Hypnomancy
2020
Hypnomancy is a visual music performance. The work consists of an evolving series of visual tone poems that reflect on dream states as fields for divination, interdimensional time travel and superconscious transformation. The project, developed as both an intimate streaming presentation and concert stage performance, combines interactive animation and live electronic music with pre-composed visual and sound elements to create a rich vocabulary of generative audio-visual tableaus. As a sonic explorer, Stout blends differing strains of minimalism, noise and pulsing rhythm with orchestral accents. This cinematic sensibility draws inspiration from global animistic music traditions and is steeped in contemporary electro-acoustic practice, acoustic ecology, glitch and experimental pop forms. David’s visual references are equally far ranging with a focus on geometric pattern making, biomimetic abstraction and the legacies of romantic landscape painting viewed through the cyber-lens of synthetic ecology. The result is a journey of uncoiling abstraction that summons the viewer to the imaginal borderlands of their own perceptual schemata.
