At a time when pop culture artifacts are recycled, rebooted and reissued to capitalize on audiences’ eagerness for nostalgia, it’s unusual to find an outfit which somehow manages to combine the sensibilities of yesteryear with an eye pointed decidedly to the future. Enter the audiovisual anomaly Telesonic 9000.

Telesonic 9000 weaves together genre-bending songs with mashups of midcentury films to produce an inventive brand of multimedia that is as retro-savvy as it is forward looking. The ingredients which make up the music - art rock explorations, Krautrock’s evolving repetition, and electropop synth hooks - form the basis for a type of abstract storytelling that connects America’s once-thriving enthusiasm for a brighter future to the uncertainty of our information revolution. This synchronization of sonic elements and stylized imagery serves as ornamentation for themes which capture an essential feeling about our relationship to time, and how the past’s visions of tomorrow impact today.

The Telesonic 9000 live ‘film-concert’ is a 21st-century update to the silent cinema format built around the interaction of musical virtuosity, pulsing electronic sounds, and kinetic future-is-now video projections. An average show consists of 300+ archive films re-edited and synchronized to music, interweaving ideas and sublime moments while immersing the audience in an audiovisual experience that is as danceable as it is thought-provoking.

The project formed in mid-2010’s Berlin, where Gray — an eclectic drummer with an art school background, then working as a session musician amidst the city’s cross-cultural creative scene — began developing a solo project based around the idea of fusing the experiences of a concert and film screening. An obsessive fan of 2001: A Space Odyssey, computer age aesthetics, and media-mixing artists like Björk, Massive Attack, and Kraftwerk, Gray gradually merged his movie and music interests by integrating his original tracks with hundreds of public domain archive films. Editing to sound and composing to imagery, scenes of atomic era scientists and postwar idealism were reconstructed to transmute the sense of pleasantly assured optimism into larger concepts relating to technological advancement and the human experience.

“Making the first show, formulating it into Progress, and all of the touring that surrounded it was really a time defined by figuring things out myself, from moment to moment. Amassing footage and pulling off a full production with very little resources, navigating my way through foreign countries, and playing for audiences - sometimes very confused audiences - who had no idea what to expect allowed me to find ways to open people up to an unusual experience.” says Dom.
 
He continued refining Telesonic 9000, globetrotting with the show to offbeat places such as Estonian art spaces, Italian cinemas, and Tokyo alleyways. This culminated in 2019’s album and film release ‘Progress’. Recorded with 2 microphones and minimal software, the album features genre-bending trips into new wave, electropop, and chillout. Its accompanying film is a 50-minute collage of hundreds of decade-spanning archive movies, covering expansive topics ranging from the life cycle of human beings to the space race. A 3-week tour of Japan and a feature slot at Berlin’s Future Soundscapes Festival (with full live band) followed. 2023 saw the release of the EP and short film ‘E.C.H.O.’, which traces the promise of the post-war technological revolution to the uncertainty of the modern digital era. The newest iteration of the live show features audioreactive oscilloscope music animations.

“When paired in the right way, music and film can create a kaleidoscope of idea and emotion.”