Sound + Vision Live: Preston Spurlock & Friends

Preston Spurlock’s gooey, squiggly blobs, his Katamari Damacy–esque collages, and his inflated-to-the-point-of-bursting lettering have become the predominant flavor in the visual stew of today’s DIY concert flyers. His frantic hand colorfully announces the bills of shows at various venues nearly every night of the week. Spurlock can also often be found providing live visuals for said concerts, projecting twisted, reversed, discolored, or otherwise violently distorted commercial images of dads at barbecues, used cars, dog food, jellied salads, and other VHS ephemera overtop performers. His visual world is cluttered, slimy, funny, ruthlessly indiscriminate in its appropriation, and totally vital to live music in New York.

Unsurprisingly, Spurlock also creates music. His songs—collected on the album Oh My Lard—take a page or two from the garage psychedelia of R. Stevie Moore, the absurdity of Elephant 6 groups, and the cleverness of DEVO. More recently, Spurlock released a collection of collage mash-ups that sonically approximate his visual style, with cassette-tape loops stumbling and crossfading over each other in chaotic, hypnotic style.

Explore the connections between music and film with this series of intimate concerts featuring live music and original video work. The concerts range widely—from moody ambient atmospheres to dynamic percussion trios to spiky improvised electric guitar—but each show represents something truly out of the ordinary. Sound + Vision Live is an exploration of sound and image: what it means to watch something; the myriad ways in which performance, film, and video art intersect and enrich one another; and how sound and light interact with each other within a space.