Bobby Previte and Benton-C Bainbridge 'Dialed In'

Dialed In: A showdown between a video pioneer and a badass drummer.

After orbiting around each other for years, composer Bobby Previte and video artist Benton-C Bainbridge have collided, and are now at work forming the nucleus of a new piece of matter: Dialed In. Dialed In is a live audiovisual performance and a collection of music movies.

Drum legend Previte's music is 14 movements performed in real time, with no loops, no laptops, and no overdubbing - a drummer let loose in an electronic candy store. VJ veteran Benton-C responds by painting with light, freely grabbing from personal archives of video obscura, altering them beyond recognition, then recomposing them in real time processes much like Previte's kit-triggered music.

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Benton-C Bainbridge (l) and Bobby Previte (r) photo by Hendrik Gerrits

Each using obsolete and forgotten technology scavenged from the tech dump, Benton-C warps video into strange shapes not seen since Electric Company, while Previte creates not sound sculpture, but music.

Dialed In presented by EMPAC

Dialed In - the DVD. Coming in 2008.

Previte and Bainbridge are currently in the studio making the Dialed In DVD album.

works include:

Dance Hall Mécanique, 3:22
Engineers give the gift of life to cute spastic motorites and kill the runt of the litter. Modern dance hall grooves meet the Poém Electronique. [Motor shots by Lord Knows Compost: Bulk Foodveyor and Valued Cu$tomer]

Dark Star, 3:59
Dark Energy folds between those extra dimensions we can't seem to see. Sampled de-tuned harps and electro percussion power this sultry and beautiful eye feast.

Mute the Send, 5:53
Utter audio brutality begets a dying CRT, whose life flashes before your eyes as it expels its Last Supper, a TV dinner.

Bobby Previte has been a force for many years among creative and improvising musicians, with a discography as long as your leg. He has performed and recorded with some of the leading lights in modern music, and his work has been discussed in books, magazines, television, radio, and in most of the major newspapers around the world. He continues to lead many wildly different bands on tours anywhere and everywhere.

Benton-C Bainbridge is one of the world's best known VJ's, an early innovator of the emergent visuals movement. He brings a painterly approach to pop concerts and raw kineticism to operas. Using custom digital, analog and optical systems, Benton-C has performed, screened, streamed, broadcast and installed video over the wires and airwaves of wildly different venues all over the world. He is currently designing video for the surfaces of the future with Fuevoz, LLC.

"Previte's records often sound like soundtracks to an imaginary movie, with a multiplicity of characters, an enigmatic story line, and no particular axe to grind." — The Penguin Guide

"Fantastic video images by Benton-C Bainbridge depicted suspended human figures, floating abstract patterns, looming godlike figures and flickering city buildings." — NY Times

Dialed In video drafts online:
Dark Star • Dance Hall Mécanique • Mute The Send • Tonametric/Pianola • Sunrise Over Baghdad

Works from Dialed In have been screened at:
Millennium Film Workshop, NYC 2006
Dallas Video Festival, 2006 and 2007
New Genre Festival, Tulsa, OK 2007
Experimental Intermedia, NYC 2007
Neutral Ground, Regina, Saskatchewan, 2007
Visual Music Marathon, Boston Cyberarts Festival, 2007

Dialed In performances include:
Issue Project Room, 2006
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Swing Space, 2007
Eyebeam, 2007
Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater, 2007
EMPAC, 2007

frame grabs from Sunrise Over Baghdad (first image is 1280x960, others are 640x480)
photo credits: "Sunrise Over Baghdad" by Benton-C Bainbridge and Bobby Previte. © 2008 Bainbridge