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Music

Yeasayer, Casey Reas, And Aranda\Lasch Create A Generative Tour Environment

This immersive visual environment becomes another live component in the band’s performance.

For Yeasayer's new live show The Creators Project teamed the band with software artist Casey Reas. His unique vision for their tour visuals relied upon a sensibility between the band's sound and the technology being used to create the visuals, taking his inspiration from art installations to create an immersive environment of changing color that would complement and augment the band's performance.

In the video above, Reas talks about how from the very start Yeasayer was looking to create a new type of performance experience. Explaining the concept behind the sculptural, crystal-like structures—developed by Aranda\Lasch and fabricated by Asteriskos—Reas talks about how the idea was not to design a complete stage environment, but to design a series of different elements from which the stage environment could emerge.

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As the backdrop and other parts refract and reflect, they become another type of instrument creating a synthesis between image and architecture. And like the music, all the visuals are live and manipulated in real-time, adding to the sense that the design creates a type of symbiotic relationship between band and stage.

In the video below, projectionist Nick Gould talks about the generative visuals that were created for the backdrop and how they were created specifically to match the contours of the prism-like structures. He breaks the visuals down into three different components: the graphics made by Yoshi Sodeoka, Reas' custom "video synthesizer" software that helps them evolve, and the technology used to project them.

Check out Yeasayer's updated tour schedule here.

@stewart23rd