Hexstatic made their talents becomes widely known with ColdCut’s CD-ROM ‘Let Us Play’. Most of you may know them for their works included in Gasbook 6 &7. Their full album entitled ‘Rewind’ treated sound and vision as one and contains ‘Vector’ (included in Gasbook 7) will be released from Ninja Tune.

We interviewed them about the new album and creative scene in London.

Please tell us about your recent activity.

We have just finished our debut audio visual album ‘Rewind’, and are starting to do a lot of gigs. We recently did the onedotzero festival at the ICA in London, which was great.

We are also currently touring with the British Council Sensurround tour which includes Halloween Society film club, Your Mum visuals crew, Audio Rom, Andrea Parker and the Off Centre Club night. We are off to Roskilde festival in Denmark with Ninja Tune next week. It’s all getting very busy.

The full album ‘Rewind’ contains ‘Vector’ which is included in Gasbook 7 and will be released on CD-ROM and DVD in August. What kind of album is it?

It is heavily influenced by music, toys and games from our childhoods.

Hence, it has quite a strong electro influence. All the tracks are fully audio-visual and there is a video for each track. There are also some remix toys for some of the tracks. It is a very electronic album, but there is a strong dose of funk in all the tracks, and a couple of more funky hip hop style tracks such as ‘Ninja Tune’. It’s a big mix of things, basically because most of the tracks are based around a certain subject, e.g. games, technology, sex etc, and take their references from these and the video ideas.

Is there any differences in the works contained in the album between CD-ROM and DVD?

The DVD will be out at a later date, due to technical difficulties, so we hope to include some new work and ideas in the time it takes before it comes out.

What do you think about the possibility of DVD?

We think that DVD will be a great new medium, and hope to use it for all our VJing and live performances. Unfortunately, the technology is a bit slow in this country at the moment. Ideally we would like to use it like you would DJing with CD’s, but obviuosly the visuals would be included as well, which is great for our stuff, as it is fully synchronised sound and vision.

Together with video samplers, effects etc, this is what we are working on at the moment for live performance.