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Music

DJ Don Rimini And His Otherworldly "Futuristic Machine"

The French producer enhances his live show with a techy, Stanley Kubrick-inspired structure.

Music festivals and spawning varieties of electro music are growing at the rate of modern megacities, while the music industry as a whole teeters on the verge of collapse. This juxtaposition pushes DJs and producers to stay innovative and creative in order to keep up with the changing favors of fickle audiences, and for many performers, this often entails the creation of a distinctive visual world to accompany their sound.

French producer Don Rimini understands perfectly that live performances have become crucial in this toxic ecosystem where nobody wants to pay for music. Like many of his peers—Amon Tobin, Richie Hawtin, Deadmau5, to name a few—Rimini has partnered with a team of visual artists and technologists to give birth to a hybrid stage design and intense, visually-enhanced performances through the use of projection mapping, LEDs, and any other techy medium they can dream up. Needless to say, the live show is a bit more advanced than the VJing of your older brother's trance years.

Working with design duo DartS (DigitalArtOnStage), Rimini gives us a live show inspired by Kraftwerk, science-fiction, and capitalism called A Live Odyssey. It’s the result of an uncanny encounter between man and machine. Here Don Rimini performs alongside this "futuristic machine," which looks like a massive iPad the size of a house. He uses mechanisms within the structure to create sounds, alongside 2D-3D visuals (created by DartS) projected onto the 4-meter high monolithic stage, on which Rimini himself stands perched like some sort of despot.