Billy Roisz

MY KINGDOM FOR A LULLABY # 4 Basic musical material such as feedback, various sound spectrums, etc. and a live performance of »visual music,» translated into digital images.

Who’s Afraid of RGB can be interpreted as a condensation of the romantic movie, drama, and melodrama. The black-and-white film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is mirrored in nine eyes and superimposed with the colors red, green, and blue. Paralleling her previous treatment of the horror film and the road movie, Who's Afraid Of RGB subjects the genres of romantic movies, dramas, and melodramas to Roiszian compression.

A road trip in the truest sense: shifts, irritations, motion at the levels of image and sound, in all directions. Like a distillate of a “best-of” road movie, Billy Roisz and Dieter Kovačič condense cinema to pure trip – moving past colorful image surfaces that fluctuate between abstraction and depiction.

Billy Roisz's TILT presents for us to see one example of such a state where something is out of whack and out of order, a constant source of new degrees of intensity. At first, there are four vertical gray elements: pulsing tubes, rods or wires that divide up the black picture. At the very beginning a kind of afterimage separates from the bundle to the far left, a bright-red vibrating shadow that then moves from one rod to the next. This feedback process continues until, after a kind of explosive overload, three flickering columns of red begin to settle between the gray tubes.

NOT STILL forms an abstract visual landscape in shades of monochrome colors, from green to red, in which found footage on celluloid flares up like a quotation from the nether world. Alienated classical film scores howl in NOT STILL’s minimalist techno soundscape, overlapping with the main motif of the record in all of its varied visual structures. VJ Roisz mistreats this just as uninhibitedly as the DJ mistreats his records. Roisz shows brief shots of film macros, tracks of animated films and a horror movie, to then unexpectedly have the leaping picture strip swallow them again. As though in a séance in all degrees of its intensity, flaring up are scraps of memory of a pop culture media history. NOT STILL enacts a clash of media in gruesome disquiet and poetic ambiance.

The "liquefaction of the liquid" is taken to such extremes that as soon as the guttural singing of Mopcut begins, the image space is overcome with spectral flutters and untenable fluctuations.

While working on his list in the bathroom, Santa Claus is murdered by an evil and all-powerful entity, known only as THE. Can it be stopped before its evil spreads and more victims fall?

For sources the solo soundchecks of eight musicians were recorded – sounds and video were saved seperately. Roisz followed the paths of musical creation processes (and their corresponding visual techniques) and developed a video, starting with soundcheck-footage, to a complex result.

Billy Roisz taps into our sensual pleasures with this experimental interpretation of Hieronymus Bosch’s iconic triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. The largely abstract landscape, stemming from both analogue equipment and ‘deep dreaming’ – a generative AI technique based on neural networks – ranges from paradisiacal to hellish. Combined with the chirping, ticking and pounding soundtrack, in which field recordings have also been incorporated, the temptation is almost impossible to resist.

Several interior spaces are illuminated and sculpted through light projections and sonic accumulations. Isolated details emerge from a sea of darkness.

In film and related audiovisual forms according to Michel Chion the relationship between sound and image is primarily vertical, and the former tends to play a secondary role. This same applies, though inversely, to music videos, in which the musical structure sets the rhythm of the editing and all motion in general, regardless of the freedom of the images themselves. blinq questions such audio-visual relationships in a radical way. Billy Roisz had 10 musicians from Austria, Germany and Japan produce short electronic sound files. These fragments, some lasting only a few seconds, were then transformed into visual patterns by means of feedback loops which function as electro-acoustic impulses and then further manipulated.

“Eight short 30-second sequences punctuated by black frames. smokfraqs, a serial work, is made compelling in part by its structural clarity and formal simplicity.” –Isabella Reicher

‘Surge’ places us somewhere between figuration and abstraction: its displayed forms defy full visual comprehension, as they stretch and snap in strict accordance with the complex beats and sheets of sound created by schtum.

paris was made as a music video for the Norwegian rock trio MoE, whose raw style is between metal and noise. "I like the anger," is roared into the microphone programmatically by the charismatic bassist and singer Guro Skumsnes Moe, who also writes the lyrics. In addition to the highly charged front woman´s raw voice, nothing more than an electric bass, guitar and drums are required to express pure anger and desperation. Roisz translates each instrument and Moe´s voice into its own visual level, and the end results are then layered visually.

elesyn 15.625 goes back to the fundaments of electronic sound and image synthesis—the electromagnetic signals, their frequencies, amplitudes which are the basis for colours, lines, tone pitch, movement and dynamics. Moving images and music are generated by "simple" forms of signal routing like acoustical and optical feedback, radio waves, bended circuits. The result is a very colourful - in the visual as well as in the the aural sense of the meaning - diorama of "electric synaesthesia" or the idea thereof.

A green shape hops across a shaded red background, to the three-beat rhythm produced by the alternating sound of an increasingly muffled high-pitched tinkle and a deeply resonant low note. At the same time, the color green turns turquoise and gradually spreads. Something awakens and stretches, the image's center of gravity shifts from the vertical to the horizontal plane...

In 2009 Billy Roisz and her friends and fellow musicians Angelica Castello, Burkhard Stangl and Dieter Kovacic took a trip to Mexico. After starting in Mexico City, they traveled through Michoacán to the peninsula of Yucatán. And the film Chiles en Nogada, about the journey, was created as a result.

Film by Billy Roisz and Dieter Kovacic

In their sci-fi Billy Roisz and Dieter Kovacic pose a question if we will ever be able to communicate across the time and space. Inspired by the communication of cephalopods, they experiment with conveying messages using lights, colours, pheromons, sounds and movements instead of words, and they demand that we receive the signals by our whole bodies, just like octopuses.

Flickering and pulsating, spitting and swallowing at the same time. The screen becomes a vibrating membrane; colours, shapes, beats and sounds a psychedelic whirlpool. A short, fast-paced audiovisual ode to the hypnotic power of colour and vertigo.