What is disorienting about both the music and images on this DVD is what cuts to the core of what noise and experimental cinema are all about. All art should do a couple of things: challenge the way you see the world, and give you knew ways to see you own life. It ought to speak to you and for you. Both noise music and experimental film do that, in wonderfully uncomfortable, ambivalent ways. They disorient, obliterate, and create a sort of blank slate for you to provide your own understanding. ?Elemental Shift,? then, is aptly named.

By combining rapid images of the mundane?telephone poles, weather vanes, a shopping cart?s journey through a generic store?with noise and industrial music, multi-media artist Christopher Cichocki challenges notions of what is worth looking at. A soundtrack of noise almost forces the issue, creating a sense of urgency in the visuals, helping to ask, ?What do you think? This is beautiful, right? Or is it?? At any rate, the overall effect is meditative. Even manipulated or speeded up images draw attention to objects that have a nobility, a presence, when noticed.

?Elemental Shift? creates awareness as the same time it calls into questions how we react to what we see, and to what we miss. This is a short run release, only 250 copies, so its influence will be diffuse, but, I suspect, deep.
8/10 -- Mike Wood (19 August, 2008)