Immersion
excursions

You have to be there for the
audio-visual “rituals” of Organ Mood

PATTERN RECOGNITION: Organ Mood

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

While the name might suggest lightweight, bachelor-pad kick-back jams, the “mood” generated by local audio-visual duo Organ Mood is more one of mystery, even mysticism. For starters, musician Cristo and visuals guy Mjack prefer their enigmatic stage names, and moreover carefully cover their tracks—they call their previous projects “irrelevant,” if only because “we don’t see Organ Mood being about us.

“We were inside an installation by Massimo Guerrera and we were getting all these ideas of how we could interact with the public,” they claim in tandem. “We then realized that what we wanted to do was a situation where the public would get inspiration from being totally immersed in our work, to create something that would trigger in them the feeling that their thoughts are actually the centre of the creation and that nothing would happen if they were not there to make something of it. Starting from there, we thought that our minimalist, almost primal approach is just the simplest way to create this feeling.”

On the sonic side—“a live electronic act based on improvisation,” says Mjack—Cristo’s efforts echo everything from the elegant e-prog of Vangelis and Jean Michel Jarre to the gritty drug buzz of Spectrum, with some classic techno and tough neo-electro tossed in. “The goal was a simple set-up where Cristo’s old Farfisa organ would be supported by recent electronic devices, like a looper, synths and a drum machine, so he could improvise songs by himself without using any pre-programmed sequences. Fortunately, it was clear that he couldn’t build complicated songs full of sections and changes. He had to play the same ultra-simple loop over and over in a poetic, hypnotic, psychedelic, Organ Mood way.”

The visual part is a charmingly lo-fi deployment of colourful geometric abstracts, layered on a dusty old overhead projector. “Mjack has been carrying around these patterns and drawings for a while without really knowing what to do with them,” says Cristo. “Whether they came from old NFB animations or from those weird decorations on the church at the corner of St-Urbain and Marie-Anne is not quite clear. We first wanted to do something completely different with the overhead projector, some kind of conference, but as he started drawing and using coloured acetates, it was clear that it looked exactly like my music, that we could go on with the hypnotic effect of the patterns.”

The new year is all about “research and development,” they say. “We really want to push further this idea of the public being the place where the creation happens. We are working on live, private ‘rituals,’ to be recorded and filmed for future release.”