Hull’s own visual wunderkind

“We’ve got five senses, if you’re gunna throw a party, you might as well stimulate as many as you can? Right?” *

Music and Art! Both bloody brilliant arn’t they? No come on, they are arn’t they? Brilliant! Plus they go together smashingly too. Like fish and chips, gin and tonic, Laurel and hardy and errr, I dunno some other things that go well together, Use your bloody imagination. From album art to music videos there’s a undniablely strong link between the two. Now with clubs such as the Welly upping the ante with more live visuals throughout their new Saturday night line up, and punters expecting a little more then a DJ and crate of records in the corner for their money, it seems that link is strong even in Hull that the city’s visual scene is finally coming into it’s own. Like many in the city Visual DJ Eyesaw, who masterfully crafts the eye-popping visual treats at Funky and Home Sweet Home has been toiling away behind the scenes for a while before the pieces started falling into place. “I guess it goes back to Orange Street at room. In something like ’98. I heard shimmy shimmy ya by ODB and just went out and bought some decks the next day” explains Eyesaw “I knobbed about on the wheels of steel for a few years, and then started doing a media course at Riley. We had to use these massive big SVHS players to edit, but they had sweet jog shuttles. You could scratch the footage back and forth and have a vision mixer to chop between the two sources. So I looked at that set up and looked at a DJ set up and it didn’t take a huge leap of logic to try and combine the two”

His visuals combine some seriously retro technology with up to date computers and elements of found video, scraps of old TV shows and glitching computer games projected onto a large screen on siphoned onto pills of clapped out computer monitors in order the melt the crowd optic nerves. “I did some early gigs with those massive SVHS players I was on about. In retrospect that was a pretty silly setup: lugging around a full linear editing suite” he remembers fondly “It’s all done on computers now apparently. I recently decided to get something cool to queue the clips with instead of just smacking my laptop keys. I’m using a wireless Xbox pad now which is supersweet as I can do everything from the bar or dancefloor. For a little while I assigned all the buttons to a big-bad-ass flightsim joystick. Pretty sure it made me look like a right tit though, so I soon sacked that off!” With the mix of elements of recycled TV clips, computer graphics and his own unique filmed footage, Eyesaw’s visual eyecandy dosn’t seem precious or “off the shelf” at all and has a realness and urgency about it that is lost with most “slick” visual displays kicking about the place “It’s probably because I came at it in a backarsed way. one of things I love about VJing. Because it is still really in its infancy and there are no “rules”. I work by queuing the clips to the beat, basically drumming out the video and applying effects or scratching it back and forth real time. This approach means I can do things to match the beat really well but it is ridiculously labour intensive. What’s the saying about working hard or working smart? Well, I was never very good at either of the two”

Lately the visual mix-master has been seen flirting with the indie and rock scene around the city, most notably creating a stunning panoramic, almost cinematic backdrop for The Last People On Earths prog rock opus “Electric Angels” at a blissteringly hot (and I mean that in the tradinational sense, it was mafting!) gig at the Sesh recently, seemleslly fitting his vision with the bands music. Despite this there are still strong loyalties to the music that spawned him “I seriously reckon we have got an awesome electro scene bubbling up. All the homesweethomos are making unbelievable tunes at the mo’, really pushing each other forward and keeping things on the up. So along with people like Mr Beasley and Dr Dot I think the city has a unique sound all of it’s own. I would love to see Hull get on the musical map for a scene I am part of and I believe we have some serious talent in this little backwate” he tells us proudly “But yeah the Home Sweet Home gigs are my favorites”

youtube.com/user/vjfit

*actually you have as many as 23, but why let that stand in the way of a good quote