Laughing Hands were centred on Paul Schutze and Ian Russell. They worked in the new music scene in Melbourne in the very early 1980s. They were an improvisation group using tapes, synthesisers, guitar and hand percussion much of which was then treated through the synthesisers, producing their soft, insistent, rhythmic sound. Among the places they played was the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre, which, if memory serves, is where I first saw them perform.
I talked to Paul Schutze about using a new video synthesiser I had built in 1980 specifically for live performance. This machine was a pattern generator that could combine a large number of patterns generated by a collection of synchronous oscillators running at vertical and horizontal frequencies. The oscillators all produced square waves which are notionally digital signals. These signals were selected by manual or automatic switching (derived from an audio input: the music) or by random selection using a pseudo-random number generator. The selected signals were sent to the inputs of three 3-bit digital-to-analogue converters which made up the red, green and blue colour values which were sent to a colour encoder for output to a monitor or video-tape recorder. Thus the synthesiser could present a rapidly changing series of coloured grids that occasionally reminded me of a Mondrian painting.
Laughing Hands and I ended up doing a performance together at the Ewing & George Paton Galleries' Noise and Muzak exhibition in 1981. After that I invited them to come to Sydney for a performance at an evening I was organising for the Departure Lounge café in Oxford St, Darlinghurst. and there we did another, much bigger performance using the video synthesiser. I also organised for M2 band Makers of the Dead Travel Fast to play at this event.
The performance consisted of the Laughing Hands improvising music from their album Dog Photos and I set up the synthesiser and connected it up to be driven by the rhythms of their music. The video was presented on several largish monitors. It was a big night. Video and sound were recorded to videotape and I subsequently edited it into this videotape.
