Bret Battey is a composer and visual musician, who creates both electro-acoustic music together with digital moving image art. The films are as complex visually as the music is to listen to, but together they create an altogether gripping and captivating experience. Musically, Bret is influenced as much by the sweep of late romantic composers such as Gustav Mahler as he is by the granularity of Iannis Xenakis, or the 'organised noise' of Edgard Varése and a host of other more recent electro-acoustic composers. Visually, he works often by digitally manipulating photographs (which he has often taken himself) to create colourful abstract visualisations to compliment the music, working often from programming individual pixels into alluringly complex larger pictures. Here, he discusses the processes involved in creating both music and image for his artworks, as well as the lineage of visual music into which he fits.
Filmmakers discussed in this episode include:
Oskar Fischinger
Jordan Belson
Norman McLaren
