Techno music is the human race's "twilight of the the gods." Hex stirs it up into a polymorphic froth.
"Techno music is the human race's twilight of the gods - its Goetterdaemmerung," says Matt Black of Hex. "It's a conversation between man and his technology [that] will be listened to by life forms of the future to grok the death of the human." Hex is a four-strong multimedia pop group from London that produces video games, CDs, videos, and computer graphics. The thread connecting their work is a full-on, in-yer-face cyberdelia that blends rave, technology, sci-fi, chaos, post-humanism, and zippy ideology into a polymorphic froth.
The group formed in 1991 when Black, half of the legendary DJ remix team Coldcut (pioneers of the DIY dance music revolution of the mid- to late-1980s), teamed up with codemeister Miles Visman and artists Karel Dander and Robert Pepperell.
In addition to live video-mixing gigs in London - where Black & Co. aim to do for video mixing "what Grandmaster Flash did with turntables" - Hex has kept busy creating titles such as Global Chaos, a CDTV combination of rave visuals and techno/ambient music (see right); eSCAPE, a CD-I of trancey techno trax combined with joystick-operated computer generated animations; and Digital Love, a CD-ROM of yoga moves performed by 3-D animated figures.
The punk ethic is strong at Hex - there's a refreshing lack of digi-snobbery, as wit-nessed by Black's enthusiasm for a newly acquired 1970s Chromascope analog video synthesizer - "the 'rare groove' of com-puter graphics."
Black says that Hex's ultimate aim is to help along the revolution in consciousness that rave culture promises - specifically, by "cutting down on the human element of performance. The initial promise of House music degenerated into a Rent-a-Diva thing, too close to the stale rock cliche of celebrity front people," says Black, explaining Hex's use of virtual characters as performers.
"Call us faceless boffins, but we'd rather give people something more interesting to look at. I dream of making live ambient techno music with totally immersive visuals to create an altered state." Hex: +44 71 922 8847.
