Ben Vida, Meredyth Sparks, Anthony Elms

Extraction is a collaboration between composer Ben Vida, visual artist Meredyth Sparks and curtor and writer Anthony Elms. Continuing Vida's explorations of digital and analog synthesizing systems,ÊExtractionÊgives particular focus to aural phenomena-engaging electronic, non-representational sounds that appear to cut, move and oscillate on both vertical and horizontal planes.The conceptual and formal parameters for this release circle around Sparks's notion of extraction, a practice and theory that foregrounds the cut as it relates to both punk's visual iconography, the historical avant-garde and contemporary electronic music, as evident in a range of analog-digital technologies (Photoshop, the internet, and analog modular/digital interfaces). The effects of Vida and Sparks's respective cuts are both subtle and startling, using patterns and repetition to obscure a clear starting point while revealing the carefully assembled construct of sound and image. Curator and writer Anthony Elms supplies an essay that provides the conceptual glue linking sound and image. Elms's text explores the phenomenological impact of the visual, aural and physical cut, considering how this force can accentuate an absence, but also make a piece whole and new again.