind of knew the parameters of all percussion groups. Without getting all sneery it was pretty obvious that guys were from New York and were shopped at American Appel.

The Books - Alexandra Palace I'll Be your mirror

The Books

I wasn’t sure what to expect from The Books live, I envisioned it to be a laptop style band with some visuals. This is because the albums are such a kaleidoscope of painstakingly put together musical collage, it was easy to forget that their is some really meaningful and passionate instrumentation on all of their records. Today the band comprised of 3 multi-instrumentalists playing a mix of cello, banjo, guitar, violin and synth with a pre-recorded selection of their films/video with the found musical collage parts of their work within the soundtrack.

I found that visuals didn’t just encapsulate the meaning and substance of the songs but are the real driving force of the melody and rhythm and act as vocalist, singer and frontman all at same time. It’s very hard to explain a Books song to people without remarking upon cliches about VHS and forgotten 80’s shows but I would describe it as what seems to be hundreds of unrelated sequences and quite plain sounds and video that explore society, tradition and life and dull day to day actions, events and sequences that that explore the ordinary and sequential and by great artistry are manipulated to become profound and meaningful short sound sculptures
that despite there abstractive nature are quite “whole”. What I also loved was the absence of drums or repeated sound-bytes within their tracks, which meant the whole construct of their songs were more sparse and could play-out in the air without being conformed by construct of melody and traditional chorus-verse procedure. They played songs from “The Lemon of Pink” and “Lost and Safe” and to me they were the stand out artist of the day.

Pj Harvey

I’ve always found it hard to talk about why exactly Pj is so meaningful to me so it seems pointless to try and express it now. So all I’ll say is that she was as good as she needed to be and “Let England Shake” is a very important record.

Posted on: July 11th, 2011 by robin No Comments

These are some photos that have been sitting around gathering dust since 2010. Until I finally got around to scanning them last night. They were my first attempts with the a Smena 8m camera

Posted on: July 3rd, 2011 by robin

I’ve decided to launch my blog today. It’s about time as it’s been sitting around 80% ready for many months as I’ve tried to compile my past projects into individual posts and index them by media type and year in the Projects section.

I don’t think it’s indicative of sheer volume of things I took on between 2007 and 2010 but I’ve tried to compile the most relevant of pieces.

On a more social note, I’m still in Luton and moved in with my girlfriend to a nice flat near the train station, and still work at the same place and do the same eat, sleep, shit routine.

On the Luton note, here are some photos of the place in all it’s charm:

Posted on: May 3rd, 2011 by robin No Comments

luton u 1

luton u 1

Posted on: May 3rd, 2011 by robin No Comments

Posted on: May 3rd, 2011 by robin No Comments

Vesica Piscis

New images based of a forthcoming music project of my own.

Posted on: April 5th, 2011 by robin No Comments

The Horselover Fat persona has been active in the world since 2006, taking residence and making music in Devon, Oxford, York, Bristol, Brighton, and Luton. The music it makes sounds like an anthropological effort of 2437 discovering written evidence of a once-popular music known as ‘jazz’ and trying to work out what it might have sounded like. It is influenced by everyone, ever.

Horselover Fat are a band, formed in theory on a whim on Brighton, and in practice in a pub in York. The band’s members attempt to split the difference between their relative loves of techno, dubstep, MOR, and noise, sometimes with a surprising degree of success. Daniel Lippard plays the guitar, Robin van Rijn plays theremin and synth, Mark Burton plays more synth and alto saxophone, Tom West plays keyboards and whatever else comes to hand. They’re affiliated with The School of Unthink (R.I.P.2009.)

The band are named after a character from Philip K. Dick’s late novel VALIS, which some of them have even read.
Mark records under the name Oblio; Daniel, under the name Meek Tiger. Tom and Daniel were previously in a sort of indie-rock thing called ‘The Flying Blackbird Ensemble’. They don’t like to talk about it. Tom’s meant to be recording a sort of singer-songwriter-ish record, but don’t hold your breath. Robin is a graphic artist and experimental film-maker, currently working on a project known as Canidae.

We recorded a few albums over the years, and played some gigs. There are some recordings to download for free here:

In Elk Ivory (2008)

A live document. We argued about the release of this for so long, the label stopped existing. Clickthrough to download.

In Elk Ivory
Click to download

Shreds (2009)

A compilation of home and rehearsal recordings from the first year of the band’s existence. If you ask us for a physical copy you can see the real artwork, which is far, far more exciting than this is:


Shreds
Click to download

Posted on: March 27th, 2011 by robin

Piano Tragic by Robin Van Rijn from Robin Van Rijn on Vimeo.

An animation by Robin Van Rijn. Music by Creeping Jaw Society. The track “Piano Tragic” is from the album “9 works for Piano” more information can be found at http://tisar.wordpress.com/

The animation is a meditation and reflection of the song.

This post is about a new film work. “Piano Tragic” is a track by Creeping Jaw Society. This is what creeping Jaw Society has to say about the track: “From the album Nine Works for Piano) Piano Tragic, which was the second track of the nine, was constructed using left over piano parts I had recorded five years previously at Luton 6th Form College, as well as single notes culled from a friends piano. The idea was to create a piece that had some emotion to it, but one built around the development of generative effects, and not just ‘a man playing a sad piano song’. I like to think it works…it at least turned out the way I heard it in my head.”

The track to me felt so composed, ordered, sequenced and filled with emotion but I could understand how it was quite self generative the way the notes and sound were so stretched and bunched together they took a life of there own forming patterns and fragments of a tune. I had wanted to do a video for music such as this for so long. My previous work with Canidae used so little precision and accuracy and was haphazardly edited with just a rough idea of how the piece structured together to form a loose narrative than typical screenplay or story-boarded animation.

With this piece I wanted to tie the sounds and editing to be precisely edited so that there was an entirely fluid, hypnotic and immersive in feeling and become completely engrossing in nature.

It was not until after 10 months of deliberating after making just 30 seconds of the animation before I found out this was the best way to go. I originally started this video in early 2009 and plotted out the animation until I got tangled around a trying to have a big idea. I felt the need to subject a theme and story into the animation to give a better cohesion between the visuals and music I was attempting to make and give the piece the same dramatic tension that that music has. Then I realised it would be pointless to give a piece such as this narrative and literal story as music of this type is far better left for the listener to interject his own ideas to the meaning and themes to the abstract nature of film and music.

Surrendering to my subconscious I just listened to the music with my eyes closed and worked out how the music could be represented visually as shapes and texture. The animation then only took a month to make and was a enjoyable and rewarding process. On that note I leave you with some still images. The full video will be uploaded soon.

Posted on: November 16th, 2010 by robin No Comments


CSS Zen

So What is This About?

From CSS Zen:

There is clearly a need for CSS to be taken seriously by graphic artists. The Zen Garden aims to excite, inspire, and encourage participation. To begin, view some of the existing designs in the list. Clicking on any one will load the style sheet into this very page. The code remains the same, the only thing that has changed is the external .css file. Yes, really.

CSS allows complete and total control over the style of a hypertext document. The only way this can be illustrated in a way that gets people excited is by demonstrating what it can truly be, once the reins are placed in the hands of those able to create beauty from structure. To date, most examples of neat tricks and hacks have been demonstrated by structurists and coders. Designers have yet to make their mark. This needs to change. The only way this can be illustrated in a way that gets people excited is by demonstrating what it can truly be, once the reins are placed in the hands of those able to create beauty from structure. To date, most examples of neat tricks and hacks have been demonstrated by structurists and coders. Designers have yet to make their mark. This needs to change.

There is more information on the site: and within my design:http://ivo-multimedia.com/zen/finalzen.html

While not strictly a artistic or that much of a creative project but more a test of my web/design skills. I’ve made a go of the old Css Zen project with an aim of a fully working one page website that has full cross browser rendering, semantic code and does not rely on any browser sniffing/tricks.

I’ve checked it in ie 6, 7,8, 9, FF 3.6, FF 4   Safari  3 and Chrome and there are no huge differences. So I feel this is pretty successful and I’m quite fond of the Eastern imagery.