Day One, Fri 30 Nov - A Fairlight Fetish

The first event of the Byte Me! Festival was ' A Fairlight Fetish', a showcase of vintage audiovisual equipment at the totally gorgeous Perth Town Hall.

If you're wondering where the source of this 'Fairlight Fetish' came from, here's a video of Jasper, aged about 10, playing with a Fairlight CVI at Scitech:



But I digress, so back to the event...



First act of the evening was the wonderful Chrism and Fenris, who used Commodore 64s and various other equipment in a glitchy, experimental audio exploration. Yours truly, VJzoo's Kat and Jasper, did the visuals. We cheated a little and served the loops off a laptop, as with such long hours preparing for the running of the Festival we'd had no time to prepare our creative materials, such as VHS tapes to serve loops from. Apart from that though, we used vintage equipment - the mighty Fairlight CVI's, and an old-skool Panasonic AVE-7 mixer. Thanks to Sam Lambency for the pics. You can see more of them at our Flickr.



Here's a track from the desk recorded live at the event:



Next up was the surprise VERY special act (and now, won't you be kicking yourself that you weren't there?)... it was Tom Ellard of Severed Heads! He played an awesome set, which he's uploaded to his website: sevcom.com/ His video's not embeddable, but his site is really worth a visit anyway. But the Paleolithic DVD there if it's still available - some great vintage Severed Heads performances dated 1982-1994.



Tom's performance was bloody brilliant, and had the international audience enthralled. You can watch it online so I don't need to tell you how great it was, you can see for yourself.

Last act of the night, in a bit of a denouement as Mr Ellard was being overly modest and didn't want to be headlining act as 'it was the Fairlight's night' - DJ Michelle Rogers (Perth) and VJ MoRpH (Sydney) in an ambient set with lots of Brian Eno etc. Poor MoRpH isn't used to such a slow place - he usually does big events at the Horden Pavilion, outdoor festival like Big Day Out etc.





All in all, we had a wonderful night playing with some great old audiovisual equipment. Feedback from the audience was very positive, especially the surprise appearance by the Aussie AV legendary act Severed Heads.