Live Review: HHAARRPP, JNXYZ

There's a sense of curious anticipation as the audience gathers into the intimate Metro Arts Cinema Space. The past year has seen HHAARRPP (aka Luke Jaaniste) quite busy, presenting a diverse range of very successful music projects at Jungle Love Festival, BARI festival, and GOMA, to name just a few. This collaboration with film-maker JNXYZ (aka Jona Nalder) offers something a little different yet again. While the two 'music-films' they have produced are already available to view online, this expanded performance, presented in quadrophonic sound, offers something more and pushes the collaboration a little closer to its imagined potential.

Gentle ambient sounds fill the room as the screen fades in to reveal the mirrored pier-scape of Blood Moon, the first of Nalder's two visions. The location of Shorncliffe pier brings with it a sense of warm familiarity to almost all whom have resided in this city for some time. However, its presentation here seems to occupy a kind of liminal space drifting somewhere between the familiar and the sublime. It's the effect of visual symmetry, an exquisite interplay of clouds and lighting, and hypnotic sound cycles, which gradually draw one deeper into this synesthetic dream realm. Jaaniste kneels centre of stage with his small electronic rig perched atop black milk crates, which are lit from beneath. It's a humble set-up, yet it produces a surprisingly powerful visual aesthetic. Tensions exist here between the natural and the artificial, between analog and digital, but most interestingly,  these tensions find release through waves of harmony. From his position on the floor, Jaaniste sews loops of live vocals and guitars into a thick quilt of sound that envelops the audience in transcendent invitations between the four speakers. There's a calm, meditative quality to it all until the escalating density of sound reaches a peak and Jaaniste feverishly rises to belt out some guitar playing about the stage, momentarily breaking away from the seemingly controlled structure before soon regaining his kneeling composure once more. All this while the imagery on screen slowly transitions from the gorgeous blues of the sky to vivid yellows of a stunning sunrise, departing even further from the familiar for that greater taste of the sublime.

After a short intermission, we are gathered back between the quadrophonic array for part two, Lines In The Sand. The imagery presented here is the lower panel from the same location shot, showing instead the rocks and shore that the gentle sea ripples break upon. Both visuals and sound move through a similar sequence. Nalder's visuals make a slow transition from blues to yellows, and Jaaniste enacts a similar process, only this time he structures the set in part around a reworking and sampling of Sovereign Murders by local peers Nonsemble. This time we are drawn into a more claustrophobic space, where the visual and auditory patterns become more internalised, and we are left to ponder in the darker depths. The sequential order of the presentations acts to draw one closer in for the second set, but one can't help but draw an abstract narrative between this two stage progression. Moving from the clouds and sky to water and shore alludes to an arrival, a kind of then-to-now story; an arrival from the heavens to the earth, from dreams to reality, from stardust to self. Whatever the journey, it lands us firmly in the now, from 'pure vision' to thinking, feeling bodies in time and space, and the quadrophonic sound operates wonderfully within this logic. But to paraphrase the words of Peter Greenaway, "What are we doing looking at a screen, when 270 degrees of the world is behind us?" The viewer is trapped by a perspective that simultaneously begs our movement. In many ways this highlights the fundamental freedoms of music and the restrictions of cinema's fixed perspective; restrictions that are thankfully becoming alleviated in various ways by the explorations of video installation and VR.   

A reversal of the sequence presented in this space may have played better to the logic that it invites. An optimistic narrative, if you will, that grounds us in the now before pointing toward the dreamy vision of a bright future. But at the end of the day, by the time the sun sets on this particular event, it's been a very engaging and inspiring experience that blurs the lines between what music, cinema and art can be and, thankfully, one of those rare endeavours that attempts to truly push us toward greater awareness and questioning. Let's just hope they keep this promising collaboration going and push it far into the horizon.