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yoshi SoDeoka text Tom Giddins

DAZED

DAZED

Noisy video art throws up psychedelic death vomit on your screens

Yoshi Sodeoka likes noise. He likes the kind of incoherent, nonsensical noise you could imagine piercing the skull of The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe every time he watches DiG! He is a purveyor of aural pollution and he combines it, to haunting effect, with photography and collage in lo-fi videos that conjure up a spirit world both alluring and impossible to interpret. “I like working with music that’s non-structural, since that fits my visual style and process,” explains the artist. “I like random things that are hard to understand. It’s challenging to me.”

With that in mind, it’s hard to imagine the Brooklyn-based artist having any trouble looking for inspiration when it comes to music. His record collection consists of bands such as Napalm Death and Discharge, which helped influence Psychedelic Death Vomit, a video that takes you on a DMT trip through a ZX Spectrum-esque universe; and Noise, a collection of ethereal, ghostly prints that look like interference from a television channel you probably shouldn’t have tuned into. “The aesthetic of noise is pretty appealing to me and comes from my taste in music. As a teenager, I was into noisy punk rock like Chaos UK and

Disorder,” says Sodeoka. “Noisy, weird punk rock music that I can’t separate myself from because I grew up with it. Throughout all my work, I’m trying to fill the gap and do something that’s never been done before. I want to create a media that feels like noise music; that feels like metal.”

Brought up in cold war Japan, Sodeoka loved shortwave radio, UHF television and pretty much any gadget his electrician father could get his hands on. This early fascination with electronic devices, combined with a relocation to New York and a love of junk TV, underground internet culture and sub-cultures in general, plays a role in the video collages he creates today. Sound and image are sampled and put into a new context through applying old techniques to new media. “Every visual source I need to make my art is on the internet these days,” he asserts. “I filter through those materials with both digital and analogue equipment. I’m interested in making a bridge between something old and new. I like seeing a good fusion of retro and modern in my work.”

His latest show Televisions + Ghosts + Nature mixes fragments of familiar images of nature culled from mass media sources with raw digital static generated by the crudest of technologies such as magnets, snapshots of old analogue television screens, cheap software, randomly applied filters and screenshots of VHS noise. “It’s a reaction to what I see,” he explains, “and it kind of all happens on a subconscious level, but that is what I’m into.”

Clockwise from top left: Noise #11 2010; Noise #13, 2010; Evil Erector, 2009; Psychedelic Death Vomit (Slight Return) 3D, 2010 See Sodeoka’s latest video mash-up on DazedDigital.com/artsandculture