SOL worked closely with EOH to conceptualize a visual language for his latest release. The central theme of the cycle of death and rebirth, symbolized through botanical motifs, as well as the aesthetics of fungal matter, were elements that were utilized to find Jean-Vincent Simonet and Kohui as collaborative artists for the project. Working in close cohesion with the photographer Jean-Vincent Simonet and media artist Kohui, a comprehensive concept that embodied both the central theme and creative process of the project was realized. What resulted is a series of haunting, abstracted images imbued with both the scent of decay and the promise of new life to come.

EOH - ABOUT THE ARTIST

EOH is a Seoul-based producer working with vocalists and instrumentalists from around the world, who has quickly established a core fanbase for his relentless pursuit of phonic, technical mastery. His works range across a wide spectrum of genres, with his alternate pen name, 0CH of the duo offonoff, already a household name within the Korean music industry.
Having presented his first work as EOH in 2020, he continues to deftly balance artistry and pop sensibilities.

ARTIST'S NOTES

Fungus and Ecdysis began with a recurring dream  of EOH’s childhood home. In this dream, the space was neither dead nor alive, a conjuration of a dying memory that reminded him of mold. Soon afterwards, I looked up footage of fungal growth, and found a strange beauty that seemed connected to my dreams. With this impression, I wanted to compose a track that would be playing in the otherwise silent house in my dreams. This became the main theme of Fungus and Ecdysis. 

The second track, Ecdysis, is a variation of Fungus. I was drawn to fungi, which come to life over dead matter. This entanglement of life and death brought to mind the ecdysis, or shedding, of snakes or insects.This action, and the energy it entails, was expressed in the track. 

‘Simultaneously being born and dying’ 

This is the theme that connects the two tracks. Everyone forgets. Some things are lost to oblivion while others are remembered. This is both the death of a memory and the birth of another, and what I wanted to make into music. 

This project was a year-long chase of my recurring dream, a process in which my consciousness chased after the unconscious, with the two tracks being the result. 

PHOTOGRAPHY by JEAN-VINCENT SIMONET

Jean-Vincent Simonet fuses analogue images, digital techniques, collage and montage with remarkable fluidity. His work is permeated by a sense of overload, exuberance and entropy. Body and decor, nature and artifice, poses and emotions collide and merge into the poetics of excess that forms the basis of the photographer's research.

For this project with EOH, Simonet delved into his vast archive of source photographs of flora in various states of bloom and decay, subjecting the images to his signature technique of blending the analogue with the digital, the carefully calculated with the fluid experimentation. 

Through this process, the photographs are transformed into strangely fractured, illusory mirror images. 

The chemical composition of their countless pixels and pigments now inverted, fazed and blurred, they are at once figurative and abstract. 

GENERATIVE ALGORITHM DESIGN by KOHUI

Kohui’s work imagines new perspectives through the merging of sight and sound, striving for the interplay of sensory experience through various approaches in virtual environments. His work is in particular focused on the generation of landscapes in algorithmic processes inspired by natural phenomena, while also considering the relationship between sound and people, society, and nature.

EOH’s music and Jean-Vincent Simonet’s images are merged into a complete whole via generative algorithms designed by Kohui. Particulate components, both sonic and visual, form interactions and transmuted within the amniotic audio-visual algorithm. 

The amalgamation melds the spiritual (EOH’s music), the biological (source material for Simonet’s subject matter), and the mechanical (electrical signals exchanged via algorithmic processing), resulting in a 4:09 long digital floral arrangement of sorts, shifting in real-time response to the artists behind it.