Tenacious, creative Aphids are still going strong, says Craig Mathieson.

IN MARCH last year, composer David Young found himself at SuperDeluxe, a club in the Roppongi Hills neighbourhood of Tokyo. In the darkened venue, which bills itself as "a place of experimentation" and boasts visual art displays, performance installations and innovative bands, he was introduced to the Japanese trio d.v.d. — two drummers and a video artist, whose sound was actually playing, and in turn feeding off, visuals that included the '80s arcade staple Pong.

"That work was savvy and accessible and yet incredibly complex and it gave me the idea of 'Right, we should do a series of works looking at how live music and visuals interact'," recalls Young, the artistic director of the cutting edge music collective, Aphids. "There's so much work going on— really different modes, from interactive video games to animation."

The result, taking place over four nights next week at Federation Square's Australian Centre for the Moving Image, is the inaugural Aphids Reel Music Festival. The aim is to integrate the possibilities of sound and vision, so that what's on the screen and what's being played work as one, as opposed to traditional ideas such as accompaniment or visualisation. Neither element is subservient to the other.

"On one hand, it's held together by being live music but on the other there's Aphids' very idiosyncratic aesthetic," explains the 38-year-old Young. "We've done a lot of work in Japan, a lot of work with Italian composers, installation-based, and other stuff that is very high-tech. The festival reflects the interests that have come out of the work we've previously done."

The program is suitably eclectic. Alongside d.v.d.'s Australian debut there's a score by the Italian composer Maurizio Pisati to be performed to Hans Richter's radical 1928 animation, Vormittagspuk, as well as two works Young has had a prominent hand in: Skin Quartet, his collaboration with visual artist Louisa Bufardeci that has played around the world since debuting at the 2003 Melbourne International Arts Festival, and the just completed Waiting to Turn Into Puzzles.

Young describes the latter as "a radical departure", with its creation giving a sense of how the Aphids Reel Music Festival roster is open to new possibilities.

Puzzles began with a super-8 film shot by artist Louisa Cureham in the Japanese city of Yokohama, which she then hand-coloured, frame by frame, upon returning to Australia to create a rich, layered look that's as much painting as cinema. The celluloid was then scanned and printed, with Young adding watercolours and annotating the score.

"The musicians are actually playing the film while it plays," he notes, adding that the approach matched his own keen creative instincts. "When I hear music or write music I nearly always have a visual image in mind — a composer is really a visual artist, we don't make any sounds but we draw staffs on to paper."

The Reel Music Festival is a benchmark for Aphids. Small, alternative creative bodies often burn brightly but quickly.

Aphids, however, is now in its 14th year thanks to the tenacity of Young and his fellow musicians. They've obtained an international profile and in the next 12 months alone, they'll have works performed in Mexico City, Singapore, New York and Berlin.

Aphids Reel Music Festival runs from Thursday, June 26 to Sunday, June 29 at ACMI. For more information see www.acmi.net.au.