Artist Feature: Glitschen
Glitschen is a glitch and musical artist from Canada. As a classical bass player, Glitschen found themselves intrigued in new video modular when an old tech guy introduced them to analog video from the 90s. Thus began their desire of wanting to see the music too, something to touch, feel, and physically experience. When they got their hands on modular, it felt like an extension to what they already knew, but instead of the sound, there was a signal. “Once I touched the machine, something shifted. The music didn't stop mattering, it just found a second language. The signal was held in my hands too, warm, unstable, alive in a different way”.
Glitschen’s creative space is what you’d call organized chaos, tangles of wires and various sound gear overlapping each other. Many days, the time spent in there can result in nothing, no image worth keeping or sound worth recording, but looking back on their time at Université de Montréal, they’ve taken a very important lesson to heart; error isn’t the enemy of work, it's the structure underneath, and oftentimes instability becomes its own creative language. “A knob swirls. Light shimmers. Static breaks apart into something with shape, something with intention, even if I can't explain where that intention came from. The conjuring finds its shape, and by then, I trust it completely”.
Glitschen is currently studying in Huddersfield, and in parallel to that time, they have produced 2 independent video essays Fernweh in 2025 and Vorfreude in 2026, both circling longing in different forms, one reaching backward, one reaching forward, using the poetics of malfunction as material and metaphor. Currently Glitschen is working on their 3rd short focused on premonition (the feeling that arrives before understanding does) titled Vorahnung. “I'm thinking of it as the noise before the image, the static that exists just before something becomes visible, before it becomes true. Less about wanting something, more about sensing something coming without yet knowing its shape”. This year, Glitschen is looking forward to creating a live performance setup, with analog video and sound, to use alongside several artists also living in Leipzig. Making something uncalculated, unmediated and conjured live before an audience is a simple but fascinating concept.
