Persistence of Vision: On VHS Head by Andrew Burke

Trademark Ribbons of Gold inherits this spirit of adventurousness from the VHS-era, extracting sonic elements from videocassettes long since cast aside. Blacow combines and reworks these fragments in a way that evokes the era, but also estranges it. A track such as “The Murder Cycles” combines a dizzying array of audio artefacts. At its core is what sounds like the propulsive synthesized score from a mid-80s thriller, but this is juxtaposed with the menacing voice-over from what could be a trailer for a slasher film or home invasion nightmare. It is tempting to try to index the track’s component parts, but such an effort seems misguided. The force of “The Murder Cycles” resides in the way that it compresses the entirety of an era, even a mode of cinematic production, into just five minutes, producing a capsule history of the look, feel, and sound of the 1980s in a sonic blizzard of jumps, fractures and cuts.

is based around a lot of late night music making. Because I spend a lot of my days working, a lot of the music making is sort of late night. Each track was based around a lot of loops […] visual loops from films that I’d leave cycling around. And a lot of tracks were done to a specific scene from a movie, even though the track don’t correlate to what the film was or what the visuals were. It is captured from VHS, cut in time with the music, and all sequenced live.” This discorrelation, though perhaps frustrating to the most eager of sample-hunters, gives these tracks an uncanny power and force. For those who have watched any number of genre films, these sounds are eerily familiar, yet processed and arranged in a way that makes them unsettlingly unidentifiable. They leave behind the general feel and experience of these films rather than their precise narrative details.

Autechre has long served as the most common point of reference in most efforts to communicate the complexity and intensity of the VHS Head’s rhythms and textures. And there’s no doubt that the genius of Autechre’s precision beat machinery and crunchy-funky groove has cast a long shadow over contemporary electronic music. Yet, I think VHS Head has a strong claim to being one of the few artists to build upon and go beyond the Autechre model. This is in part down to Blacow’s persistence of vision, his commitment to the videocassette, it sonic possibilities, and the intricate beats that he is able to build up through this unusual sample source. But it is also down to the way in which his engagement with film, the whole cult world of the soundtrack, and the maligned regions of genre filmmaking, ends up being not only a powerful audio experience, but a more complex investigation into our audio-visual past and the way that it haunts the present.

It has always been my sense that the work of VHS Head should be of interest not only to fans of electronic music and to those who are charting the most audacious forms of contemporary composition, but to cult film fans and cinephiles as well. Each track, after all, is a kind of audio essay that, without compromising the funkiness or fluidity of its beats, tenaciously works through the influence and impact of the VHS revolution and the films that were at the heart of it. While there are other artists, ranging from Oneohtrix Point Never to Odd Nosdam, who similarly mine the past in producing cultural memory in the present, VHS Head is unique in the way that his fidelity to media and method makes the music feel like a sustained, ongoing project to register the impact of these films, their soundtracks, and the practices associated with watching them. His work realizes new and groundbreaking forms of music out of these scattered remnants of the past.

It seems reckless to speculate what turns the eagerly-awaited third LP from VHS Head might take. Yet “Angels Never Sleep,” the closing track of Persistence of Vision, offers some sense of the innovations still to come from Blacow’s established methods [https://youtu.be/6IkGH1GRUzQ]. Like “Farewell to Africa,” the downtempo groove of the track and its array of looped elements both fascinate and entrance. It is never quite as frenzied as earlier material, but neither is it a locked-groove. It constantly shifts and metamorphosizes, introducing new elements – a harp sample here, a slowed-down distorted trailer voice there – but also reintegrating old ones, in a complex algorithm of affective impulses.

The video for the track captures this perfectly, a shifting set of kaleidoscopic images that are sometimes lush and organic while at others turn monstrous and horrific. Floral compositions give way to hands and eyeballs emerging and collapsing into one another. At roughly the half-way point, the track’s main melodic motif rapidly accelerates, sending the images spinning at what feels like twice or three times the speed. It is a vertiginous moment, as the meditative turns manic. The remainder of the track flips between these two poles. The kaleidoscopic transformations of the video are punctuated with images from Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1972) of the young girl, bathed in the luminescent blue glow of the television screen, in thrall to the static, and crawling toward to those calling to her from the other side. There might not be a better image to communicate the power and attraction of VHS Head’s music. It tempts us into another world, one in which the sonic fragments of the past come alive again, to haunt and to enthrall.

Links: https://www.facebook.com/adeblacow/

Andrew Burke is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg where he teaches screen studies and cultural studies. He is currently completing a manuscript titled “The Past Inside the Present: Cultural Memory and the Canadian 70s.” An earlier article he wrote on VHS Head appeared in Popular Music and Society in 2015. He tweets at @aabwpg

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