The electronic dance music scene has been evolving in steps ever since its birth back in the 80's, with the era of the triple deck, the CDJ revolution and the emergence of competitive DJ and Live performance software. Although at the core it still is the music that matters most, the role of visual entourage, and more specifically is rapidly becoming popular after having simmered in the underground for more than a decade.

One of the most respected outfits in this revolution is Addictive TV, a London-based audiovisual production team that has been pioneering in the mash-up of video's, light effects and music for 14 years now. They have received many plaudits for bringing the realms of video and sound closer together, perhaps providing a further justification of visuals, given that they match with their sonic counterparts. Nick Clarke and Graham Daniels have been the first artists ever to create a remix of a Hollywood film, as well as being the first ones to put DJ and VJ mixes on mainstream television with their highly acclaimed Spaced Out and Transambient series. But their activities stretch far beyond the realm of clubbing, as a more artsy side is revealed at art festivals and expositions the world over. Among the gigs for this year is the Optronics festival: a unique event at which AV artists perform at IMAX cinemas and locations such as London's National Film Theatre.

With the duo being set to attend and perform at this year's Amsterdam Dance Event, 365Mag hooked up with Producer, VJ and editor of Addictive TV Graham Daniels for an update of his views on visuals and his performance in Amsterdam

1. How would you describe addictive tv yourself?

Well, we're producers and audiovisual artists, simple as that. AV is a kind of cross over between, and joining of, DJing and VJ-ing and that's what we're into, that's our thing. And no different to the audio and music world where some artists also produce radio shows and so on, we produce broadcast television shows about the scene. We also produce other artists and obviously create our own audiovisual work and perform. We also organise events, like our night The Audiovisual Lounge which we ran for many years in London's Shoreditch or our high-profile visual music festival Optronica we now run with the British Film Institute at the NFT and IMAX. To us, the whole visuals thing is really a natural progression of remix culture and electronic music.

2. How did the idea came about?

Well, the idea never really "came about". It's been a long development over many years. I personally have been VJ-ing now for over a decade and I guess that's where it really all came from. As Addictive TV, we'd also been producing television for many years too and wanted to bring the two areas together and so around 1996 we pitched an "ambient television" idea to Channel 4 that was eventually produced as a programme called Transambient in 1998. Producing this show is how I met Tolly, who created music for the project. After that, me & Tolly just began working together more and more, especially for Mixmasters, our long running ITV1 music series of DJ/VJ mixes, and the rest, as they say, is history.

3. What's so cool about creating and cutting up video's?

That's like asking "what's so cool about making music?" or "what's so cool about making films?". You're either passionate about wanting to do something or you're not. We're really into the idea of creating visual music cut-ups and getting a great a reaction from crowds. Live video was just something I'd found very liberating from the outset and having worked for a long time in film and TV, I knew how images worked together, and mixing live was a way to bring together a love of very precise editing and electronic music, but in a spontaneous way. Music and visuals just do it for us, you can get inside the music in a whole new way.

4. What sets you apart from the rest?

Well, for starters doing both the music and the visuals, compared to VJ's, there's not that many of us performing both Audio and Visuals. And within AV itself, we're really into the idea of remixing films - creating dance tracks from audiovisual samples from a movie, but still keeping the film's narrative in some manner and certainly being respectful of the original film itself. Not that many artists are taking this approach. We recently played in Brazil, so remixed the fantastic Brazilian movie City of God, and it went down amazingly. The crowd loved it. Similarly, late last year, we played in Shanghai so remixed Chinese movie Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Again it went down a storm.

5. What do you think is the added value for parties of having a VJ around?

We've all got eyes as well as our ears. And simply by being an extension to the music, great visuals can really help create an amazing atmosphere. And in the same way, bad visuals can simply have the reverse effect! Images always add an extra dimension - why did people invent film and then television and not just be content with radio or gramophones!

6. What has been Addictive TV's ' breakthrough'?

Depends on what you really mean by "breakthrough". We've done many things that have brought us attention, from being the first artists to officially audiovisually remix a Hollywood film to being the first people to put DJ and VJ mixes onto mainstream television. We also started Optronica, our own dedicated audiovisual festival putting acts on at an IMAX, which had never been done before either. But I guess the thing that really made the difference in terms of "getting noticed" was taking the decision to perform our own integrated music and visuals sets, and stop VJ'ing for other DJ's We still occasionally do a guest VJ set for a high profile artist, like recently we did an exclusive set for The Chemical Brothers in Rome. But performing our own AV shows was definitely a turning point.

7. What's your favourite audience (geographically), and why?

Planet Earth! In all fairness, everywhere's great really. But I guess if we had to pick one place especially, it'd be Budapest in Hungary. We've simply had fantastic gigs every time we play there! The crowd are very open and into the whole AV thing.

8. Any funny stories about travelling?

Travelling? Mmmm... We accidentally flooded Tolly's hotel room in Germany once, the hotel was having building work done and they'd turned off the water without telling anyone! And a tap was accidentally left on. We went out for quite a few hours and came back to a dark patch under Tolly's door, and when he opened it, water flooded out into the corridor and the room was deep in nearly half a metre of water! Ooops. And, er, one other time we accidentally set off all the fire alarms in a hotel in Ireland at 4am! They really weren't very happy.

9. How do you see the future of VJ-ing at clubs and parties?

It'll grow and become more popular. At some point hopefully clubs and venues will also start installing more permanent visual equipment too. I think the AV scene will grow as well and more artists will perform both the music and visuals.

10. What are your future plans?

We've quite a few project coming up. We've just been approached to remix two other US movies, which is great. We've also just been commissioned by an arts board in England to remix the classic 60s movie Get Carter for the opening of a film festival. The festival takes place in Newcastle - the UK city where Get Carter was all shot and there's an old giant car park heavily featured in the film that's now going to be pulled down and demolished, so there's a special event taking place projecting on the side of the car park where we'll be performing. Aside from that, we've got gigs coming up in the USA, all over Europe and in Russia, Hungary and Romania too. And we've just been asked to do a small tour of Algeria which will be different but fantastic.

And obviously the big thing for us is the next edition of our Optronica festival in March 2007. We describe Optronica as 'visual music on the big screen' - which simply means AV acts performing in cinematic spaces like a huge IMAX cinema, London's National Film Theatre as well as in club spaces. The acts we go for have visuals as a major component to what they do, and we have put on acts like ex-Kraftwerk main man Karl Bartos with his AV show, New York turntablist DJ Spooky doing a film remix, and Warp act Plaid with video artist Bob Jaroc. We also programme smaller acts with a more left-field or "art" approach, like Takagi Masakatsu from Japan or Skoltz_Kolgen from Canada, along with British acts like Exceeda or The Mellowtrons. A big part of this festival is to give a really high profile platform for visuals and AV acts who all too often get a bit sidelined at major festivals.

11. what can we expect from your show at ADE?

Expect a full-on dance set of AV madness with break-beat film remixes and promo mash-ups; everything from Franz Ferdinand vs New Order, Jim Morrison mashed with Blondie, James Bond completely remixed, Elvis Presley vs The Streets, a break-beat-ska remix of Laurel and Hardy through to the Sex Pistols and our well known re- working of cult British movie The Italian Job, and obviously a lot more besides. We also recently created a special bootleg cut-up of Fernando Meirelles City of God [Cidade de Deus] as, like I said earlier, we played in Brazil - so we'll definitely be giving that a spin. We've made a hell of a lot of new work this year, and the show is evolving the whole time so we never quite know what we're going to do till we get there...!

12. For the techies: Which programs do you use for VJ-ing and production?

To perform, mainly we use 3 Pioneer DVJ-X1 DVD turntables, and this year we've been testing the 2nd generation version - the new DVJ-1000 for them - we'll be bringing them with us. We use a modified and customised Edirol V4 vision mixer that takes audio (to enable us to cut and scratch audio and video at the same time), a laptop running VJammPro software, a Pioneer DJM600, or 800 or 1000 audio mixer and the Pioneer EFX-1000 effects unit. To produce work, we use software like Ableton Live, Cubase, Rebirth, After Effects, Premiere, Edius, and some other tools.