VJ Feature: The Big Chill

When it comes to music festivals, few place as much importance on VJing and visual artistry as The Big Chill. As the festival appoaches it’s fifteenth anniversary, mondo*dr spoke to co-founder Katrina Larkin about their long-running affinity for quality audiovisuals…

At the very first Big Chill, which was 15 years ago this coming February, we had lots of friends like Matt Black [one half of Coldcut] and Stuart Warren Hill [one half of Hexstatic] and I don’t know how but Stuart managed to get hold of this movie sized cinema screen (which every Sunday morning became this absolute curse to get up) and a projector. This was at the Union Chapel in London, so it was a really beautifully set up. We used to fill the whole main floor with matresses covered with fabrics and as soon as people would walk in the door they’d be like kids – they would just run straight on to all these matresses. The DJs would play and the likes of Matt and Stuart would do the visuals. People started to turn up with content - they’d actually go out filming with their camcorders. It was the very beginnings of the structure of visuals with music.

When we had our first festival – we made sure that every time there was a DJ on stage we would have visual content from people to put on to the screen at the same time. We got a right little collective of VJs going in those early days. What happens now is we have one person - John Rickson - who coordinates all the VJs. Artists now are so up on VJing, that they tend to bring their own visuals with them – so the collective is fighting a little harder sometimes to get on the screen.
A lot of big festivals have big screens to play adverts between music or so you can see the band better. We use those screens all the way through for VJ mixes to go with the music that’s playing.

The Big Chill House [Big Chill’s club in Kings Cross, London] was properly set up so the VJ has their own space which overlooks the dancefloor and they can see all the screens from. It was always set up from the very first day with the VJ in mind - with all the best technology and also so they could keep in eye contact with the DJ.
Who’s my favourite VJ? There’s so many of them! I do really like Hexstatic, I think they’ve always been really really clever , I really like what they do. But I still like what Matt Black does as well…

With the Orbital set to make a come back at The Big Chill 2009 festival, top notch lighting and visuals will once again play a major role. More info at www.bigchill.net