GoGo Penguin to perform ‘Apophenia’, a new audio-visual show at HERE at Outernet

Mercury nominated British band GoGo Penguin will present Apophenia, a new live audio-visual experience created over nine months in collaboration with TENENTNET, a cognitive design studio in London, and PlanValley video engineering pioneers based in Stuttgart and Lyon.

Apophenia is a new kind of live music event that’s only just becoming possible. Using technology that didn’t exist a year ago, cinematic visuals on an epic screen respond continuously to the music as it’s played, in effect, it’s an AI dancing to live music. Chris Illingworth’s piano solo might appear as an epic flock of starlings, over Nick Blacka’s bass groove as an undulating mountain range, while Jon Scott’s drums might be triggering the weather, or cells dividing, or our flight path as we soar through a bizarre urban dreamscape.

The Apophenia show will be as immersive as a cinema screening, combined with the spontaneity of a jazz gig, and invites audiences to engage their visual cortex musically, to experience new relationships between their eyes and ears. Yet, while electronic Dance Music audiences have enjoyed audio-reactive visuals for decades, acoustic music has been focussed on intuitive interaction and gestural nuance that computers can’t process in real-time unlike humans. So to create live visuals that are more than just an atmospheric backdrop requires outrageously powerful computers, technical and creative expertise and a sense of adventure. Inspired by their recent collaboration with Jordan Copeland’s London research studio TENENTNET for two mind-bending music videos, GoGo Penguin set out to probe these creative frontiers.

The band explained to Jordan Copeland of TENENTNET their vision of a stage in near-blackout, inviting their audience deep into the enormous screen suspended above them as they play. The music and visuals would be one coherent experience, a continuous journey for 70 minutes. TENENTNET assigned a typically eclectic project team to figuring this out. The creative was devised by digital artist Stella Belle-Hex (Idles, The Vaccines, Take That) and Jordan Copeland (Primus, Jacob Collier, The Comet Is Coming, Alabaster dePlume, Swedish House Mafia).

The set list for Apophenia draws on the band’s rich catalogue featuring tracks from their recent album Everything Is Going to Be OK alongside material from Between Two Waves, GoGo Penguin, Man Made Object, A Hum Drum Star and their Mercury Nominated breakthrough album V2.0. promising fans of the band an immersive, recontextualised journey through the band’s unique musical legacy.

For full details visit soundcrashmusic.com/show/gogopenguin/