avid August - VĪS Live at the Barbican 2023

Celebrating the second anniversary of the release David August's multi-disciplinary epic 'VĪS', this special recording of 2023's Barbican showcase is the closing chapter of what's been an ongoing narrative, encompassing music, art, poetry and even a unique alphabet. Last year, the original album was expanded with 'VĪS Reinterpretations', a series of meditations on the record's themes that featured acclaimed artists such as Valentina Magaletti, Flora Yin-Wong, claire rousay and Aho Ssan, and now August underlines the entire project with a very fitting marriage of sound, light and physical performance, released on high-quality video and DSP audio.

Since the project's genesis, August had always imagined 'VĪS' as an expansive show, knowing it was the best way to present the labyrinthine story in all its glory. And in 2023 at London's iconic Barbican Centre, he was given the opportunity to put together exactly that, accompanied by choreographer Franka Marlene Foth, performers Belen Leroux and Camille Jackson, percussionist Andrea Belfi and lighting artist Marcel Weber, aka MFO.

Split into four distinct chapters, 'VĪS' is the result of years of research, development, collaboration and refinement, an ambitious chronicle of human cultural evolution that blurs the lines between history, myth and metaphysics. Starting in Plato's notorious cave with words from legendary Greek composer Lena Platonos, 'VĪS' unfolds over thirteen segments and presents civilization's advancement and transformation, displaying the ancestral rhythms still imprinted on our cultural consciousness and the formation of polyphony, the back-and-forth between religious and secular musics and the inevitable descent into digital chaos.

Manifesting these concepts, the Barbican performance begins with a beam of light, the "energy" or "force" that the word 'VĪS' itself represents. And August's creative direction unlocks many of his more buried themes and nuances, picking out the clouds of history as they billow across the stage and the shadowy figures as dreams (or fantasies) become corporeal reality. Colors shift, blend and multiply and movement winds and fractures, poetically recounting August's grand design for the project. The ambitious spectacle might be the best way to absorb 'VĪS', working as both an epilogue and a retrospective.