Diaspora – Let’s Hear It For The Vague Blur (Half Theory)

Audiovisual duo Lloyd Barrett and Joe Musgrove have conspired here together for a dreamy piece of psychedelic wallpaper. Still images almost smudge into each other, into vague almost perceptible blurs of colour that gently fragment and burst into another ill-defined image just before you think you’re staring to get a handle on what you’re seeing. All the images are still, garnered from the internet then processed and abstracted into the aforementioned blurs. The illusion of movement comes from the camera slowly sweeping in a different direction across each image, the superimposing of one image over another. The semi improvised music begins dreamy and ethereal, offering little more the a spaced out bed for the images, thought things becomes a bit more erratic about fifteen minutes in, moving away the sweeping washes of ambience, which although it works is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. It’s when they begin utilising high-pitched drones, heavy reverberant delays, increasingly textural tools and providing plenty of space to the compositions that the relationship between the audio and vision seems to change and become more interrelated. Whether this is intentional or even necessary is another matter, this ever-evolving montage of colour and lethargic movement is impossible not to get caught up in. Thanks God it only goes for 40 mins, otherwise you could lose yourself for days. Though there are 4 other experimental short films from the Brisbane based Half Theory family.