DJ Dom Armano: what does QED mean, and what's the history behind the name.
Valentin: QED is Latin for Quod Erat Demonstrandum, it means "that which was to be shown," and all this just proves that I am a big geek" (we all laugh). But the reason we wanted to call the act "QED" was that we're a multimedia artist; we have this video show that we do along with (our act) so in some sense it's kind of literal, "that which was to be shown," not just listened to, but a whole performance experience. But it's also about the album Mobius, which is out on our own label (Siren). In the music industry you get a lot of "You can't do this, you can't do that, this will never happen you need to do it this way." So we just said "you know what? This is the music we feel in our hearts, this is what we're going to do," and hopefully people will enjoy it, but this is what we're going to show them.
Kristine Henricks: that's what's shown
Dom: Excellent! I have seen the video for Love Bites several times, and I noticed that Val, you're wearing an earring in the shape of your logo...
Valentin: yeah
Dom: Where'd the hell did you get that thing?
Valentin: Chris Harrington, a good friend and big Mac guy, happened to find a font called "housefly." It was kind of a "trippy" font, and with some modifications, we came up with the QED logo. It just kind of fit the image of the band. I am very much into design. We also thought it would make a cool earring. And so a jeweler friend of ours came up with the design, and made them up. We're actually thinking they would be a cool thing to sell.
Dom: I have experienced your performances several times, and with each performance I discover something new about the QED overall experience (lights, sound and atmosphere). Tell me about this unprecedented creative style of performing, and what brought you to it, or IT to you. How did you decide to go the overall "QED Route" not just the music, but the combination of music, lights, video, sound and atmosphere.
Valentin: The feeling in the (music) industry these days, Dance music, to the labels anyway is an afterthought,
Kristine: and a track act sort of thing.
Valentin: Exactly. We really wanted to bring out other elements. Being a tech guy, I started to look at what was not quite as full blown an experience about other track acts and dance acts. Adding something really cool with video and try to enhance that emotion, especially because the music that we do, because of the nature of people that we are, we tend to get into that "epic sound," that dramatic, very developed sort of sound and with the visuals it adds a completely new dimension. We're always playing around with that.
Kristine: Val designed MediaXtasy, a patented program that incorporates video into the live performance. QED "grew up" around MediaXtasy, and because Val is so creative, we were lucky enough to add this element. We called it MediaXtasy partially because it can be triggered at any time to the music. This is also what makes it different from other video, or "wall candy."
Where most video is just that- some video running in the background during a performance, MediaXtasy is triggered live via a midi keyboard. Basically in the matter of a few minutes, we can change a whole scene of a show, and it changes with every show.
Dom: That is one of the coolest things about your shows for sure. Let's go back to the first single released from Mobius, Love Bites. Tell me, how did you combine what you do live for that song with the video?
Valentin: The video was something that we produced ourselves, shot ourselves and we actually edited using MediaXtasy. In our shows, we take a number of video clips, and we create a "palette," which is just a set of video clips that thematically fit together.
For Love Bites, we take some of the interesting visual elements from the video, and combine them in a palette to get across in the performance a certain sense of drama, sensuality and a number of different emotions.
Triggering these palette elements live during a show adds to the QED experience. You're not only hearing the song live, but we also have the video being triggered in real time and it's something completely malleable and fresh every time.
