Taxi Val Mentek are: Christoph Hefti, Dominik Scherrer, Tony Gethin.

Live Performance & Video Art

Multimedia hipsters Taxi Val Mentek present a series of new video work and a new show: an exhilarating interaction of video art and Electro-Surf sound.

Get ready for an eclectic journey featuring spaced-out Japanese school girls, German-blond gym instructors and a more than serious stimulation of the senses.

Place of departure : the wicked habit of the Taxi members to take the everyday reality out of its context and experiment with it in new environments.

Place of arrival :planet Taxi, somewhere in the mi(d)st of your very own brain where a suspicious gland causes pleasure wrinkles to soothe your life. The effect is Val Mental.

Sonic and visual interference will provide the backdrop to enter the nasty world of ‘hobby terror’, where – within Taxi Val Mentek’s idiosyncratic collage-like animations – hand-knitted versions of the band members are being attacked by hobbyist’s haberdashery items.

In the taxi-universe, the obvious loses its original function - toothbrushes fly in formation through galaxies to the rhythm of electronic beats: beep beep, no beep beep. And the other way round. You see where we are heading at.

Taking the group’s crusade to escape any categorisation one step further, the fine artists / filmmakers / filmcomposers / fashion designers Taxi Val Mentek present a show that will see a totally groovy integration of live video / audio and sampled video / audio.

Assorted high- and low-tech fragments of electronic experiments in combination with a swinging live band create a complex film soundtrack-like sonic universe.

The art of Taxi Val Mentek is equally at home in both the art galleries and on the concert stage where the screening of a variety of video material through banks of TV monitors will be as much a live event as the performance of the three musicians on stage, fronted by Vaudeville-style singer and MC Christoph (once described as ‘the Johnny Rotten of Easy Listening’).

Taxi Val Mentek have no fear of cheap entertainment though paradoxically, their show leaves a splendid aftertaste of sophisticated high culture.

Put differently : Taxi Val Mentek will take you in their videos along Magritte, Monty Python and Cut Copy Paste; some love sickness put aside, their music is the perfect upper for when you’re fond of Love Boat-happiness.

Where Hungarian trash meets Las Vegas. Seeing is believing.