jam bands

When Phish takes the stage at Sphere on Thursday to begin its four-night run at the cutting-edge new Las Vegas venue, it’ll do so armed with a bespoke production in keeping with its long history of head-turning concert innovation — which is why co-creative director Abigail Rosen Holmes‘ sentiment on the eve of the shows initially seems counterintuitive.
“We’re pushing a lot of technical boundaries, and we’re doing a lot of things that are somewhat new … but never done for its own sake, all done very specifically to achieve what we want to do creatively,” the live music veteran says of her work with Phish, which follows U2 as the second musical act to play Sphere since it opened last fall. “You should just walk in and think that it was amazing, and you had a great time. If you’re sitting there thinking about what it took for us to build it, then that’s probably not right.”

What Holmes wants fans to focus on is Phish “just being the band playing the best Phish music they can.” Phish has an extensive history of intricately produced “gags” — deploying a fleet of clones, turning Madison Square Garden into an underwater world replete with drone-powered whales and dolphins, or even doing a Broadway-caliber staging of its song cycle about the fantasy world of Gamehendge, to name a few — but Holmes says that since she first began conceptualizing the Sphere shows with the band and its frontman Trey Anastasio last July, they’ve eschewed such a creative direction.

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“We’re going to use all of the opportunities of this building — the audio, the visuals — and do it while supporting Phish truly playing music the way Phish plays music,” she says. “That became really the guiding star for everything that we thought about creatively. How do we create visuals and use all the technology of this space — and not impede Phish being able to play anything they want any way they want on the night?”

It’s a marked contrast from U2, which kept its show more or less the same for each of the 40 nights it played Sphere, and designed impressive song-specific visuals for several key tracks. That Phish will mix up its show for each gig on a four-night run — not repeating a single song — is a given; what that looks like in a venue with Sphere’s epic visual capabilities is less familiar territory.

Abigail Holmes

Rene Huemer

Still, in Holmes and the Montreal-based multimedia 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’s up to the paradoxical task of orchestrating an advanced, immersive sensory experience to accompany a band whose musical signature is improvisation. Holmes started working with Phish in 2016, when she collaborated with lighting director Chris Kuroda on designs for the band’s touring show, and she conceptualized 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 her concert résumé — she’s also worked with Janet Jackson and Roger Waters, among others — to architectural and installation projects, including a stint at Walt Disney Imagineering. “I feel like people often reach out to me for projects that don’t fall neatly into any really easy category,” she says, adding with a laugh, “People call me for their weird stuff.”

In Moment Factory, Phish united Holmes with kindred interdisciplinary spirits. The firm has worked with Phish several times dating back to 2015, including on its 2018 and 2021 Halloween gags and on 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 music clients — who include Billie Eilish and Halsey — and into airports, malls and more. But even so, Moment Factory producer Daniel Jean explains, “The challenge with Phish [at Sphere] was the biggest challenge we’ve ever faced […] to make sure that we create a show that is flexible and can react in real-time.” As Hardoin puts it, the team has been “trying to design the unpredictable.”

While Holmes and Moment Factory are tight-lipped about specific creative elements of the show, which they 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 concert in Phish’s 13-show Madison Square Garden “Baker’s Dozen” run in 2017. That choice “provided a little bit of a framework for a jumping-off point for ideas for the visuals,” she says, though she emphasizes it’s “not rigid in the song choice, it’s not rigid in the visuals.”

Those visuals will be twofold. Kuroda, the band’s longtime lighting designer, known for improvising his work along with the band’s jams, will continue that role at Sphere, utilizing a new version of his intricate rig designed specially for the venue. “The amazing rig that he has on tour was not a good fit into this building,” Holmes says. “It sits in front of the screen, it takes a lot of motors that would be in front of the screen. We realized pretty early on that that would have to change. I’m extremely excited to watch the new rig that’s designed for him in here. It plays a role in tandem with the screens instead of existing on its own.”

Moment Factory contributed to the set design that ensured Kuroda’s lighting rig and Sphere’s screen could live in harmony. And furthermore, Sphere has provided an opportunity for the company to expand its early 2000s roots in multimedia to staggering proportions. “We’re basically VJ’ing on a 16,000-by-16,000-pixel ratio for Sphere,” Jean says.

Phish

Rene Huemer

The exact nature of those visuals remain under wraps until Phish takes the stage on Thursday night, but the creative process Holmes and Moment Factory describe sounds groundbreaking. In a nutshell, the Moment Factory team has created visuals 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 for real-time manipulation of the visuals that follow Phish’s musical impulses.

“It was a matter of, OK, how can we evolve this universe for eight to 20 minutes, with different parameters, wheter it’s the colors, whether it’s the saturation, whatever,” Hardoin says. “[Holmes] has a very good understanding of the music of the band. She’s able to modulate [the visuals] live, as lighting designers do.”

At the shows, Holmes will be executing the visuals, which will integrate generative content and use existing technologies in new ways, like Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, a platform that allows creatives in fields like gaming, television and live events to blend live-action video and CG. (“That’s been pushed very far past what’s been done in other places,” Holmes says of Unreal.)

For months, Holmes and her team have used the vast trove of Phish concert recordings to simulate how the Sphere visuals “might evolve during a jam … being quite careful to use multiple versions, because they’re going to be radically different,” she says. “The visuals go in real-time to support [the band] and follow them musically, not the other way around.”

Phish’s penchant for newness is, in Holmes’ estimation, what will define the band’s Sphere run — and it explains why the booking appealed to the band in the first place. While the band capped off its 40th anniversary year in 2023 with a New Year’s Eve production of its Gamehendge saga, comprised of some of its oldest material, Phish has a new studio album out this summer (Evolve, due July 12) and continues to introduce fresh material while rethinking its live presentation.

“When we think about this show, it’s today — it’s not referencing the past,” Holmes says. “This is a piece of them taking a huge risk and experimenting and trying something new, because that’s what they like to do.”