HFF Vol. 1
16mm, 5m
2014



Welcome to the inaugural release by Psychè Tropes, a label dedicated to exploring the synaesthetic intersections between sound and its visual counterpart. You hold in your hands an oil-based spiral groove etched with vibrations called forth by cinematic prerogatives. Secreted somewhere within the folds of this record’s sleeve you will find a tangible 20 frame strip of 16mm film with optical soundtrack. Combined yet separated by 26 frames, the soundtrack is revealed to be a Rorschach-streak of bilateral symmetrical waveform perpetually leading the image. This film strip is a suggestive random fragment of the visual component made for this release, whose indexical iconography has been shuffled and dealt to you, like some arcane tarot deck.
A film festival arrives at a station, crossplatforms and releases its own music. Absurd? Good. This release has been assembled not only to embrace such lateral mutations, but also to foster that process.

From its inception in 2010 Hackney Film Festival set out as a platform for a community of audio-visual artists living and working in the East London borough, inscribed within the grooves of this vinyl convocation is a cherry-picked clutch of them. Now Vol. 1 is born and HFF evolves: a crucible of images that begets sounds – errant motile sounds whose blind wriggle detaches from the AV mother lode in search of a new synthesis. An audio-visual entity rendered temporarily blind (for it is always temporal). But visuality, like a phantom limb, can be enacted by the deeper pattern-forming structures of the brain when the sight organs are silenced and the auditory materialises – and this is often where the fun really starts: in the hermetic cavern where pictures dance. A black sun. Like the chimerical effects of flicker under closed lids.

> Video

A film by Steven McInerney.
Additional film by Sally Golding, Reuben Sutherland, NASA
Excerpt text by Stuart Heaney
Copyright 2014. All Rights Reserved.