Manchester

I'll try this out. Here lies a record of where I am/have been and what it is I usually get up to in terms of this current tour. Sometimes it's mundane. Sometimes it's awe inspiring. Mostly it's a challenge coupled with escalating frustration.
This is how it all begins. I spent 14 hours indoors at the Apollo Theatre setting up and programming a lighting rig. I have seen nothing of this fairly miserable city, which is how it usually goes. There is video for days. Seven projectors and a half dozen cameras on stage. 2 Barco projectors the size of a pair of small elephants out front. It's bound to look pretty amazing. Drawing Restraint is the title of a Matthew Barney/Bjork work that I'm rather fond of. The title has been kicking around in my head for most of the day. It;s something that I feel I am learning these days. I am not the designer or creator of this show. It's a position that, at the moment I am neither familiar nor comfortable with. The designer is someone (one of the few in this weird world of lighting) that I deeply respect and admire. He began with The Pixies and the Sugarcubes and has of late been designing for Bjork and The White Stripes. He's been at it for twenty years, and has a really good idea of what he wants to see and how it can be accomplished. The design for this particular show began pretty busy and crowded. Above the ten musicians and countless instruments and gags there was meant to be a big, tangles mess of artifical neon that, through the use of multiple motors on a number of points, would change shape every few songs and morph into weird things and colors. It all fell apart, both literally and, well, financially a few weeks back, so the look is pretty stark, in comparison as we start the tour. I also haven't had so little to work with on a stage of this size (5,000-7,000/night) in a while. So, beginning with a dozen moving lights and some leds and a bit of fake neon we've cobbled toghether an interesting look. There is, as I've said, video everywhere. I have done a handful of tours with video, all of which I have either run myself or directed throughout a show, and all content came from me. This time lighting and video and separate and distinct, fighting over space and attention to the same end. Yesterday I began programming, which is something that I don't always have 2 days dedicated to with a full, empty stage, but for the lights in front of me. It's a bit of a luxury, I suppose. On the flight over I listened to the band's 2 records, 1 e.p. and slew of covers and demos. I made pretty careful notes on each song regarding color schemes, who does what and where on stage and where the major changes occur. My own shows tend to be very cue-intensive in that I program at least one page for every song in a band's rerpertoire consisting of 20 or 30 cues per song and somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 to 1,000 cues per show. It's a labor of love sometimes, but usually it's a labor of, well, labor. It's what I'm good at, really. Sitting in front of a glowing computer and making a bunch of things that move around and blink on and off look the way I think each moment of each song should look. My instincts are, generally, to have a visual change to correspond to each significant auditory change in a song. It's almost always a rock song, in 4/4 and you'd have to be a mongoloid to not recognize a verse from a chorus and be able to anticipate it live. As it is commonly said in this business, it's not rocket science. It all appears rather intricate and technical, but at the end of the day most people respond to a combination of bright and loud in a positive manner, regardless of it's eloquence or refinement. So, drawing restraint. I usually sit back with my ipod and visualize how I want a song to look. When I don't have the luxury of staring at a real stage I sometimes stare at a 3D rendering of the stage and go from there. When life is really brutal I do it all in my head 'blind' and hope it looks the way it should look by the first show. I had began programming as I would, cue by cue, but the designer had a different vision, I think. Where I had envisioned 20 cues per song he saw one, maybe two. When the guitar player changes keys I had seen the back wall swept with color, and when it really picked up towards the end I saw the lights turning out into the house and scanning the crowd. That's usually how it goes. I ended up with one of the busiest songs in the set being lit by four amber lights from the side of the stage. It took several hours for me to rationalize a theatrical view of this particular show. It is different, for sure. There is more of a focus on the show as a whole rather than each particular element of each song. We literally spent hours concocting unusual color combinations and being sure to never use the same 'look' (i.e. color and position) more than once. It's a different aesthetic that I'm used to, and the added element of almost being directed in many of the creative decisions makes this an interesting learning experience, for sure. It will all pile together with the video to be a pretty interesting thing, no doubt. So, today I'm back at it. The video guy was up until 4am editing together a bunch of clips synchronized swimmers, as you do. We'll all get together this afternoon and run through a mock show and hope nothing catches fire before the official start next week.