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Sound and Vision

“No interesting performers ever come to Romania ” seems to be a frequently made complaint. “The only artists we ever get are arthritic has-beens at the end of their careers,” they say. “Sala Palatului must be their last stop before retirement.” What nonsense. Only this next week, Romania will be playing host to a certain world-famous vocalist… erm, Michael Bolton. Mmm, da. Maybe these people have a point.

It’s especially clear that there’s a dearth of interesting acts making their way to Romania when you take a look at the kind of people who come to Belgrade or Budapest on an almost weekly basis. Next month, Kraftwerk, one of the most seminal groups in the history of music, will be performing in Belgrade , and a host of western artists are the regular guests of Serbian clubs. And we get Michael Bolton. It hardly seems fair.

The House scene must take some share of the blame, for having encouraged a market where the criteria for whether or not to go to an event is to refer to a fairly arbitrary ‘Top 100 DJs in the world’ list. Charts like these, quiet blatantly drawn up by a magazine editor and his friends one lunchtime over a pint in the pub, are taken as gospel by the kind of people who take an interest in such things in Romania . Tiesto, the Number One DJ in the world? It’s a bit like calling Britney Spears is the world’s greatest female vocalist.

So, when an exciting artist does make their way out here, it’s something to sit up and take notice of. It’s even more of an event when the group in question has fairly underground credentials in the west. In contrast to the moronic choices that the Bucharest clubs make when choosing their next big name western act, inviting someone as comparatively unheard of as Hexstatic to Romania is a brave move indeed.

Hexstatic are Stuart Warren Hill and Robin Brunson, and though they’ve made occasional forays into producing music themselves, it’s their visual projections that they’re best known for. Pushing forwards ‘visuals’ – that is, the projected images that accompany a band or a DJ – is something that Hexstatic have always been championing. In 2000 they released the UK ’s first entirely audio-visual album, and more recently they helped develop a piece of kit called the Pioneer DVJ-X1. In plain language, the device allows you to manipulate with DVDs in the same way that DJs have been playing with CDs and records for years. It means that you can mix and even scratch the synchronised sound and images from a DVD in the same way that a Hip-Hop DJ scratches a vinyl record. Hexstatic’s live shows have also included projections that come alive with the help of the 3-D spectacles that are given out to audience members.

It all sounds very exciting in principle, but there was one reason why I was a little unenthusiastic about the opportunity of seeing Hexstatic at their gig on the 7 th of May at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Palatul Poporului. I was never expecting to be particularly impressed with what Hexstatic do, because visuals all too often fail to excite. The images that are projected to accompany a band or a DJ at a club are either so boring that they blend into the background (in which case, don’t bother with them) or grab peoples attention and stop them dancing (definitely don’t bother). Instead of having a venue full of writhing, sweaty bodies you end up with a room full of people silently gawping at a screen with their mouths open. Visuals tend to destroy, rather than enhance, the atmosphere in a venue. So it was something of a surprise to see 1,600 people packed into the MNAC gallery, surrounded by four huge video screens, dancing to Hexstatic’s audio-visual shenanigans.

“We had twice as many people as we expected,” explained the mastermind behind the event, MNAC’s Cosmin Ţapu. “We actually ended up closing the doors and turning people away”. It’s even more impressive given that the gallery is currently operating without any proper budget. One of the consequences of the change of government last year is that projects such as MNAC have been temporarily sidelined. As you’d imagine, not having any money makes putting on headline-grabbing events rather difficult, and it was thanks to the generosity of sponsors that the gig was able to take place.

Despite the particularly British points of reference that Hextataic’s work makes use of (cut-up footage of cult British daytime TV shows; English C-list celebrities embarrassing themselves in the 1970s), the response from the crowd was phenomenal - the duo ended up performing for twice as long as they were scheduled to.

The fact that an act that is definitely below the radar of the mainstream, even in the UK , can fill one level of the MNAC gallery just goes to disprove the usual reasons to explain why the acts we get out here are usually so inexcusably poor. It’s no longer viable to claim that alternative, left-field dance music doesn’t have a following here, because it clearly does. The problem at the moment is that promoters are too stupid and too conservative to start cashing in on the scene that exists below the surface. It’s only a handful of renegade promoters, such as Timisoara’s ‘TMBase’ crew (responsible for recently inviting underground Hip Hop icon DJ Vadim, himself signed to the same label as Hexstatic) who are managing to bring artists worth getting out of bed for. Romanian kids are hungry for inspiration from Western talent, and at the moment, there’s literally nobody providing them with it.