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The collaboration between superstar DJ and producer, Sandra Collins, and acclaimed director/VJ Vello Virkhaus began in May of 2005 in Los Angeles. Collins approached Virkhaus after becoming acquainted with his work through WMC’s illustrious “Ultra Music Festival” , mutual friends, and several random meetings on their return flights from WMC. The duo started off their first collaboration by producing 15 original visual music DVD’s for a show at the Avalon nightclub, in Los Angeles. Their first performance experience together introduced Sandra to spinning on the Pioneer DVJ-x1 video turntables, implementing an audiovisual mixing solution.

The video feed from the DVJ’s, was fed to Virkhaus and remixed along with additional audio reactive animations and live cameras. Utilizing various hardware and software solutions from Apple, Edirol and Brash Live, Vello twists and blends the video streams together. This concept led Virkhaus and Collins to be sponsored by Pioneer for 2006, and to carry the performance even further. The show now integrates over 40 original animated works on DVD, which Sandra blends together throughout the night. Collins and Virkhaus utilize several different groundbreaking techniques to mix DVD-video and animated footage (much as traditional DJs scratch records) combining these mixing styles with Collins genre smashing performance style, the duo create a mesmerizing marriage of sight and sound. Collins sees the collaboration with Virkhaus as an opportunity to stretch the limits not only of the club experience, but of the live mixed electronic music experience as a whole. Linking music and visuals together and fine tuning what types of styles blend well together pulls the audience even further into the space.

Sandra and Vello together have an incredible resume and have been recognized around the world for their artistic gifts. Vello has worked on visual content creation and vj’d live for a wide range of both mainstream megastars and electronic artists. Vello has been profiled on the Apple Pro video website, and won an award from Clubsystems in 2005 for “Best Video System” for Crobar NY. His company V Squared Labs has created and performed visual work for artists such as Sting, Destiny’s Child, Beyonce, 50 cent, Blink 182, Green Day, Bon Jovi, Jay Z and Korn. “The merger of the visualists and the disc jockeys is going to feed the media hungry youth the kind if interactive stimulation they need to continue to capture their imagination and attendance to electronic music events in the future,” says Virkhaus.

Sandra was named “DJ of the Year” in 2003 by Dancestar, and has received tireless praise from such publications as URB and the Los Angeles Times. A tireless experimenter who is always in search of new sounds and platforms for her music, Collins is truly in a class of her own, whether she’s performing to a 5-10,000 person club, a festival or an imitate gallery space. “I knew from the start of my career as a DJ that it’s easy to be become pigeonholed when you regularly perform live and so I’ve always experimented with different styles of music in my shows,” she says. Imagine the experience of such forces combined. Or, rather than simply imagining it, check out the spectacular results at the INTERFERENCE performance nearest you.