Chromatic Dispersion

collaboration with Koen Holtkamp’s visuals presented exclusively at Rewire Festival 2021 Online Edition

Close friends for years, Byron Westbrook and Koen Holtkamp found themselves living on opposite sides of the USA when the pandemic struck. “Chromatic Dispersion” was conceived as a way to stay connected, beginning as a visual interpretation by Holtkamp of Westbrook’s most recent compositions before it evolved into its own idiosyncratic project. As the duo developed the work further, they began to allow their process to feed into itself, with Westbrook taking sonic cues from Holtkamp’s visual treatments and vice versa.

Holtkamp’s approach is inspired by the ‘Visual Music’ of artists like Jordan Belson and James Whitney as well as Structural Cinema; playing with elements of physics and gravity as well as optical illusions. Westbrook’s compositions incorporate interwoven patterns of melody tuned in just intonation, taking inspiration from the Lovely Music label and artists such as David Behrman, with whom he studied from 2010-2012.