The aural and the visual collide in the immersive work of David Psutka

This week, Toronto multi-disciplinary arts series Long Winter presents INsulator, a mysterious grown-up fort/installation described by the artists as a "giant maze and audio-visual experience." As the audience walks through a sheer tunnel of projected imagery, they'll hear the live musical improvisations of artists reacting to the mirror image on the other side. It's an open-ended and risky endeavour that seeks to marry art and music in an immersive way. That's what makes it the perfect home for Toronto-based electronic music producer David Psutka.

Psutka's visual arts-inspired project Egyptrixx — which will be featured at the event — finds as much inspiration in minimalist artist Donald Judd as he does avant-jazz pioneer Yusef Lateef.

In all of Psutka's projects — Egyptrixx, Ceramic TL, and Anamai — the visual is given equal weight to the aural. Sometimes it's hard to call him a musician at all. His tracks aren't exactly songs. They're more like sonic collages made up of undefinable techno-inspired sounds, creating cold and meditative soundscapes.

But he wouldn't call himself a visual artist either. His live performance graphics and album art are collaborations with multi-media artists like Berlin's ANF and Marlen Keller, who create the industrial-looking images that contextualize the music. Where Psutka's projects sit comfortably is the intersection of these art forms and ideas, or the "murky in-between places," as he calls them.

Despite the ambiguous nature of Psutka's vision, in practice, it's clear and distinct, fitting in everywhere from the Berghain to MoMA.

We spoke with him about his non-musical approach to music, his sound's relationship to the art world, and the 1930s abstract art movement that helps guide his process.

Your musical output has such a strong visual element to it. Where does that come from?

I don't consider myself a visual artist. I don't really have a visual arts background per se, other than just really enjoying it and following it sort of passively. I don't make visual art or have any kind of history.

It's similar to music. I don't really have a formal background in music or some kind of traditional background in music. I'm more just kind of interested in the ideas, which I think overlaps beyond the medium — outside of music, outside of visual arts — into one another.

I don't consider myself a visual artist. I don't really have a visual arts background per se, other than just really enjoying it and following it sort of passively. I don't make visual art or have any kind of history.- David Psutka

How would you describe your music's relationship with the visual arts?

Without sounding too lofty, I think that the essence of the music projects that I do — which is obviously my main kind of involvement or job — is really just aesthetic concepts, or kind of aesthetic ideas, or really basic ideas that don't live exclusively in music.

Which is why I always have really strong partnerships with visual artists and why I think that there is a visual aesthetic component. It seems like the natural thing to do given the angle from which I come to music.

What are some of those aesthetic ideas that help guide your sound?

Some of Ceramic TL is clearly based on the idea of unpredictable chaos, which, to me, conjures up the idea of shattering glass or materials climbing off of one another. There's a lot of really solid and big sounds in the Ceramic TL project and Egyptryxx project. [And] there's a lot of really cold and unrelated and inhuman sounds, and structures of sound arrangements.

What particular non-musical influences have led to these aesthetic choices?

I guess the Art Concret movement. It's a movement that I have gone back to — their procedural ideas — time and time again in my art. Not that I love their work so much, or love them as artists, but I thought there was something really strong about the way they made it, which is essentially to scrub any kind of human influence or the human touch from the art as much as possible. Because they saw human tendencies as having all these flaws, like sentimentality, vanity, narcissism, any kind of personal reference or inside jokes with yourself, expressiveness. They saw all of these things as human mistakes that kind of diluted the quality or the effectiveness of the work.

Why is the visual so important to your work?

People will make different kinds of multimedia performances with different objectives or for different reasons. Some people are trying to recreate some kind of added feature to a regular kind of performance, and there's nothing wrong with that. I think that where Andreas and I differ [from other artists] is that we're trying to create an aesthetic statement, an aesthetic declaration, and not so much about making me look more "rock n' roll" or look cool.

Most of the AV performance we've done has been kind of straightforward or not even too strategic or even well thought out. We just sort of threw everything out at the audience, sound and visual, and hopefully it makes sense.

Maybe it doesn't, but we just kind of put it out there.

Toronto Long Winter InSulator. April 14 and 15. ArtsScape Sandbox. 7pm. $15. 19+ Featuring music by: Holy Fuck, JOOJ with Sandro Perri, Not the Wind, Not the Flag, Lido Pimienta, Yamantaka // Sonic Titan, Fucked Up, Egyptrixx, Mary Margaret O'Hara, Jennifer Castle, Doomsquad, and Soupcans. Visuals by PORCH.