Lumen: You studied Illustration at the Art Center in Pasadena, California. I did not see much visuals at music events, and I can say the same even today in 2018, this one of the motivating factor for me to push VJing forward. Around the time when I graduated from university, I went around clubs and asked if I could VJ at their parties in Los Angeles. VJ Fader: My first VJ gig was at a small dance club called Star Shoes (now closed) in Hollywood back in 2002. Also, James compares popular festivals, shares his most memorable live mixing experience, and fantasizes about the nearest future of VJing. Now he’s based in Berlin, working on a new marketplace for visual artists all over the world. The development of the visuals is based on the graphics created by Zoshi and I find this very interesting because we have completely different styles.VJ Fader started his VJing career while he was studying art in California. BackGround is born as an audio / video platform that wants to offer podcasts accompanied by visuals. V/Plasm: I was involved in the project by a friend with some experience in organizing techno events in Tuscany.
Jaded: Can you tell us about your upcoming Background project? Knowing the video artists of the past and being able to appreciate contemporaries allows you to have a complete and continuously updated cultural background. I think is very important listening to a lot of music, watching movies and have a strong passion for the plastic and figurative arts, for me architecture and extreme design are a great source of inspiration. V/Plasm: I work with the Adobe suite, Resolume Arena, Maxon C4D and recently I started using Smode Studio. Jaded: What’s your advice to anyone wanting to get into the world of visuals and what programmes would you recommend for beginners? I have a good relationship with Blush Response, a few months ago he involved me in the album released on the SNTS label, while recently we were very satisfied with the video for “Worshipping the Cybernetic Godhead.” The VJ sets I’m most fond of are those with Oscar Mulero at the Dude Club in Milan, with Dax J at a Rotterdamse Rave and with Amelie Lens at Amnesia Milano. I thought “Wow, the Mulero label looked for me, cool!” but I was always looking forward to the next one as an opportunity to enhance and better define my style. Although I was very much a beginner, in 2015 I started to sign music videos for eminent and emerging artists I used to dig – such as DMX Krew, Dax J and Boston 168.Ī few months later a music video for Soma Records was released and in the while I was contacted by Pole Group. In a short time, I started to make visuals for other producers and in the end it became my job. When I had to upload the tracks on Youtube, I didn’t like the idea of music with static images, so I’ve made my first visuals. I had started producing electronic music and the first releases took place on netlabels dedicated to music Leftfield, Breakcore, IDM, Jungle. V/Plasm: My approach to the visual arts was quite random. Jaded: Hi Rod! How did you get into VJing and do you have any stand-out shows or videos you can tell us about? We nabbed him for a chat earlier this week… This coming Sunday, he’ll be going live from our Jaded channels in a live VJ collab with our Disruptors series.
He’s just launched his new Background project (WarinD features in the first episode).
The first thing that strikes you when working with V/Plasm is how quickly he gets your ideas.That’s probably one of the reasons that there’s a bit of queue to get him involved.