Saw them last night at the Wonder and had do to do some research (Wikipedia) to figure out what was going on with frontman Alan Palomo. He was doing lots of mad scientist action, twisting knobs very intensely, flipping switches, etc. and I was curious about how much of it was necessary and how much was complete theatrics. Apparently he uses Abelton Live which is some high powered, loop-based software sequencer. My conclusion is that most of it was theatrics. However, he also had a theramin and playing a theramin is pure drama. The guitarist had a guitar with some sort of lit-up tie dye hologram screen on it and he was all about the guitar solo. What I'm trying to say is that this is the sort of band that you take drugs before seeing. There were clouds of smoke billowing above the crowd at all times. Also, we saw Wayne Coyne. From the Flaming Lips. He was wearing a gray suit and had that crazy hair and was being a normal person attending a show until this girl started shouting about Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips as we were exiting and he disappeared into the floor like a sprite.
Most of what Alan does isn't theatrics, I own a ton of synths and gear, he's just adding ambient sound to make the songs more full. And Wayne actually stuck around and talked to a couple people (me included) Then went over and talked to Ron and Alan about Ron's guitar. You can see the video on Wayne's twitter.
ReplyDeleteThanks for commenting Eli. I'm not saying he was just pretending to twist knobs, my friend and I were just struck by his flamboyance. Not in a bad way. It would be boring to watch someone twist knobs and press buttons without adding some arm waving and head bobbing. I've actually always wanted to play with a synth, it seems like it would be fun.
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