Synopsis: Jawbone.tv talks to New York multimedia artist and musician Fredo Viola, discussing his take on audio meeting visual and his experimental works 'The Sad Song', 'The Turn', and others yet to come.
Modern storytelling has evolved into a mashup, with mediums crossing, crunching and breeding at every turn. At the forefront of this mix renaissance is a new species of creator equally fluent in the audible, the visible, and all things between. Fredo Viola is one of them.
Viola is best known for viral hit 'The Sad Song', an experimental piece of music and video that propelled him into the spotlight back in 2004. It's the sort of thing that he lightly describes as a 'hybrid fantasy excursion'.
"I do really feel like that's what I'm trying to do," says Viola laughingly. "It's a carryover of my desire to be a filmmaker and to make really unusual fantasy films ... I've just been trying to bring some of these techniques into my music, purely as a selfish way to do the ideas I'd been working on for a while."
Viola studied to be a film director at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, but over the past eight years his life has been more about bridging the gap between sight and sound, taking much of what he had hoped to do in film and pouring it into his music.
In December of 2008, he struck a popular chord again with 'The Turn' (www.theturn.tv), a subtly crafted interactive experiment that utilizes physics and basic geometric objects as a means of navigating through his various audio-visual experiments. It's the sort of thing that appears to propel Viola, pitting one medium against the other to create entirely new outcomes.
"Storytelling for me is conflict. ... When I'm writing a piece of music, I always try to think of the music almost as characters. And I'm always trying to juxtapose some kind of contrasting character ... I was always a really big fan of Fellini and Tarkovsky and Bergman, and the reason why I loved their films is because they put their emphasis on transitions between states. Like Tarkovsky's whole film was basically a transition from one poetic state to another. And Felini would often do these transitions from waking state to sleeping state."
"There's something really beautiful about hovering in that sort of in between land. It's ambiguous. There's a lot of freedom in that place. And I think that's why I'm drawn towards using audio and visual at the same time, and having them affect each other."
As for the future, Viola's taking his show on the road and sees technology as playing a huge role in how music and stories are absorbed.
"I'm doing a European tour in September, and some of them [the shows] are going to have to be visual as well as audio, so I'm putting a lot of thought into representing what you see on my website into my live show. And I've got an idea for an application [software] that I'm really excited about that hopefully in the next year is going to become a reality."
"It's a strange time. It's exciting. A lot of the old forms are dead ... I think software is going to make for very interesting storytelling. It's going to offer a whole new way to listen to a work of music. And giving a little bit of connection to the person downloading the music and using the software is going to open all kinds of interesting new options."
For more information check out www.fredoviola.com or visit Viola's Myspace Page and Vimeo channel. Oh, and here are some other great Fredo Viola vids.
