A wonderful source
The Center for Visual Music is a nonprofit film archive dedicated to visual music, experimental animation and avant-garde media. CVM is commited to preservation, curation, education, scholarship, and dissemination of the film, performances and other media of this tradition, together with related historical documentation and other material.
This is were I buy my DVDs. Go check it out!
Sound and visuals
If you are interested in Visual Music you will - without any doubt - at one point hear the name of Sebastian Oschatz. Whiz kid and genius.
Via Generator.x : "Sebastian Oschatz is a German media artist and educator with a background in Computer Science. At one point he was a third of the experimental music ensemble Oval, famous for their uncompromising systems-based approach to the creation of sound. [...]
Oschatz is one of the founders of the Frankfurt-based media company Meso, established in 1997 to work with experimental media interfaces and interactive installations. [...]
Meso is also the developer of the visual programming tool VVVV, created originally to run Meso's own projects.."
Visual Music at its best
Had the great pleasure to work with Karl Kliem back in 2002 for the VIVA Plus launch. I constantly show Karl's work as excellent examples for Visual Music productions to my students.
His label and website Dienststelle is a wonderful resource and always an inspiration. From his site: "Karl Kliem is a founding member of Frankfurt based media lab MESO. He is developing realtime audio and video systems. Diverse works in the area of multimedia, webdesign, TV-design, music- and soundproduction for films and interactive installations. He is also a member of Involving Systems and founder of the label Dienststelle. Since 2007 he has a lectureship at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach within the faculty of Electronic Media."
The hero of Flight 404
Via Eye Magazine: "Robert Hodgin claims not to experience synaesthesia, but his interest in the phenomenon of seeing sound as vision goes back to a fateful evening (1 November 1991) when he dropped four tabs of acid and put a Cocteau Twins boxed set on the autochanger. (This was in the days of Vaughan Oliver’s elaborate packaging design and actual vinyl clonking down on the turntable). This, as he titled his lecture, resulted in The Best 8 to 12 Hours of my Life. The next day, Hodgin applied to art school. He eventually studied at RISD, and a glittering career (plus lots of banner ads) ensued. And he hasn’t taken any illegal substances since."