VMS in the press.

In 2024, Amelia Mason at WBUR attended the opening night of the Boston Immersive Music Festival. On October 17, her story about the festival aired on WBUR and on the website. She wrote, “The lights dimmed, and in the far corner vibraphonist Julian Loida began a questioning refrain. Sebastian lifted his arms as if he was steering an invisible ship, and the glowing images projected on the wall began to move. Abstract and phosphorescent, the transmuting figures sometimes evoked familiar shapes: squid tentacles, a dragon rearing its head, an orb of yellow flower petals like a cocoon. The same landscape was visible inside our visors, rendered in three dimensions, the images seeming to pass over and around us before receding into dark, infinite space.” (Mason, 2024).

In 2019, the New Hampshire Union Leader published a series of articles on Bill Sebastian and visual music. Mike Cote writes, “The sites and sounds transport you to another place, as if you were so mesmerized by an abstract painting that you stepped inside it to watch it shift and swirl around you” (Coates, 2019).

In 2018, Brian Coleman reviewed VMS’s art for Dig Boston. He wrote, “Then the music starts. Columns of color and shape begin to cascade in front of you, like liquid fireworks. Shapes that look like thick smoke or neon jellyfish float by to the left, right, and underneath” (Coleman, 2018).

In 2013, James Sullivan wrote a feature piece for the Boston Globe on Visual Music Systems. He wrote, “The potential life-changing perceptions [Bill Sebastian] imagines the OVC offering go far beyond simple sensory pleasures, he says” (Sullivan, 2013).

John Bishop, of Video Magazine in 1982, added in that “the emotional energy of the visuals equals and at times surpasses that of the music. The images are not slaves to the sounds but function the way a dancer does; interpreting, harmonizing, and enlarging the space created by the music” (Bishop, 1982).

Bob Stewart, of Heavy Metal Magazine in 1980, described the OVC as “Bill Sebastian’s towering color organ. Despite the technology involved the main factor here is personal expression. Sebastian’s hands glide over four hundred touch sensitive buttons as he does his electronic finger-painting, concentrating on size, symmetry, sharpness, continuity, and other emotionally significant concepts of the changing patterns seen on the eleven-by-ten foot display screen. He’s not switching on a gadget. Sebastian really is an artist functioning in a manner similar to a musician and performing on an instrument of great range and flexibility” (Stewart, 1980).