When Phish takes the stage at the Sphere on Thursday to kick off their four-night run at the cutting-edge new Las Vegas venue, they'll do so armed with a production tailored to their long history of head-turning concert innovation — which for this and co-creative director Abigail Rosen HolmesSentiment on the eve of the broadcasts initially seems opposite.
“We're pushing a lot of technical boundaries and doing a lot of things that are kind of new… but they're never done for their own sake, everything is made very specific to achieve what we want to do creatively,” the live music veteran says of her work with Phish, who follows U2 as the second musical act to play the Sphere since it opened last fall. “You should just walk in and think it was amazing and you had a great time. If you're sitting there thinking about what it took to build it, then it's probably not right.”
What Holmes wants fans to focus on is Phish “just being the band that plays the best Phish music they can.” Phish has an extensive history of elaborate “gags” — deploying a fleet of clones, turning Madison Square Garden into an underwater world filled with drone-powered whales and dolphins, or even putting on a Broadway-caliber song cycle performance for the fancy world of Gamehendge, to name a few – but Holmes says that since she started planning Sphere shows with the band and frontman Trey Anastasio last July, they've shied away from such a creative direction.
“We're going to use all the opportunities of this building — the sound, the visuals — and we're going to do it while supporting Phish to actually play music the way Phish plays music,” he says. “That really became the guide for everything we thought about creatively. How do we create graphics and use all the technology in this space — and not stop Phish from being able to play whatever they want however they want on the night?''
It's a marked contrast from U2, who kept their show more or less the same for each of the 40 nights they played the Sphere, and designed impressive song-specific graphics for several key tracks. That Phish will mix up their show for every concert in a four-night run — without repeating a single song — is a given. what looks like a space with Sphere's epic visuals is less familiar territory.
Abigail Holmes
Rene Humer
However, to Holmes and Montreal-based media studio Moment Factory, whose Sphere team is led by the show's co-creative director Jean-Baptiste Hardoin, Phish has secured a creative crew that rises to the paradoxical task of orchestrating an advanced, immersive sensory experience to accompany a band whose musical signature is improvisation. Holmes began working with Phish in 2016 when she teamed up with lighting director Chris Kuronda about the band's tour plans and designed the live production for Anastasio's 2019 side project Ghosts of the Forest. Her career dates back to lighting work on Talking Heads' Stop making sense, and extends far beyond his concert resume—he's also worked with Janet Jackson and Roger Waters, among others—into architectural and installation projects, including a stint at Walt Disney Imagineering. “I feel like people often come to me for projects that don't fit neatly into any really easy categories,” he says, adding with a laugh, “People call me for their weird stuff.”
At Moment Factory, Phish joined Holmes with kindred interdisciplinary spirits. The company has partnered with Phish several times since 2015, including Halloween in 2018 and 2021 and its 2022 Earth Day show at Madison Square Garden — the one where the band turned the venue into an arena-sized aquarium. Like Holmes, Moment Factory's work extends beyond its musical clients—like Billie Eilish and Halsey—and into airports, malls and more. But even so, a Moment Factory producer Daniel Jean explains, “The challenge with Phish [at Sphere] it was the biggest challenge we have ever faced […] to make sure we're creating a show that's flexible and can react in real time.” As Hardoin puts it, the team was “trying to plan for the unexpected.”
While Holmes and Moment Factory are tight-lipped about specific creative elements of the show, which began workshopping in earnest last October, they share some broad strokes. Each night will have a loose theme, Holmes says, not unlike those that governed each of Phish's 13-show Madison Square Garden 'Baker's Dozen' in 2017. That selection “provided a little context for a jumping off point for ideas about the visuals,” he says, though he stresses that “it's not rigid in song selection, it's not rigid in visuals.”
These optics will be double. Kuroda, the band's longtime lighting designer known for improvising his work alongside the band's jams, will continue that role at Sphere, using a new version of his elaborate rig designed specifically for the venue. “The amazing stage that he has on tour didn't fit well in this building,” says Holmes. “It sits in front of the screen, it needs a lot of motors that would be in front of the screen. We realized very early on that this would have to change. I'm very excited to watch the new rig designed for him in here. It plays a role alongside the screens rather than existing on its own.”
Moment Factory contributed set design that ensured Kuroda's lighting rig and Sphere's screen could live in harmony. In addition, Sphere gave the company the opportunity to expand the early 2000s in multimedia to amazing proportions. “We're basically VJing at 16,000 by 16,000 pixels for Sphere,” says Jean.
Phish
Rene Humer
The exact nature of these visuals remains unknown until Phish takes the stage Thursday night – when they will be revealed not only to fans in attendance at the Sphere, but also to viewers at home, as Phish's set marks the first time concerts will be broadcast live from the venue – but the creative process Holmes and Moment Factory describe sounds groundbreaking. In short, the Moment Factory team created graphics and worked with Holmes to create a playback interface – not unlike the custom programming Kuroda has implemented over the years for his lighting rig – that will allow the manipulation of graphics that follow Phish's musical impulses in real time.
“It was about, OK, how can we evolve this universe for eight to 20 minutes, with different parameters, whether it's colors, whether it's saturation, whatever,” Hardoin says. “[Holmes] he has a very good understanding of the band's music. It is able to shape [the visuals] live, as lighting designers do.'
On the shows, Holmes will run the graphics, which will integrate the production content and use existing technologies in new ways, such as Epic Games' Unreal Engine, a platform that enables creatives in areas such as gaming, television and live events to combine live action. video and CG. (“This has been pushed way beyond what's been done in other places,” Holmes says of Unreal.)
For months, Holmes and her team used the vast trove of Phish concert recordings to simulate how the Sphere visuals “might evolve over the course of a jam … being careful to use multiple versions, because they're going to be radically different,” she says. . “Graphics are supported in real time [the band] and follow them musically, not the other way around.'
Phish's penchant for novelty is, in Holmes' estimation, what will define the band's Sphere lineup — and explains why the booking resonated with the band in the first place. While the band closed out their 40th anniversary in 2023 with a New Year's Eve production of their Gamehendge epic, comprised of some of their older material, Phish has a new studio album out this summer (Developdue July 12) and continues to introduce fresh material while revising his live presentation.
“When we think about this show, it's today — it's not about the past,” says Holmes. “That's a part of them taking a huge risk and experimenting and trying something new, because that's what they like to do.”
