Noisemakers 2000: Style undercover

>> Covert Ops preach strength through anonymity

by GENEVIEVE PAIEMENT

Covert Ops make technology stylish. The 11-member multimedia crew, who prefer to remain anonymous because "it's less complicated," is made up of a motley assortment of restless creative minds, including a magazine editor and writer, a couple of DJs, some skratch video and music producers, a 3-D designer and window-dresser and some graphic designers. Half of them are still in university (one's writing his Masters thesis on skratch video) and all are in their early 20s.

"We joined together to pool the resources of a group of friends who have the same type of ideas and aesthetics," four members explain to me, each filling in the other's sentences. "Also, a group identity gives weight to our solo projects." Past projects have included last April's Tech, an event which featured many local drum & bass and techno DJs and dozens of TVs and screens showing looped images of machines and computers. The flyers for Tech were one of the year's best examples of old school minimalist techno-cool flyer art: they were pasted onto big-ass 5-inch '80s Commodore 64 floppy discs.

You may have witnessed some live Covert Ops video skratching of everything from Super 8 home videos from the '60s to breakdancing and nature documentaries, this summer, at Life, Tuesdays at Tokyo. As for the future, they've been commissioned to do fight visuals for Ottawa's Ready to Rumble rave, January 29, and are putting the finishing touches on an epic skratch video/experimental drum & bass bomb they'll be dropping some time in February, called the Apocalypse Now Project. It uses only sounds and visuals taken from Francis Ford Coppola's film of the same name and apparently "takes sampling, both audio and visual, as far as it can go."

Web site: www.covert-ops.montreal. qc.ca

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