‘SHOCKMUZIK’ (18 mins) is a celebration of maximalist electronic sound design – a futuristic live audio-visual dance piece embracing the intellect behind the formulas of pop music and a rejection of A.I. in the world of futurism in favour of a more meaningful, queer perspective. Using projection and live vocals, VASCHA and dancer il-bambolina take the form of many alien bodies, displaced and learning how to be human.

I have always been fascinated by the tension between chaos and order in audiovisual art, and it’s growing relevance in this fast-paced, emotional, yet formulaic and digitalised modern world. This fascination is fortified by my ear for pop music, often working with heavy syncopation inspired by the ethos of electro-pop production pioneers of the past few decades such as Max Martin and will.i.am.
My specific dedication to electronic music has always acted as the core of a more visually maximalist output that deconstructs the very fabric of popular digital media and juxtaposes it with a more spiritual experience. Although my experimental video work began years ago as complete solo projects (sound, shooting and editing), my collaborations with other video artists over the years have encouraged me to follow a more planned-out and refined artistic process without compromising my attention to detail in post-editing. Collaboration has also been a huge part of my live performances where I have worked with dancers, taking inspiration again from pop performance but with a sense of disorder, play and irony inspired by avant-garde choreographers such as Fluct Monica andLaurieann Gibson.

However, from the beginning of my craft, I have always been boxed in as an experimental musician making harsh, noisy and dark sounds. Despite successfully broken out of this box, these elements always createan edge to the ear- catching pop ethos that I was inspired by since childhood.`

Being an artistic child of artists such as Gaga and Nicki Minaj, it feels imperative to unabashedly celebrate and embody the surreal in everything I create, and this feels so emboldened 20 years on with the bizarreness of the internet.

I believe the internet is so intrinsically linked to contemporary electronic music, as I explored in my dissertation this year, ‘A BRIEF CHRONOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF FEMME MAXIMALISM IN CONTEMPORARY POP MUSIC’ This was an attempt at a manifesto to re-define the parameters of the study of pop music born on the internet in artistic academia and rewarding a feminised or ‘queer’ sound with a higher brow integrity.