Exit director Mike Daly collaborates with musician Sarah Blasko for Sydney Graphic Festival 2015
Exit’s Mike Daly has recently collaborated with Australian musician Sarah Blasko for Sydney Graphic Festival.
As one of the headline acts of The Graphic Festival at the Sydney Opera House, Blasko performed for the first time her new and highly anticipated fifth album ‘Eternal Return’, which comes out next month.
The show was a specially-commissioned performance for the festival which featured exclusive visuals created by Daly. In collaboration with Blasko, Daly conceptualised the vision and created 45 minutes of mesmerising integrated visuals, providing the perfect backdrop to Blasko’s majestic performance.
Says Daly: “It was great to collaborate with 
Sarah again, we both wanted to create immersive and mesmerising visuals that felt deeply integrated with the music. We really wanted to give the audience a sense of
synaesthesia, as if seeing the music or hearing the images. Synthesisers really define the sound of this album and although synthetic and electric, these songs feel very organic and emotive, so I wanted to create both processes and aesthetics that reflect that.
“In the space of six
weeks I designed and created custom-made visuals for the entire album. All the images are entirely synthesised in the computer by creating abstract 3D ‘systems’. These systems respond to the separate audio recordings of each instrument on the album, growing and developing with the
music. The results are mesmerising graphics that seem to build themselves organically out of the sound.
Daly’s work has been extremely well received by the public and the media.
Sydney Morning
Herald: “She cautiously but elegantly made her way through 10 tracks, all of them accompanied by filmmaker Mike Daly’s subtle but stunning visuals. [They] provided a perfect backdrop as Blasko journeyed majestically through strange lands.”
The Brag: “Then there’s the visual element – apropos of the Opera House’s Graphic festivities – in which artist Mike Daly adds minimalist, shape-shifting backdrops specifically crafted for each song. […] a lot of work clearly went into
crafting these, allowing for the observer to immerse themselves in the album even further.”