Electric Zoo if officially over #sadface However, the next BIG show Bostonians have to look forward to is Pretty Lights show at the TD Garden, which features Eliot Lipp as the opener. Take a read into his live set and what Pretty Lights is doing to push the limits of live sets!
(
Missoulian) Derek Vincent Smith, who’s better known by his stage name Pretty Lights, has made no secret he wants to push the boundaries of the electronic dance music genre and take the it to places it hasn’t yet gone.
He seems to be making good on that promise, beginning with the live show he’s headlining “The Illumination Tour,” which continues into mid-November.
On earlier tours, Smith brought along a live drummer who played live beats to the music Smith was performing from his on-stage audio setup. But he found that limited his ability to improvise songs on the fly.
“I tried to communicate with my drummer with sign language for awhile and tried to keep everybody on the same page,” Smith said in a late-August phone interview. “(But) I realized I was really holding myself back as far as how I did push the improvisation of the electronic music that I had composed.”
Having a drummer also limited Smith’s ability to coordinate visual elements of his show with the music he performed.
“I really wanted to connect my control of the music to the control of the (visual) aspect of the production of the show,” he said. “So the last tour we figured out how to connect my technology, the devices I use to make music and control, to have video linked to each clip that I would trigger.”
The improvisational element of the Pretty Lights live show is something Smith has been developing throughout a career that has seen his popularity mushroom since the 2006 release of his debut CD, “Taking Up Your Precious Time.”
In releasing that debut, Smith took the unusual step of allowing anyone to download the CD from his Pretty Lights website.
While this might have cost Smith some income from record sales, he thought making his music free would get...
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