Phish.net was delighted to have the chance recently to talk to the accomplished production designers and engineers at TAIT Towers, the team that designed and built the LED video screens that debuted in 2016 as part of Phish's new-look onstage setup. As you'll read, TAIT is a company with longstanding ties to and a love for Phish, who were only too thrilled to be asked to work with the band on the most dramatic revision to its stage presentation in its 33-year history.

You couldn't miss it. When Phish took their usual places onstage in St. Paul to kick off their 2016 summer tour they had some impressive new hardware at their disposal. First, behind them in a half-circle, stretching from stage right to stage left, was a five-and-a-half-foot tall wall of light-emitting diode (LED) video screens. Second, above their heads was another huge, rectangular screen, facing down and toward the audience. As the show started, colors and images began playing across both screens. For the entire first set, the overhead array stayed in a compact rectangle. But when things got cooking at the start of the second set—during the throbbing minor-key “Mike’s Song” jam—the big rectangle fragmented, spreading apart into a patterned array of smaller screens, a look reminiscent of the hordes of perpetually attacking spacecraft from classic arcade games like Space Invaders and Galaga.

The screens were a shock to the finely balanced and highly sensitive ecosystems of Phish fan message boards. None of us had ever seen anything like it before at a Phish show. Chris Kuroda's lights have always been a huge contributor to the band's onstage presentation and have constantly evolved over the years and with the times, never showing any real fear of rolling with the new. But this wasn't just a tweak to the traditional rock and roll lighting rig, or a flashy new toy providing a cool effect to be used once or twice per show. It was something more powerful and fundamental than that, a sentient kinetic sculpture that breathed along with the band.

With the exception of one-off production numbers at holiday and festival blowouts, Phish has kept its onstage look remarkably consistent over the years. True, the band members have occasionally shuffled their positions onstage, but while performing they mostly stay in one place; the “Meatstick” dance excepted, they’ve never shown much interest in incorporating choreography or backup dancers. And compared to other arena and stadium acts, with their pyrotechnics, projection screens, lasers, and flashpots, Phish’s trick bag of effects has remained modest. The theater-era fog machines used to add an ominous horror-movie vibe to that same throbbing minor-key “Mike’s Song” jam didn’t survive the band’s jump to the arena circuit. To the extent Phish has used onstage effects at all, they’ve been almost comically analog. You could buy the miniature trampolines used in the synchronized “You Enjoy Myself” routine at any big-box sporting-goods store. Likewise, with rare exceptions, since phasing out the Minkin backdrops in the mid-1990s, Phish has played against a simple black curtain or the back wall of the venue. Phish fans enjoy being surprised at any given show, but when it comes to the basic ground rules, many are, if not traditionalists, certainly creatures of habit.

Initial reviews of the arrays were predictably mixed; some loved the unimagined possibilities and raw power they offered, while others worried that they cluttered the stage and were about as subtle as a nuclear war. Remembering past cases where Kuroda had tried and abandoned lighting gadgets and gizmos, some pessimists wondered how long the LEDs would stick around. But nearly everyone agreed to wait and see, expressing their faith in Phish’s and Kuroda’s long track record of providing dynamic, disorienting, psychedelic light shows.

Sure enough, as the summer evolved and eased into fall, Kuroda grew more and more comfortable with the arrays. Although one assumes they can, he never used them simply play video. Often they were mostly another lighting effect, but big, bright sheets of light as opposed to spots or washes. Sometimes he would give you patterns or abstract shapes, rotating or rolling along through space. The screens could provide a garish color contrast with the traditional lighting rig, knots of orange and green cutting through the wash of purple from the front and downlights. Only occasionally would Chris use his new present to beat you to death with metaphor—like the wall of flames surging behind the band during the climax of the Dick's "Character Zero." And once in a while, he would just hit the OFF button and let the LEDs cool down, illuminating the proceedings with his old-school rig.

TAIT was responsible for turning this aspirational design concept into an operational reality. It couldn't have hurt, that in addition to TAIT's long relationship with and great respect for Phish as a stage act, the company is also home to several unabashed Phishheads. At TAIT’s headquarters, their cafeteria is the current drydock for the JEMP Bus that provided the band's makeshift stage for the nostalgia-soaked second set of their 30th anniversary New Year's Eve show in 2013. TAIT’s Chief Operating Officer, Eric Grossman describes himself as "a lifelong Phish fan.” He says the thrill of working "with the band, and especially their creative [production] team," was more than a pleasure.

"For so long, Phish has set the standard in the jamband genre with great music, always supported by gorgeous lighting," Grossman told me. "This year, we had the chance to complement their work with a video element that could be bold or subtle, sitting as a passive background element or moving to create dynamic, active effects. We wanted to create something that is as unique and flexible as the band.”

Are the screens here to stay? With a couple of successful tours under their belt, and the band seemingly interested in upgrading their stage presentation to take advantage of everything 2016 (and beyond) has to offer, it seems like a solid bet. Phish.net was thrilled to have a chance to speak to TAIT’s Senior Project Manager, Matthew Hales, who led the team in designing the video screens, the software and the machinery for this particular show. Here, edited very slightly for readability, is what we learned:

PHISH.NET: Phish fans may not have heard of TAIT before, but Phish audiences have been enjoying your shop's work for a few years now, right?

MATT HALES (Senior Project Manager): Hell yeah! Well, we hope so anyway! We've worked with Phish on production of their New Year's Eve shows at Madison Square Garden multiple times over the past few years, so we had a solid relationship with the band. But we jumped at the chance when they came to us to design a full revamp of their touring production. Phish, traditionally, hasn't had video or automation in their shows, so this was an exciting and refreshing challenge.

.NET: How has it been working with Phish? Are they good collaborators?

MH: It's a completely collaborative relationship. As a company, we really pride ourselves on being able to talk to artists about their art, their vision, and even more basic stuff like budgets and deadlines. We try to integrate all these things together as much as possible and translate everyone's specific needs into a common language that we can all speak. So with Phish, we have to justify creative design limitations and the same time we're pushing the boundaries of what can be done in terms of spectacle and technology.

.NET: We know that Phish's lighting designer Chris Kuroda has moonlighted as the lighting designer for Justin Bieber, whose show is a little more theatrical and elaborate than Phish's. Was the production rethink a reaction by Chris to his experience working for Bieber?

MH: The impetus came from Trey, significantly, but also the rest of the band having taken the time to see other shows and get a sense of the kinds of production options other artists were using that they really liked.

PHISH.NET: Despite all of TAIT's work on the New Year's Eve stunts, this was the first time TAIT had worked with Chris Kuroda on building a lighting effect, right?

MH: Yes, this was our first time working with Chris. Working with him has been amazing. He's a fantastic lighting designer. He's very meticulous, has a pretty specific vision, and is very trusting when his boundaries are pushed. We all worked very well together and look forward to more in the future.

.NET: How did the design process start with respect to the new LEDs? Did Chris or anyone from the band convey to your team a specific look that Phish was going for?

MH: Chris reached out to Abigail Rosen Holmes, a lighting designer he respects a lot, and asked to work as his co-designer. When Chris and Abbey came to us, it was in that same spirit. They asked us to develop the design collaboratively and then to build what we designed.

.NET: How long did it take for the design concept to come together?

MH: We had a meeting where they presented an initial design, but then Abbey came back to us with a totally different concept than the original. Abbey sent us a PDF that had video modules floating in space in a sort of digital cloud configuration. They were these structures, totally defying physics ... numerous video screens floating in space in different spatial positions. She said to us, "This is it. This is what the band has approved."

.NET: Just get it done.

MH: Yeah. So we knew we had our work cut out for us. We went through a dozen ways to achieve the screen articulations they wanted. One of the challenges was avoiding having the audience know ahead of time that the big screen is eventually going to split into space. We couldn't have a lot of visible mechanics or rigging. So, the real engineering trick was developing a mechanism that, when in the closed position in the first set, wasn't even visible behind the screen, but could still quickly deploy to the open position in the second set and become part of the show.

Some of the biggest challenges involved the most basic stuff: transporting the equipment from one show to the next. We have to optimize the entire process, not just the design creation but also the load-in and load-out. We have to keep all these concerns in mind throughout the design, fabrication, and integration stages. The goal is to make sure the band is left with something that is incredibly efficient, both operationally and technically from a programming standpoint, and also safe and reliable. And to do it all while achieving the kind of visual stimulation and aesthetic the band wants to present to their fans.

.NET: With a couple tours under its belt, how do you think the video screens are doing?

MH: We're all ecstatic with how it turned out. It really is a touring art piece, with all the splashes of Pop Art, more than just a cluster of floating video screens. We were lucky that Chris and Abbey were just crazy enough to design something so art- and technology-forward, and that they trusted us to execute and deliver their genius.

.NET: Phish has long been famous for having a great light show, but it’s fair to say that the new LEDs are a more aggressive onstage effect than the band had ever previously used. Phish has never made video a part of its regular onstage look, and they seem like the sort of band that would only use pyro effects or flashpots if they were trying to make fun of them. Was there any concern about overkill?

MH: We wanted to be 100% sure that whatever we delivered matched the aesthetic of the band. There was incredible scrutinizing of every detail by our design team to make sure the screens worked within the context of a Phish show.

MH: So, this was a huge part of the development process with Abbey and Chris. It was very important that it be a big, dramatic statement, but simultaneously we needed to make sure it didn't overpower the performance. It's a fine line to walk when you're talking about installing a massive machine onstage, but not having it upstage the band. So we were sensitive to it, and how we managed to achieve that balance is still kind of a mystery to me, but in my opinion we did it.

.NET: I was one of those old, traditionalist fans who was worried that the screens would be too much, especially in a smaller room. But in the shows I saw this summer and fall, other than maybe at Bill Graham where it felt a little crowded onstage, I thought the screens really brought something exciting and new to the table. One thing I noticed was that Chris doesn't feel obligated to use them all the time, or use them really aggressively.

MH: We wanted to find a happy medium where it would enhance the crowd's experience and be part of the improvisational journey. The idea was never to present video as video; the idea was to use video as a lighting effect, adding another layer of color and movement to the overall look. The shorthand we like to use is "Space Invaders meets Andy Warhol"—patterned splashes of light, abstract colored shapes, that Pop Art feel.

.NET: Every Phish fan understands the difference between the first set and the second set. At outdoor shows, the first set is played in daylight, the second after nightfall. And whatever time of year, the first set tends to be more song-based and the second more jammy. Was it always part of the plan to give the audience a different look for the second set?

MH: 100 percent! The design directive was to have something closed, smooth, clean and bold during the first set, and as the second set began they wanted to transform it into a totally different environment.

.NET: Can we geek out and talk specifications for a minute?

MH: Absolutely.

.NET: The mechanism that you all designed to open the screen and arrange the panels, that has a lot of work to do. How did you put that together and still keep it unobtrusive enough to hide during the first set?

MH: There are 78 individual panels, but we operate them in pairs, so there are 39 separate screen-pairs when the device is in motion. We get video to the screens using 13 different columns of video, which means that each column delivers video to 3 pairs of screens. For each column of video, the 3 pairs of screens that it feeds to are connected to a frame, which is mounted on a scissor mechanism. As the scissor opens and closes, the screens move out and back. But because the screens each need to move a different distance and direction, the arms they're mounted on each need to be different lengths as well.

.NET: What's the spread between the area covered by the closed first-set screen and the open screen in the second set?

MH: In the closed position, each column of video is about five and a half feet. When they open up, they each have various stopping points along the way, and the longest each column gets is roughly 16 feet, nine inches.

.NET: In addition to building this massive physical apparatus, TAIT also designed the software that runs the hardware, right?

MH: Right, we have our own proprietary motion-control software, TAIT Navigator, that operates the arrays during shows. I should mention that the software can do some stuff that Chris hasn't tried out yet, so fans will probably see a continued evolution of the LED screens in 2017.

Since 1978, TAIT Towers has provided touring systems, solutions, technology and designs for the top live productions in the world, including 19 of the 20 highest grossing tours of all time. TAIT has worked on world tours for artists such as The Rolling Stones, Beyoncé, U2, and Adele, along with spectacles like the London and Sochi Olympic Ceremonies. You can learn more about them at www.taittowers.com.

Special thanks to Mia Tinari, Global Head of Marketing + Communications at TAIT, who worked with us to get answers to our questions, then worked on me to make sure this piece got finished and posted!

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