Strange Pill

Audio visual artists duo, musicians, producers and humanists Ben Hardy (UK) & Zahara Muñoz-Vicens (Spain) are explorers of perception with an experimental perspective of music as collage, taking the concept of sampling to the visual realm, at the avant-garde of post-digital culture. In search for a sense of tangibility for music in the digital landscape, they propose different video-based participatory experiences, unveiling the visual narratives of audio recordings, showing expressions, cultures, diversities, instruments, locations… of each captured moment.

They’ve worked with holograms, projections, interactivity and video art, hundreds of artists from different backgrounds/cultures/abilities and organisations like Arts Council England, Irene Taylor Trust, New York Philharmonic, Bhavan Indian Cultural Centre and Chinese Music Ensemble amongst many others. They transform unused spaces into audiovisual galleries and their work has exhibited at places like Barbican Centre, Kinetica Museum, Roundhouse, Cairo Palace Of Arts and Athens Digital Arts Festival; they’ve given talks at places like London City University, CultureTech and MusicTechFest. They’ve been included in publications like Kolaj Magazine, StyleBiblio’s “Otherness” and Aesthetica Magazine’s Anthology “Future Now: 100 Contemporary Artists”. Last year they received Best Innovation in Sound Tool/Technique from Sound Of The Year Awards, provided by BBC Radiophonic Workshop, MusicTechFest and Museum of Sound.

ARTWORK

The Nyco Project: The New Machine III
Net.Art

The New Machine III, from The New Machine series, is a psychedelic 4-piece EP music experience, with Mamma Doom, Wipe Me To Forget, Don’t Say A Word and You Bring Me Hope: songs created with cut-ups of filmed live performances of everyone involved. The Nyco Project, short for “nylon cord”, represents the concept of a threading link.

Presented as humanist tapestries that can be deconstructed and reconstructed, with this EP Strange Pill takes us to a perception-expansion journey where a song is more than the sum of the parts, and where the parts are also essential for the song to exist. They capture each individual original performance, in different locations and bring them together as cutups of a collage, showing the moments and the people behind the sounds.The result is a set of existential love songs with surrealist atmospheres, digital moving paintings that respond to touch, to isolate and explore separately each part that makes the whole.

As our brains tend to merge the parts of a perceived reality into an individual meaning (connectedness of perception), here the experience of the parts and the whole create further meanings, merging analogue and digital into a new post-digital experience of music.

Artwork Link
https://www.strangepill.co.uk/the-new-machine-iii

Website
https://www.strangepill.co.uk/