member: James June Schneider

Filmmaker and sensory experimenter Matterlink aka James Schneider has been working with sound and image for more than 20 years - beginning with his early years in Washington DC's punk community playing music, working in photography, and multiple projecting 16mm films during concerts. As Matterlink, he performs a raw, sound-driven approach to this new art of live cinema.

Matterlink draws from thousands of collected video fragments, both shot and found. He triggers these shots with the original sound attached from any number of midi devices. He then re-samples them, creating and layering loops, maintaining the linked sound and image while punctuating with song and word samples. The sound is key : "I primarily focus on playing the audio part of the shots and I leave the images mostly alone, just to follow along and do mysterious things". Matterlink performs this video sampling in various bands, as well as a range of solo sets, and "video sound" improvisation with an eclectic variety of musicians.

His solo sets are highly malleable performances, such as Pika-don that deals with the subject of artificial light (first performed in 2004). The character of the sets vary in terms of narrative presence, sound intensity, rhythm, number of screens, etc... depending on the context. From 2001 until 2004, Matterlink played live in AE (label: Sonig) alongside Andrew Sharpley (of plunderphonic pioneers Stock, Hausen, and Walkman). In 2008 he began performing with Parisian éléctronique singer-composer Elmapi in the group Video Love.

Matterlink (as James Schneider) directed the film documentation of the Staticose Chamber project (1996) and contributed to the proposition of the chamber, an audiovisual therapy apparatus conceived of by the Monadic Institute. He also directed The End of the Light Age (2007), an experimental science-fiction feature starring cult film legend Lou Castel and Blue is Beautiful (1997) with the group The Make-Up from Washington DC.