The Wonderful World of Well Sounding Voltages and Projected Light

DVD collection of films and performances by the Belgian synth player, sound artist and film maker Floris Vanhoof.
The DVD is split into two parts: “Films” and “Performances”.

Britt Brown reviews The Wonderful World Of Well Sounding Voltages in The Wire 378: “The impulse for abstraction has ramifications. Once form is fully scrambled and narrative negated, the resulting work tends to inevitably become, at least in part, defined by process – how, when and with what it was made. Belgian synth player, sound artist and film maker Floris Vanhoof’s recent DVD collection implicitly acknowledges this through its sleevenotes, which list date, duration, materials and location, with only a meagre textual clue as to each piece’s thematic intention: ‘Prehistoric processes’; ‘Why scary stuff looks funny and funny things look scary’; ‘A study on the unrecognisable’. This latter phrase basically sums up Vanhoof’s whole oeuvre. His avoidance of identifiable subject matter, obvious instrumentation or structural trajectories can feel liberating or frustrating depending on your predilection and the venue in which you experience the work, a fact he alludes to when describing this disc’s true purpose: ‘It is meant to get you out there as dynamics and flickering are nicer in the analogue world.’ But even when viewed digitally at home it’s apparent how congruous his visual and sonic sensibilities are.”