Live Visuals and VJ Sets

The second of the two FritzKatz sets. Drum and bass!

If you want to see the visuals mixed in with views from the studio, check out the video on MadTiXx’s channel.

I met up with MadTiXx at the FritzKatz hackerspace in Saarbrücken and we played two sets together that evening. This is the first one, a chill techno set.

I made extensive use of the scanline and VHS distortion effects that I built in Resolume Wire. I think they turned out pretty decent.

If you want to see the visuals mixed in with views from the studio, check out the video on MadTiXx’s channel.

The mighty MadTixx played a banging drum’n’bass set at HaxoGreen and I made visuals for it: a mix of analogue and digital video glitches, including a lot of stuff filmed off of my old CRT TV, circuit-bent video devices from the 90s, and my own custom made CRT and displacement effects (made in Resolume Wire).

2 hours to enjoy with your ears and eyes!

I had the oppurtunity to play the awesome GPN-Lounge visual setup (hexagons!) with AA Battery (live set on Friday), k_ttu (DJ set on Friday), and MadTixx (DJ set on Saturday) at GPN22 in Karlsruhe from May 30 to June 2.

Here are some impression from my sets. All photos were taken by klemmi and were released under CC-BY-SA-4.0.

Wide view of the stage with the two projectors visible in front of the screen.

AA Battery (left) doing the bleeps and bloops with his Nintendo DS setup, me doing visual stuff.

AA Battery x Rauschfeld

At work on stage during my set with k_ttu

For k_ttu’s dark and bass heavy set I went pretty hard on the glitches and tried to tone down my usual rather colorful style a bit.

k_ttu x Rauschfeld

k_ttu x Rauschfeld

k_ttu x Rauschfeld

Colorful variation of GESTALT_V17 with a new music loop. Made in TouchDesigner.

Some sunday afternoon shenanigangs with instancing, noise, and feedback in TouchDesigner. The audio is a loop from an unreleased track. Tilt-shifty blur added in Final Cut.

At Revision 2024 MadTiXx played a Techno mix in the infamous “toilet tunnel” and I made some visuals for it, overlayed on the original video of the tunnel.

A techno live set that I played for practice at home - and I made visuals for it: They are a mix of analogue glitches, partially re-scanned from CRT TVs, and digital effects made with waaave_pool. The visuals set was performed with Resolume Arena, the techno set was performed with a 6U case of eurorack modular.

TOPLAP does a solstice live stream event every year, and this year I was part of it with a 15 minute live coding session with visuals. For the music live coding part I used Tidal Cycles, for the visuals I used Resolume Arena with some audio reactive elements. I composed my editor window and the visuals in the OBS streaming software that I was using for sending my stream to their server. I’m afraid the bitrate is a bit on the lower side for the quickly changnging visuals, so unfortuantely there are some blocky artefacts to be seen throughout the stream.

MADTIXX delivered a banging techno/progressive house set at GPN21 and I got to do live visuals for the recorded set.

The visuals were performed live in Resolume using a MIDI controller, with the recorded set playing and providing FFT data for Resolume. The remixed video for “FBI (GulaschDub)” (the first track in the set) was edited and added after the recording to get the right timings for the scenes in sync with the music and voices.

I prepared three major “themes” for the set:

• Glitchy videos, that were heavily processed through my analog video setup.
• Cleaner videos, that I would then process with some effects in Resolume.
• Vintage style videos and still images that I could compose in more of a collage style.

Also, I made heavy use of 2D animation loops, most of them by Laak and some by Micah Buzan. I also used a few 3D elements, some of them were made by me in Blender, most of them again by the awesome Laak.

In Resolume I grouped the clips and loops into eight decks that made sense to me and then it was just a matter of performing and improvising the visuals to the music.