member: James June Schneider
Filmmaker, vampler, and sensoral experimenter, Schneider has been working with sound and image for nearly 20 years. From his teenage years in DC's punk community working in music and photography, to his films and projecting 16mm during performances for groups such as Blonde Redhead, to his vampling work as Matterlink, it will be interesting to see where Schneider's overall project with sound and image leads.
STATICOSE CHAMBER
He is credited as the director of the doc. of the Monadic Institute's Staticose Chamber project in the mid-nineties and helped develop the apparatus. The Staticose Chamber was an audio visual therapy unit, the fruit of the Mondadic Institute's dedication to "the positive uses" of audio visual combinatory experiences.
From 2001 till 2004, he played audio/video samples live in AE (accident and emergency, on Sonig) with Andrew Sharpley, (of plunderphonic pioneers Stock, Hausen, and Walkman) and Emiko Ota, Japanese powerhouse musician, and Thierry Negro. Along with the sampling of Sharpley, Schneider sampled video with the sound attached (ex. see/hear cars screeching from different films, each with a different note). AE played around Europe with bands such as Blurt, Melt Banana and Mouse on Mars (recording with live video projection in their studio).
"Triggering Affect pockets"
Since parting ways with AE, he now vamples solo as Matterlink, a dangerously live, raw content-driven sampling from thousands of video fragments both shot and found/appropriated. Retaining the original sound from the "vamples", he "triggers affect pockets" (vamples) from a midi keyboard. Sometimes the vamples are played raw and sometimes Schneider re-samples and transforms bits of the video he plays, grabbing and altering loops, punctuating them with phrases as, he explains : "...narrative strains emerge and are submerged back into the chaos of sound and image."