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imomusBy chance, I discovered a snap of Ladytron's lighting cues list on Flickr. It got me thinking about button-pushing. This is literally a series of instructions to the guy in charge of the lighting board about which buttons to push, and when. But it's also a band attempting to push an audience's buttons.
Why do I find this lighting cue list so depressing? I suppose it's because I know it probably "works", on a Pavlovian level. Ladytron come onstage and perform a song called Black Cat, accompanied by "very fast flashing lights, high impact, high energy, red and white". Our nervous systems respond; it's physiological. We get stoked; we're wired that way. The set segues into Ghosts, which is "flashy, red and white", and then into "Runaway", which is "very flashy, red and blue". There's a standing instruction in capitals at the bottom of the sheet: "NO STATIC WHITE LIGHT AT ALL PLEASE".
Now, my aesthetics, when it comes to stage lighting, are completely the opposite to the ones spelled out here. I really dislike the coloured gel lighting that's become standard at modern rock shows -- a simplified, banalised, flight-cased version of 1960s psychedelic electric ecstasy. Like so much else in pop and rock music, something radical and experimental became, over a forty year span, gradually safe, stale and conservative. It couldn't easily be thrown away, though, because it works. It still pushes buttons out there. It's efficient and effective. That's why I hate it.
Personally, I like the static white lighting Ladytron shun. The Talking Heads Stop Making Sense tour, filmed by Jonathan Demme, had a stern rule: no coloured lights on the performers. It looks great. There's plenty of colour on the screen behind the band, resourceful props like an oversized suit and a domestic lamp being swung about, and a sense of sweaty, funky transcendence that's achieved despite the "making love with the lights on" ambience. I suppose it isn't so much that Talking Heads aren't "pushing buttons" here -- they are. It's just that they've put some thought into making new buttons that do new things.
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In purely behavioural terms, though, making new buttons that do new things is a road to nowhere. Confronted with unfamiliar and ambiguous cues, audiences become confused. What does it all mean? How are we supposed to react? Wire's Document and Eyewitness is a great example of originality leaving a rock audience frustrated and perplexed. Punters keen to hear Wire's early punk rock thrash "12XU" got Dada performance art involving dismantled cooking stoves and weird unrecorded material instead. The relationship between stage and stalls deteriorated rapidly, and -- the time-honoured gesture of clichéd rock intolerance -- bottles were thrown.
Ladytron's lighting list made me remember the tensions that often develop on rock tours. You're out on the road with another band, labelmates perhaps, and relations begin to deteriorate when, night after night, you witness something enviable yet depressing: the band pushes really obvious buttons in an entirely calculated way -- repeating Pete Townshend's Gustav Metzger-influenced guitar-smashing routine, for instance. You see it the first time and it looks spontaneous, even if you know it was originally done in, you know, September 1964. By the tenth or twentieth time it looks cynically calculating and formulaic. By now you hate the band. You hate the way they push the same buttons every night, and you hate the way the audience responds. It's all so "successful", and yet it's -- by your lights -- a dismal artistic failure. The audience changes every night, it seems, so that the band doesn't have to. Eventually, to no-one's great surprise, the medium slips from relevance, undermined by its own conservatism.
I was chatting about this last night to Berlin musician friends -- Joe Howe and Jason Forest, Emma and Jen (Carsten Nicolai hovered nearby). We were sitting in the Lustgarten between the Berliner Dom and the Altes Museum, picnicking on the grass in front of a stage where Kyoka was performing a set of her material. Kyoka admirably avoided recognisable beats or melodies, creating unpredictable clusters of abstract sound closer to Stockhausen than trad pop or rock music. Sure, you could say that being non-conventional is, within the microbubble of arty subsidised Berlin music events, the "conventional" thing to do. But it's not a very interesting paradox. "Original" may be relative and contextual, but it still means something.
The little stage on which Kyoka performed was comically incongruous, a rent-a-rock stage dwarfed by the vast facade of the Altes Museum, surmounted by a huge white-bulb ticker display spelling out quirky, arty phrases: "UGLY THING", "POINT TO THE SKY" and "YOU LOOK GORGEOUS". The little stage had the usual sad cluster of gel spots on a rail, lights which flashed incongruously along to Kyoka's daring music in the usual feeble "rock" way, like an elderly clerical worker gamely shaking his arse at the office Christmas party. If the museum facade was unmistakably coming to us from 1822, and the ticker and Kyoka's music felt freshly 2009, the little rock stage and its coloured lights were a portable parody of 1972, singing the body electric with feet of corporate clay.
Afterwards, when the lawn grew dark and the audience had gone, a small cluster of us stood there in the dusk, lit only by the ticker up on the museum facade. Jan Lindenberg noticed a strange glow coming from the empty stage, a sort of optic hum. The coloured lights, extinguished, were still faintly lit. "It looks like a shrine," Jan said.
It was the moment introverts love, the moment when the rock noise and the flashing lights die away, and nobody's pushing our buttons any more. The moment when something can happen. We unhitched our bikes from a railing where a poster marked DIONYSUS hung -- an advert for a forthcoming museum show, Dionysus: Metamorphosis and Ecstasy -- but the moment belonged to Apollo, the wine god's mysterious nemesis.
Why do I find this lighting cue list so depressing? I suppose it's because I know it probably "works", on a Pavlovian level. Ladytron come onstage and perform a song called Black Cat, accompanied by "very fast flashing lights, high impact, high energy, red and white". Our nervous systems respond; it's physiological. We get stoked; we're wired that way. The set segues into Ghosts, which is "flashy, red and white", and then into "Runaway", which is "very flashy, red and blue". There's a standing instruction in capitals at the bottom of the sheet: "NO STATIC WHITE LIGHT AT ALL PLEASE". Now, my aesthetics, when it comes to stage lighting, are completely the opposite to the ones spelled out here. I really dislike the coloured gel lighting that's become standard at modern rock shows -- a simplified, banalised, flight-cased version of 1960s psychedelic electric ecstasy. Like so much else in pop and rock music, something radical and experimental became, over a forty year span, gradually safe, stale and conservative. It couldn't easily be thrown away, though, because it works. It still pushes buttons out there. It's efficient and effective. That's why I hate it.
Personally, I like the static white lighting Ladytron shun. The Talking Heads Stop Making Sense tour, filmed by Jonathan Demme, had a stern rule: no coloured lights on the performers. It looks great. There's plenty of colour on the screen behind the band, resourceful props like an oversized suit and a domestic lamp being swung about, and a sense of sweaty, funky transcendence that's achieved despite the "making love with the lights on" ambience. I suppose it isn't so much that Talking Heads aren't "pushing buttons" here -- they are. It's just that they've put some thought into making new buttons that do new things.
[Error: unknown template video]
In purely behavioural terms, though, making new buttons that do new things is a road to nowhere. Confronted with unfamiliar and ambiguous cues, audiences become confused. What does it all mean? How are we supposed to react? Wire's Document and Eyewitness is a great example of originality leaving a rock audience frustrated and perplexed. Punters keen to hear Wire's early punk rock thrash "12XU" got Dada performance art involving dismantled cooking stoves and weird unrecorded material instead. The relationship between stage and stalls deteriorated rapidly, and -- the time-honoured gesture of clichéd rock intolerance -- bottles were thrown.
Ladytron's lighting list made me remember the tensions that often develop on rock tours. You're out on the road with another band, labelmates perhaps, and relations begin to deteriorate when, night after night, you witness something enviable yet depressing: the band pushes really obvious buttons in an entirely calculated way -- repeating Pete Townshend's Gustav Metzger-influenced guitar-smashing routine, for instance. You see it the first time and it looks spontaneous, even if you know it was originally done in, you know, September 1964. By the tenth or twentieth time it looks cynically calculating and formulaic. By now you hate the band. You hate the way they push the same buttons every night, and you hate the way the audience responds. It's all so "successful", and yet it's -- by your lights -- a dismal artistic failure. The audience changes every night, it seems, so that the band doesn't have to. Eventually, to no-one's great surprise, the medium slips from relevance, undermined by its own conservatism.
I was chatting about this last night to Berlin musician friends -- Joe Howe and Jason Forest, Emma and Jen (Carsten Nicolai hovered nearby). We were sitting in the Lustgarten between the Berliner Dom and the Altes Museum, picnicking on the grass in front of a stage where Kyoka was performing a set of her material. Kyoka admirably avoided recognisable beats or melodies, creating unpredictable clusters of abstract sound closer to Stockhausen than trad pop or rock music. Sure, you could say that being non-conventional is, within the microbubble of arty subsidised Berlin music events, the "conventional" thing to do. But it's not a very interesting paradox. "Original" may be relative and contextual, but it still means something.
The little stage on which Kyoka performed was comically incongruous, a rent-a-rock stage dwarfed by the vast facade of the Altes Museum, surmounted by a huge white-bulb ticker display spelling out quirky, arty phrases: "UGLY THING", "POINT TO THE SKY" and "YOU LOOK GORGEOUS". The little stage had the usual sad cluster of gel spots on a rail, lights which flashed incongruously along to Kyoka's daring music in the usual feeble "rock" way, like an elderly clerical worker gamely shaking his arse at the office Christmas party. If the museum facade was unmistakably coming to us from 1822, and the ticker and Kyoka's music felt freshly 2009, the little rock stage and its coloured lights were a portable parody of 1972, singing the body electric with feet of corporate clay.
Afterwards, when the lawn grew dark and the audience had gone, a small cluster of us stood there in the dusk, lit only by the ticker up on the museum facade. Jan Lindenberg noticed a strange glow coming from the empty stage, a sort of optic hum. The coloured lights, extinguished, were still faintly lit. "It looks like a shrine," Jan said.
It was the moment introverts love, the moment when the rock noise and the flashing lights die away, and nobody's pushing our buttons any more. The moment when something can happen. We unhitched our bikes from a railing where a poster marked DIONYSUS hung -- an advert for a forthcoming museum show, Dionysus: Metamorphosis and Ecstasy -- but the moment belonged to Apollo, the wine god's mysterious nemesis.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-02 08:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-02 08:40 am (UTC)poem
Date: 2009-08-02 08:52 am (UTC)I would like to know the meaning or longer story behind Apollo. And the bikes etc...
It seems like you had to wait til after the show was over and the lights died to catch the magic. And what a night it seemed.
I remember mostly as a teenager it seemed an empty stage was the most inviting place to go, after the show sneak up there and dig around... looking for the magic... never 'finding' anything, but through the searching... through the action, the magic was there.
I too like the white light. And really dont mind other lights but GOD! cant people realize how stupid (I dont need to repeat you) and old they make it???
You did the whole Aki, Momus thing in Chelsea w the white light and it was AMAZING!!! awesome. Loved it. Sonic Youth on an early tour did great strobing white minimal lights, and ah, there were a few others... Brainiac did a crazy single strobe the whole show, crashworship... had an amazing light show the few times I saw them... white strobes ( I guess I react well to the white strobe) and making actual 'fire pits' (made from saltpeter?) in the audience area.... and then had the show shut down... because... you know, there's fires going on inside the building...
ok, so the idea of repeating things past the point of usefulness...
I mean I often think about sex... like how many times are you going to blow a load on someone's face, and be like WOW! thats fantastic... I mean, 20 years later, WOW! you know... so it;s a challenge...
but another way of looking at it is, you're you your entire life... and you have to do something with it, stay interested in you...
you shaved your head over a few weeks back...
a few weeks ago, I had amazing sex... I dont know the girls experience... but, it wasn't during the sex... it was afterwards... I held on to her body for maybe 5 or 10 minutes minutes well my body just buzzed... It felt amazing. I wasn't expecting that... and it wasn't a predictable show. It just happened.
but I dont think I could take that show on the road...
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-02 09:21 am (UTC)yawn
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-02 09:59 am (UTC)Thanks, by the way, for your suggestions months ago of Things To See in Berlin. The hours during which we made it to those neighborhoods didn't always match with what we were trying to see, but we did make it to the magazine shop. A good deal of the time was spent eating talafel in a Turkish neighborhood.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-02 10:42 am (UTC)* We are always happy when the lights are simply set, focused, turned on and left alone during the show.
* Overhead lights should be focused on the center mic and bass player positions. We need to read notes.
* Mr Thomas does not like flashing lights. Light scenes can shift but avoid flashing.
* No smoke-machines are to be used during our performance.
* Lighting should be theatrical rather than rockist. We are interested in atmosphere, mood, drama, energy, subtlety, imagination-- not rock cliche. Please do not use patterned gobos. Mr Thomas finds patterned light routines to be particularly offensive.
* Lights should be carefully focused on Mr Thomas and the band & not directed at the audience. Please try to avoid EXCESSIVE backlighting.
* Lights must never fade to black between songs.
* Light comes mostly from above not from below. A handy tip to keep in mind is that the sun is up.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-02 10:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-02 11:17 am (UTC)--this is awfully nice sounding, especially since health has more or less retired me from going out to do very much, and when i do it can be kind of rough. and because nobody is going to come to my living room.
i think though the idea of 'institutionalization' though is interesting,that something becomes so associated with one other thing that it becomes indespensable or even that one is isn't thought of without the other, that it would feel instinctual.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-02 11:18 am (UTC)Anyway, after slowly making my way up the stairs I found a seat. It struck me sitting there how I'd never really experienced anything quite like this before; it was comic and sublime in equal measure; the romantic lynchian atmosphere of the auditorium, occasionally punctuated by someone coming in and having to negotiate the darkness. It was almost worth the ticket price alone just to experience this moment of things-not-being-as-they-should-be. This was perhaps the crux of it for me: this shouldn't be happening, but it is.
We are experts at working things out now, delineating things. I've started reading a book by Peter Fuller ("Art and Psychoanalysis") and he appears to be trying to work out whether our appreciation of certain timeless artworks has a material basis; in other words, whether its down to certain unchanging factors that relate to our nature. I'm sure Steven Pinker wrote something similar in "The Blank Slate"; both seem to think that certain art appeals because we are genetically hard-wired to appreciate it. So, to a large extent, aesthetics is just about pushing the right buttons.
Perhaps this is the kind of thinking that, consciously or not, informs our choice of lighting. If it works, don't fix it?
If a Macca falls in a forest, and there's no-one around
Date: 2009-08-02 11:32 am (UTC)Re: If a Macca falls in a forest, and there's no-one around
Date: 2009-08-02 11:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-02 12:00 pm (UTC)Like Mr Thomas, I'm of the generation that was fighting the good fight against rockism. Who's fighting it now? Not these guys, fo' sho':
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-02 12:06 pm (UTC)I didn't say that doing something over and over was wrong because "they don't mean it man". It wasn't the inauthenticity of that I was stressing, but the unoriginality. Also, I never said that originality "means something outside context". I said that it means something despite being bound by context and being relative. To say that meaning is determined by context is not to say that meaning is absent.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-02 12:15 pm (UTC)Re: If a Macca falls in a forest, and there's no-one around
Date: 2009-08-02 12:19 pm (UTC)Re: If a Macca falls in a forest, and there's no-one around
Date: 2009-08-02 12:32 pm (UTC)Re: If a Macca falls in a forest, and there's no-one around
Date: 2009-08-02 12:44 pm (UTC)Sure, and this is why it's really hard to keep liking a band you're on tour with.
But even new bands now manage to convey the impression that they're repeating themselves, and on first listen. That Raygun band in the video above (edited by Rhodri), for instance, have their debut album out on Monday, and you just know there isn't going to be a single surprise on it. Even the pun about "psyche-Delia Smith" sounded like they'd used it a hundred times before. And I'm as big a fan as Berlin-era Bowie as the next man, but people need to go much further, now, to capture something of the metallic shock of Berlin-era Bowie than simply copying the ebow guitar sound and the snare processing and calling themselves "experimental" as a result. Think "What would Berlin-era Bowie do?" rather than "What did Berlin-era Bowie do?"
Re: If a Macca falls in a forest, and there's no-one around
Date: 2009-08-02 12:53 pm (UTC)Re: If a Macca falls in a forest, and there's no-one around
Date: 2009-08-02 01:03 pm (UTC)You can't help thinking that people like the Raygun singer probably notice, one day while looking in the mirror, that they look a bit like Mick Jagger and a bit like Pete Murphy, and decide -- as a result -- to form a band that sounds a bit like... you know, whoever. The Bauhaus Stones. It's the stuff I've called Epigone Pop, Retro Necro, and lots of other names.
All you need on top of that is the RIAA actually sueing music consumers, and you have an industry just begging to be put out of its misery.
Re: If a Macca falls in a forest, and there's no-one around
Date: 2009-08-02 01:18 pm (UTC)"More about their frontman? He's called Ray Gun. He's the man on "lead vox and sonic experimentation". Blue-eyed, slinky-limbed and razor-cheekboned, he looks and sounds like the velvet-voiced, finger-waggling progeny of a promiscuous session between Jagger, Bowie and Iggy pop [sic]."
You can see the "looks a bit like, sounds a bit like, might be the son of..." mentality that informs bands, labels and press in the UK right there. I say "Epigone Pop", they say "looks and sounds like the progeny of blah blah blah", I say bad, they say good, but we're on the same page about what's happened.
The irony is that RCA, at the time, was so flummoxed by Bowie's Low that they almost didn't release it. Thirty years later -- the kind of time period between a Richard Strauss and an Edgar Varese -- they're releasing lame, tame re-hashes. I don't know why I'm even bothering to write this, except that this is a band that will "press buttons", and that's my theme.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-02 01:21 pm (UTC)Re: If a Macca falls in a forest, and there's no-one around
Date: 2009-08-02 01:27 pm (UTC)He'd decide that world doesn't need a white male rock star
He'd consciously shun the influence of 'good' music - the 100 Best Albums usuals, as defined by rock critics
He'd break into a mortuary and steal a corpse
He'd announce a guerrilla concert in boarded-up council flat - but advertise it only in mosques
He'd hire a brass band to play lullabies to the corpse
Having read that plain white lights are more artful, on Click Opera, he would install a giant flashing rock rig (ex-U2) that entirely fills the council flat, so that the brass band are bent double in and around it
He'd admit only imams in, one at a time, after a thorough frisking, to view the event
Re: If a Macca falls in a forest, and there's no-one around
Date: 2009-08-02 01:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-02 01:32 pm (UTC)Just out of curiosity, how did you find it?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-02 01:40 pm (UTC)