In Conversation: Zoë Mc Pherson and Alessandra Leone

Ahead of the North American premiere of their audiovisual showcase Pitch Blender later this month at MUTEK Montreal, multimedia artists Zoë Mc Pherson and Alessandra Leone discuss their evolving creative partnership.

Call it fate, call it chance, but there are times when a creative synergy is so clear, it is almost as if a meeting of minds was destined to happen.

Connecting at a female:pressure event six years ago in Berlin, Zoë Mc Pherson and Alessandra Leone immediately took an interest in the other’s work. At the time, French-Irish sound designer, DJ and performance artist Zoë was embarking on an immersive audiovisual album project and seeking collaborators. Alessandra’s passion and experience as a motion designer and director was an almost fatalistically intuitive fit.

Zoë has garnered acclaim for their boundary-pushing approach to examining the physicality of sound, which has resulted in a digitally-forward, avant-garde style. In partnership with Alessandra, who is known for creating entrancing visual experiences, both through animation and live production, the pair will be performing their Pitch Blender showcase at MUTEK Montreal later this month.

Best described as a “cybernetic dancefloor experiment”, Pitch Blender is a live retelling of Zoë’s experimental electronic album of the same name. An all-encompassing experience, it fuses some of the most beloved elements of the rave scene with otherworldly art installations, creating a synthesis of sound, space and screen that promises to not only engage, but challenge its audience.

What do you most admire about each other’s creative practice?

Zoë Mc Pherson: Alessandra is a hard one to satisfy! Me too. We push each other further. We’re always questioning what’s happening, what we’ve done. As well as something to admire, it can also sometimes be a blockage, which we recognise. That’s been really interesting during our time working together. We always want to push a bit more, explore something, really think about it. 

Alessandra Leone: And push it further. Since the first project, it’s the idea that it doesn’t necessarily need to stop here – maybe we want to explore how that intersects with something else. We are both hard workers, and we’re very critical of our own work. Over time, we learned how to give feedback to each other in a way that makes it better. 

I love your sound and approach to music, but since the beginning, you have brought a lot of visual ideas and inspiration in. That’s very important. Sometimes artists are like: “OK, you do the visuals, I’ve done the sound.” But the way we do it, and what makes it very exciting, is that it’s a constant exchange due to us being interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary artists.

What were some of your main influences and inspirations when creating the Pitch Blender showcase?

Z: Each track has a different meaning. It’s not chronological, it’s different themes but connected. 

We’ve been interested in materials and textures and sculpture. We talked about having a project from the point of view of something not human, and the lyrics to [album track] Lamella were inspired by this exchange. But then the other tracks like On Fire are really intense, like ‘We have to do something’, [and] have this vitality. 

A: We have these two fixed points in the light show, which are the music videos we did for Lamella and On Fire. Everything else always changes, in a way. After the experience of touring the String Figures audiovisual show together, we didn’t want to have projection the whole time, so it became a bit of a hybrid. We’ve sometimes got lighting interacting with sound, sometimes we just have visuals, or sometimes we’ve got darkness.

It’s very important to think of a live audiovisual show as an experience. You need to find a balance between music and how much stuff is going on on the screen, and how that can easily become too much. It was really trying to find a balance between the visual and musical parts. The whole stage and the part where the audience is is all our playground in a way, so we didn’t want to just limit ourselves to the video projection or LED wall. 

What are some of the biggest challenges you face in the audiovisual world?

A: One of the challenges we face when we say ‘let’s not just do projection [or] one screen only, we’re gonna have lighting as well’, is that a big part of the show becomes site-specific. Each venue has lights and each stage looks different. It’s quite a lot of extra work, but at the same time, it adapts to different settings and different scenarios. It’s definitely worth it.

How will the show evolve specifically for MUTEK? And what role does audience feedback play?

A: For the visual part, some sections are mixed live. So at this point, I don’t know what’s gonna happen, actually. I like to keep that, even though it makes me feel a bit nervous. I like it to fit into the feeling I get from the audience and the vibe of the event we’re performing at. The visual art is mixed depending on the feedback of the audience. It’s nice to keep some parts open.

When we started speaking about audiovisual work in general, MUTEK had always been one of the festivals that we wanted to perform at. It’s one of those very big international festivals that has always been very inspiring. 

Z: Especially somewhere where they value audiovisual work. When we started doing audiovisual shows, we would play in venues that are mostly used to music. There’s a projector but no one knows how anything works. Then this year we had MUTEK Mexico, and we had so many people on stage helping us. It felt really pro. We were getting to do what we were imagining.

As well as working together on Pitch Blender, you are both the co-founders of the boundary-pushing SFX platform. Can you share the story behind the creation of SFX? What inspired you to start your own platform?

Z: We had explored and experienced quite different situations by creating, releasing and touring our audiovisual project String Figures. [We had experienced] the possibilities and limitations of putting out such a project within the frame of music venues, labels, film festivals, museum settings, and everything online. It felt like a good idea to start our own platform/label, which we now call ‘interdisciplinary conspiracy’, and do what we want rather than have to fit in to what already existed. From the start, we both had a strong interest in cross-disciplinary art and were really into collaborations, so this opened up new ideas and directions. To be honest, I think that was the best decision ever. I’m so proud. Now, if we have a project in mind, and if we have enough time or money, we can actually do it. We have a base if we want to put out someone’s project. I’ve always been into the management of artistic projects, so, in a way, it follows this route. It’s gonna be five years [old] next year.

A: It started with Zoë’s release, and it was simply very instinctive. We also call it a platform, and to me it’s about a common goal: releasing this type of work.

How do you see the field of audiovisual multimedia art evolving in the next few years?

A: We all know there is a lot of discussion about AI, but I feel like that’s already dying a bit. There was so much excitement about the idea of some algorithm that generates its own things. But now, everybody’s like: ‘That’s actually using other people’s work and remixing it.’ Artists can be inspired and maybe use some AI or refer to immersive, 360 virtual reality visual aesthetics. But at the same time, it’s also all about bringing that back together into your own work and making it yours. Let’s see how artists actually react to this stuff.

Lastly, what advice would you give to aspiring multimedia artists looking to collaborate?

Z: It’s very basic, but working with mood boards and different inputs, not just one.

A: Don’t be afraid of sharing your thoughts, ideas and inspirations with other people. Try it out. Sometimes it can be a bit overwhelming to say “let’s prepare an A/V show” if you have never done it, but you need to let go a bit. Some things may work well, some things may work less. What I’ve also learned over time is that there is a lot of energy that can come from the audience as well. It doesn’t need to be perfect before you show that to an audience. Get it out, try it out, and show it to people, and you’ll see what their reaction is. Collaborate, network and reach out to people. You have nothing to lose.