If you went to a rave in the ‘90s, there’s a good chance you’ve gaped at the work of VJ and visual artist Vello Virkhaus. Back then, his O.V.T. crew was at the cutting edge of live video mixing for electronic music events. They did literally hundreds of gigs.
Ironically, the Michigan-born Virkhaus hated his first rave. The year was 1991, and the music was all whooshing, vacuum-cleaner techno. “I didn’t like it at all.”
At a later event in Chicago, where he was enrolled in the same art school his grandfather had attended, he discovered Richie Hawtin and Juan Atkins. He also discovered that if he took some of the video feedback and looping experiments he had conducted as teenager in his mom’s basement, and projected them behind the DJ, the kids went nuts for it.
