Recently we were invited by our friend Anja to accompany her performance at the Stutterer Music Series (www.stutterermusic.com) in Prague. There was very little time for us to prepare and Anja wasn’t familiar with the venue so we packed up the Tagtool and arrived early to set up all the equipment and have a quick practice session before the performance. Though we could have used the white screen on the stage we decided that we would project directly on the brick wall – as it turned out a really good decision because I had a larger area to work on and the drawing had an interesting texture. Anja describes her music as ‘slow groove electronic improvisation’ (Hear samples of her work at www.myspace.com/akitay). I drew and Dima did the animation – an improvisation consisting of mostly abstract shapes and geometric patterns.
As usual, setting up the Tagtool created quite a lot of interest and Trever Hagen, who was playing the second set of the evening, asked if we would be willing to do some visuals for him too. Although we only had a few minutes to listen to his pre-performance warm up we decided that as an accompaniment to his live looping electronic trumpet compositions I would do some figurative drawing. Trever’s compositions can be heard at www.myspace.com/trevonic and here are some stills of the drawings I did at his Brick Bar performance.
We didn’t take our video with us so it is only thanks to Trever’s friend who was busy with her camera that we have these stills of what was, for us at least, a very enjoyable evening.
Trever is returning to Prague next month so we are hoping to have another opportunity to work with him then.
So, the moral of this story is that not only is Tagtooling great fun – it also helps you make new friends!