The current Hexstatic duo of Stuart Warren Hill and Robin Brunson have been together since 1997. Before that time Stuart Hill had been producing visuals for the
Big Chill Festival. and had a visuals company called SP Visuals with Pod Bluman. Brunson had been working in computer animation and producing and DJing for Skint records offshoot Under 5's as Rareforce. Both wanted to combine their video talents with music. They gradually took over for the original
Hex group which consisted of graphic design artists Robert Pepperell and Miles Visman and
Coldcut members Matt Black and Jonathan More.
Hex This first version, known simply as
Hex, fused an interest in computer programming and animation with their talent for video design and knowledge of club culture to create a range of multimedia projects. In 1990, they produced music videos for artists such as
The Fall and
Queen Latifah as well as graphics for television stations. Also that year they created the first pop music video created entirely on home micro computers (
Apple Macintosh,
Amiga, etc.) for "Coldcut’s Christmas Break." In 1991, they released the video game "
Top Banana" along with a 12" single mix of the game's sound track. A year later they included the game along with
rave visuals,
techno and
ambient music all on one
CD-ROM billed as a "multi dimensional future entertainment product." The group continued to put out interactive
CD-ROM and
CD-i titles throughout the mid nineties. During this time they also performed live visuals for clubs and chillouts. Their final contribution came in 1997, when they helped create the
CD-ROM version of Coldcut's
Let Us Play! album which featured tracks by its own offspring Hexstatic.
Hex officially disbanded in 1999 due to internal tensions.
Natural rhythms trilogy Prior to meeting Brunson at the
Channel 5 launch party in 1997, Stuart Warren Hill had begun working on the Natural Rhythms Trilogy, a collaborative effort with
Coldcut and
Greenpeace. Stuart approached
Greenpeace asking for use of their stock footage of wildlife and logging operations and in return
Greenpeace could use the finished project in their campaigns and presentations. The first video was 1997's
Frog Jam, which created a rhythmic structure out of short clips of water dripping, frog leaping and tribal drumming and chanting. This was soon followed by
Natural Rhythm and
Timber. Natural Rhythm featured insects, birds and other wildlife as well as a tribesman playing a flute like instrument. Each video employed increasingly more complex mixing and splicing techniques culminating with the award-winning Timber. Its tone is more plaintively political, opening with majestic images of the sunset over a forest of immensely beautiful trees then quickly shifting with a clap of thunder to a
telegraph button punching out the dots and dashes of a
Morse code SOS distress call. Images of powerful
circular saws, chopping axes, and huge, buzzing
chainsaws soon follow. The picture then distorts and images of the indigenous animals appear to the singing of a mournful native woman. The anti-
deforestation message is quite clear even before the industrial machinery makes its appearance towards the end of the track. Timber won the award for Best Editing Video Musique in France in 1998 and appeared on Coldcut's 1997 release Let Us Play!.
Studio releases and advancement of the AV genre Hexstatic released their first full-length CD in 2000. Entitled
Rewind, it was packaged with a 2nd CD-ROM disc that contained videos for each of the album's 11 tracks. The music is similar to
Coldcut and has an
electro infused sound that reviewer Bob Bannister terms a combination of "
South Bronx hip hop [and] the avant-
Eurodisco sound of
Kraftwerk." The album was created over a two-year period on two 100 MHz
Macs that were barely switched off during the production; one 30-second siren sound at the beginning of the track "Machine Toy", took three days to render. For the video track "Deadly Media", Stuart Warren Hill recorded news broadcasts from around the world off of a satellite feed and cropped everything but the newscasters’ mouths to build a random cacophony of voices out of which the spliced-together phase "deadly media" emerges.
Solid Steel Presents Hexstatic - Listen and Learn was their next project. Released in 2003, it was a mix album produced by Robin Brunson of many of the tracks that influenced Hexstatic's own sound. It featured time stretching techniques made possible by the newest CD mixing technology. In contradiction to many DJ purists who only use vinyl, Hexstatic (and
Hex before them) have consistently demonstrated a willingness and even a passion for bleeding edge technologies. In 2004, they consulted with Pioneer on the production of the first DVD turntable with tempo control, the
DJV-X1. This machine has the ability to live mix audio and video in the same way one would a simple audio disc. The band's involvement with current technological development has not lessened its infatuation with older technologies. As can be seen from the
Speak & Spell game on the cover of
Listen & Learn, the
Sinclair ZX80 home computer on
Rewind and the
View-Master on
Master-View, Hexstatic clearly have a penchant for gadgets from the 1970s and 1980s. They have stated that the
vector graphics they have used in some of their videos were inspired by the
arcade game Battlezone. It has since been more broadly distributed through online
file sharing.
When Robots Go Bad was their next studio album and saw the duo pursue a more pop-electro sound that featured several vocalists including London based soul singer Sabirajade and Australian singer/rapper B+. It was released in 2007.
Hexstatic presents Videos, Remixes and Rarities, 2008, was a DVD and CD combo celebrating 10 years of the duos video and audio work. The DVD featured all of their best videos, some previously not available on DVD. The CD featured rare and unreleased tracks and remixes by Hexstatic.
Hexstatic present Trailer Trax was a solo digital release by Robin Brunson and was given away for free via Bandcamp in Dec 2010.
Holotronica is Stuart Warren-Hill's solo AV 3D project. The album was released August 2014, a visual collaboration with Tom Wall of Blinkin Lab. Stuart then needed a way to show 3D visuals to a large audience when performing his album live. After considering the Pepper's Ghost technique, he soon realised this was not a touring solution. Stuart then invented Holo-Gauze. A patented technology for holographic effects that supports stereoscopic 3D. The only gauze that can do this it is also ultra fine and highly reflective giving good screen gain and contrast and becoming invisible to the audience when correctly setup. Holotronica is now based in Bristol and supplying Holo-Gauze, holographic solutions, bespoke 3D content and visuals all over the world and can list clients such as Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Samsung and Eric Prydz.
Live performances Since their art crosses a lot of boundaries they have performed at art galleries and cinemas as well as festivals and smaller clubs. After viewing
Timber,
David Byrne asked Hexstatic to do the visuals for his performance at the 1998
Lisbon Expo. Since then they performed the first ever live AV gig at the
Guggenheim in
Bilbao as well as at the
Pompidou Centre in Paris and the
Getty Museum in Los Angeles. In September 2005, they projected video on a huge water screen over the
River Thames in London as part of the Thames Festival. They also have performed at the huge Electraglide
raves in Japan before 10,000 people. They completed the world's first audio-visual album which was previewed at the
onedotzero festival in London at the
ICA. since then they have had a strong relationship and featured in many of the organisations events at home and abroad including Tokyo, Taipei and Stockholm. Notably, they performed a series of unlicensed "guerrilla gigs" in the streets of London on 10 March 2006 as part of promoting their single "Distorted Minds". They loaded up their equipment in a van and performed a 30-minute set projected on the wall of a local building in each of three sites that they had previously scouted out. The crowds of a couple hundred people each were generally well behaved and the brevity of the performances meant that Hexstatic were on their way to the next location before the police arrived. They escaped with only a single parking ticket. ==Awards==