A Page of Madness (狂った一頁, Kurutta Ichipeiji) is a 1926 Japanese silent film directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa. Lost for 45 years until it was rediscovered by Kinugasa in his storehouse in 1971, the film is the product of an avant-garde group of artists in Japan known as the Shinkankakuha (or School of New Perceptions) who tried to overcome naturalistic representation.

With its rapid, non-linear cuts and terrifying imagery, A Page of Madness is widely regarded as a kinetic masterwork of early 20th century Japanese cinema. Accompanied by Totally Automatic, composer Matt O’Hare sonically leverages the beautiful and chaotic expressionism of Madness by utilizing visual analysis of the film to drive audible changes in a modular synthesizer, promising a raw and visceral take on a seminal horror classic.

Totally Automatic:

Totally Automatic was formed by Anne Ishii, Eugene Lew and Matthew Smith Lee in the summer of 2021. They play unarranged music with each other, on drums, saxophone and electronics, and can be found around Philadelphia.

Matt O’Hare:

Matt O’Hare is a multidisciplinary artist and educator whose projects typically engage computer music, video art, and devised theatre. He currently teaches at Haverford College where he founded the Studio for Electronic Art, an educational space where modular synthesis and sound art bridge the humanities with computer science.

Simon Whetham:

Simon Whetham explores the energy and effects of sound, from resonance and psychoacoustic effects to the transduction of sound as movement and light. Recent projects find him repurposing obsolete consumer technology in kinetic performances and installations, notably “Made to Malfunction” and “Successive Actions”.