Everybody at Mode already knows me as a freak for live music, (even if they still seem shocked when I tell them I went to two concerts in one night, or that I risked my life by traveling all over Florida and Georgia with 6 complete strangers to see multiple shows on the same tour), but my last concert experience really warrants a post from a visual and interactive standpoint. It also doesn’t hurt that I got a few decent pictures. The “Lights in the Sky” tour ups the ante for a band known for its constantly re-invented live aesthetic: Nine Inch Nails. Very few musicians are so invested in the visual side of their band that they’ll hire a full-time art director, or label every track on a 4-disc instrumental album with photos instead of titles.

I’ve seen a number of higher-budgeted shows where the lighting and video equipment are used to create distinctly different motifs for each song, but this was a first for me in that I would actually describe them as “scenes”. This was probably the most creative use so far of Element Labs’ Stealth Screens, an increasingly-popular modular LED system for concerts, trade shows, and television events. Capable of playing really any video, albeit at a low resolution, the beauty of this system is that the minimal screens allow light through, achieving kind of a 1-way mirror effect depending on where the light sources are. By layering 3 of these screens throughout the stage and hoisting them to different levels, NIN was able to play in complete animated scenes with back, mid, and foregrounds. It was refreshing to see the environment change to reflect the music, both in very literal and very abstract ways.

As if this weren’t enough, these screens have been given more than the traditional inputs, and actually interact with the band in different ways. Whether displaying waveforms of each member’s output in realtime, or fields of static that scatter when someone steps close or waves a flashlight, or displaying huge heavily-filtered abstractions of what cameramen are filming live, the possibilities really seem endless. While from a technological standpoint this is all insanely complex, from a mechanical standpoint it is pretty practical and easy compared to traditional lighting rigs (Okay, they had hundreds of those too. I’m not going to complain.) The point is that NIN have developed a light show that is conceptual and elegantly-executed, where most big-name bands will take the shock-and-awe approach of MORE lights, MORE pyrotechnics, MORE video, without attempting to innovate.

I’m going to make an honest effort not load every post I make with music references, but I’m excited to see audio/visual experiments I had only read about executed on a huge scale like this, and see the bar raised for onstage theatrics.

Some video for those that are interested. Not mine. I’m not a big enough fan to fly to Caracas.
clip 1 - “Echoplex” (Giant touch-activated drum machine made out of light? Sweet!)
clip 2 - “Only” (Display reacting to motion)