This is a 3-song cross-section of the set I created for a halloween show of The Flaming Lips’ “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots”. This is for geeking purposes, meant to expose a bit of my planning and process for what was a new type of visual show for me. 

Typically the visual accompaniment I do is highly improvised. I create a large bank of short, loopable visual samples that connote a variety of tones, and attempt to follow the thread that the DJ/band/performing artist is creating in real-time. As one might imagine, this is a very unpredictable and exhausting live process. This was my first experience doing a much more rehearsed show. I particularly enjoyed having the opportunity to plan and rehearse more or less what would go where, and when. 

The video lacks any sort of transitions as my process was to complete the entire album-long sequence in Premiere, then go through and cut out samples depending entirely on major transition points, loop points, and areas where the live band might differ a bit in various ways from the album. All transitions, effects, beat-matching for looping etc. is done live.

We installed a live camera on Chris Maddin’s (lead singer’s) microphone. We implemented the live video sparingly, but would superimpose his face using luma-key atop cloudscapes, waterfalls, and abstract visuals, as is demonstrated toward the latter part of this video. You’ll only see the backgrounds, as the live camera integration was intrinsically a live process.

Photos of the event, courtesy of Sarah Maspero.

The band performed splendidly. Aside from my own equipment suffering a minor meltdown during these songs, t’was very fun, very engaging, and the next one should be even funerer and engaginger.

Samples come from: Robot Carnival, Kill Bill Vol. 1, Planet Earth, and some original concoctions, so twisted and deformed from their original isntantiations as to no longer warrant crediting… I think :P