Hyperscope by Levox

music score : eRikm
film action : Gaelle Rouart & Etienne Caire
Centre Pompidou Paris . France
tour in EU & UK

HyperScope is a new project from Levox - squeezing fresh filmic juice from all those discarded cinematic lemons. Expertly exploiting elaborate optical techniques and sharp, encyclopedic musical juxtapositions, both filmmakers and musician playfully corral the whole gamut of dramatic cinema’s legacy ; it’s stereotypes, its sentimental pronouncements, its fatal dénouements ; reconstituted and reworked by hand, coloured, cropped, re-shot and re-printed ; soundtracks layered, slowed, sped up and reformed.

Gaelle Rouard and Etienne Caire extract HyperScope’s imagery from what seems like hundreds of different films - overlaid, combined and contrasted in a rainbow of new meanings and impossible scenarios, and with the unsettling feel of daylight shadows or midnight bird-song. In a flow of colours and dramatic intrigue the unknown sits next to the known, and perhaps draws some strange new meaning from it.

Meanwhile eriKm brings his patent-pending, made-in -France broken-punk take on Musique Concrète, derived from an approach to turntables that seems just, you know : beyond. As with the filmmakers, the sound is culled and ripped from film soundtracks ; reworked, and layered into half-rhythms of inchoate screams and slammed car doors marking out time. In the end, its this new soundtrack that grips the rudder while light and chemical swirl about in an organic, polymorphing maelstrom.

All in all, a dizzying and intense experience, full of compressed narratives and real drama.