Variety: London-born Four Tet (a.k.a. Kieran Hebden) has long been one of electronic music’s leading lights, but even his continually inventive and melodic nine albums did not prepare fans for the wildly immersive and elaborate fusion of light and sound at his current run of concerts.
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I am in awe. I see this and my mind immediately goes to the Kusama's infinity rooms, but this is so much better. The seamless combination of sound and lights in such an immersive way blows me away. I have seen lighting control systems with options for audio input, but nothing on this level of artistry before. I agree with the author of this article, from the photos and videos, this looks like something one would find at a museum of modern art, not at a concert. I have been told before that I am easily distracted; not even when I was little, but like a couple years ago, I was walking through a grocery store and I gravitated to the cereal aisle because I got distracted by the bright colors on the cereal boxes. If I were to go to a concert like this, I would definitely be mesmerized by the lights. I definitely think this design makes the concert experience so much more intense and intimate. The collective wonder that an audience feels when watching a fantastic performance is only made better by watching a fantastic design, and in this case, not only are they watching a fantastic design, but they are experiencing it as well.
The fusion of any two designs in an art instillation piece can be fascinating and mesmerizing, but the combination of sound and lighting is one that never seizes to amaze me. The sonic element has such a driving element that motivated you to feel something or do something. In this case, the music motivated the crowd to dance to the rhythmic beats. And the lights a visually pleasing and almost trance like, causing audience members to “[stare] in awe for minutes on end”. In this particular installation of light and sound by Four Tet, the tight grouping of lights hanging form strings really created a sense of movement and density when used to crate patterns of moving colored lights or sporadic movements as the lights danced within the cube of strings to the melody of the electronic songs. I wish this article had longer clips of the show in order to see if there was a pattern between the movement of the lights sad the music and how that pattern played with the overall composition and feelings evoked form this piece of performance art.
It is the most thrilling and invigorating experience when a show or performance is immersive, and especially combines two different elements of design at once. One of the most fundamental aspects of theatre and performance is to enter the audience into a space that is completely different from the outside world, and to give them an hour or two that feels as if it’s from another planet entirely. This concert looks like something I would definitely want to be a part of. Having a totally immersive environment in a show also creates such a binding sense of togetherness and communal experience among the audience that is hard to replicate in any other environment. The setup for this concert definitely seemed other-worldly-- the small orbs of light connected with one another and hanging down into the crowd looked like a visual representation of that boundless web of energy that’s created during a loud concert. The video of the show looked like you were experiencing being in outer space itself-- I can only hope other artists and performers utilize these kinds of innovative visuals during their concerts in the future for more people to see.
This show looks so, so cool and I wish I had gotten a chance to see it when it was in Los Angeles! This kind of coming together of music and light is so inventive and yet makes so much sense. I think that when many people listen to music, light and playing with color is something that comes to mind visually, and this Four Tet show seems to have produced that melding to life perfectly. I especially appreciated the Instagram videos that people had posted and that this article included because it gave just a little bit of an idea of how it might have felt to be in the venue myself. Being so immersed in this environment seems overwhelming, mostly due to the rhythm of the lights as the music changed, but it also seems like it may have made me really understand the music and how it moved in a more thorough way.
Concerts always seem incredibly hard to light in creative ways without resorting to the use of other light producing and light using forms such as media or lighting up stages. This concert, however, took musical lighting to a whole other level of innovative and exciting! Timing lights with the music is nothing new, but much like immersive theater the integration of lighting into the entirety of the space in an immersive and encompassing way makes that timing of lighting with sound all the more jaw-dropping to watch. While the videos were pretty cool, I'm sure it would be more awe inspiring to see in person, and I wish I could go to that concert sometime just to see how those lights work in real life and experience that room and those lights for myself. I also think it's really cool that this was taking place in such a small space, allowing for audience members to move around and interact with the lights. In the videos you can see them swinging or moving a bit as people brush by them, and it just reaffirms the interactivity and immersion of this concert. I would love to try something cool like this for Playground, maybe a concert lit totally with strings of Christmas lights on different circuits that interact with the music and hang around the audience.
WOAAAAHH!!!! This is so super cool! These little lights remind me of Dippin’ Dots and Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms. This installation gives the same expansive, repetitive, slightly trypophobic feeling that Kusama’s rooms give. This usage of the element of repetition in art is incredibly intriguing to me. It can evoke such different feelings; feelings of awe, creepiness, impressiveness, expansiveness, and more. In edition, the combination of light and sound is very exciting. I have always found light and sound to be very joined in my mind; my favorite type of show that I have lighted so far are dance shows because I love expressing the emotions captured in music through color and light. This installation is even more so that, without human bodies or anything else that could take away from the display of the power of pure light and sound. I am alway excited to see art that uses the element of light, as I feel like it is underappreciated in the world.
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