On Friday September 14th I had the good fortune to attend a collaborative performance by musician Christian Fennesz and video artist Charles Atlas. Perched at either side of the large stage of the Pompidou Centre’s main performance hall the pair presented an hour of improvised sound and visuals that were projected on a cinematic scale. This collaborative work eschewed narrative convention for a series of peaks and valleys that played the looping visuals of Atlas against the guitar generated laptop manipulations of Fennesz. This proved to be a pleasingly intense experience. Perhaps, a little too intense for those who were seen to flee the hall mid performance. Fennesz’s music ranged from the oceanic to the threatening with large slabs of digital skree melting into the mix. For the most part he avoided the sense of calmness and dare I say prettiness that has infused his recent recorded works. This was music that relied heavily on the visceral power of volume. Like Fennesz’s music the video of Charles Atlas also employed a strategy of echo and dis-integration. Short loops of archival moving image were juxtaposed and overlayed in a procession of imagery that recalled nothing so much as the endless return of a fevered dream. A smash and grab raid on the archive of the unconscious that drew momentum and intensity from the sound of his collaborator. Loops would disappear to return once more, persistent and fragmented. However, it was the mesh of the two distinct elements that gave the works its power. To claim that the pairing was seamless would be to erase the very real tension that grew from the improvised nature of the performance. A tension that gave birth to a thoroughly entrancing night out.