stephen vitiello & molly berg

Soundtracks

Previously found releasing music via labels like Sub Rosa and 12k, sound artist Stephen Vitiello now arrives at the SMTG label, with a DVD featuring six cross-platform collaborations with visual artists (Seoungho Cho, Matt Flowers, Eder Santos, Kevin Gallagher, Andrew Deutsch and Nic DeSantis). Preveiously, Vitiello has collaborated with everyone from Pauline Olivers to Machinefabriek, and has presented installation work at such prestigious venues as New York's The Whitney museum and Paris' Cartier Foundation. On this DVD we get to hear Vitiello's soundtrack works while watching the accompanying footage from his collaborators' video art. Vitiello gets assistance from Molly Berg (a cohort on The Gorilla Variations album on 12k) and between them they produce a diverse and unrelentingly beautiful array of compositions, whether that involves supplying glowing ambient tapestries for Seoungho Cho's digitally treated mountain range footage, or sounding a little like Four Tet (at his most experimental) on the incredible woodland-traversing Kevin Gallagher piece, 'Green Tunnel'. The music for Matt Flowers' entomologically-themed micro-footage takes a different slant again, gunning for chiming, almost child-like tuned percussion and quiet cello melodies, while Andrew Deutsch's 'Balance Inquiry' receives a kind of clockwork take on the sort of sounds you'd expect to hear at some remote Buddhist monastery - bells, insect chatter and various natural timbres chime in unison, all given a sinister edge by Vitiello and Berg's mechanising treatments. Eder Santos' 'Cinema' proves to be one of the most visually arresting pieces, cutting through treated footage of strange, hyperreal environments, featuring the ominously throbbing glow of streetlights, and ever-changing skylines. For this, Berg and Vitiello's music incorporates immersive soundscaping melodic use of guitars, wind instruments and a spot of muffled drumming for what could easily function as an exceptional stand-alone piece of music. Excellent stuff, all packaged in a silkscreened chipboard Arigato Pak.