It’s impossible to see SonicVision, the new music show at Gates Planetarium, and not liken it to the laser shows that rocked the old dome from 1974-98.
SonicVision, which does not incorporate lasers, uses baffling, psychedelic visuals with blazing modern rock and electronic music ranging from Queens of the Stone Age to Fischerspooner, from David Bowie to Coldplay. And like laser shows, this program is running weekend nights, and organizers are hoping the alternative programming will lure a new demographic to the newish state-of-the-art planetarium.
It only takes a few seconds of Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place,” the show’s opening track, to realize, save for the whole blaring-music-in-a-planetarium aesthetic, that this is not your father’s laser show.
“People are going to make the natural assumption that it’s the same thing, but it’s not like that,” said Toby Winsett, the laserist who called the old Gates Planetarium home for years. “It’s totally different. The laser shows were more simplistic in nature because all of the laser imagery was being drawn live, and all of it was being drawn by a dot of light racing around the dome. It could never be as complex as (SonicVision) is because the dot simply couldn’t move around that fast.”
“That’s a tough one,” agreed Dan Neafus, the planetarium’s operations manager. “Those of us who are familiar with (SonicVision) hesitate to make the comparison.”
SonicVision is a great accomplishment. It was created by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the institution worked closely with its many technological partners and independent artists, along with MTV2 and Moby, who mixed the music and included a few of his own songs.
SonicVision is also a questionable accomplishment. While some of the visuals are mind-blowing and stomach-turning, others are curiously cheesy and unfortunately clichéd – raver robots and henna hands, all dancing and pulsating – and make you wonder why public institutions such as museums would spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours on what is basically a glorified screensaver.
The majority of the visuals that take over the planetarium’s 56-foot-wide dome are impressive, be they simple and peaceful or frenetic and displacing. The jellyfish aliens rocking out to Audioslave’s “Cochise” early in the show are a trip, and the roller coaster that is U2’s “Elevation” is a true ride that has you ducking, careening your neck and smiling. At other times, some of the images were laser show-esque in all their basic geometric simplicity.
“There were definitely a couple of places in the show where I had this big smile on my face because it looked more like a laser show than it was,” said Winsett, who is IMAX operations manager at the museum. “It brought back … memories.”
What was most impressive about the show was the sound, which they’re calling a 16.4 mix. There are 16 1,000-watt speakers spaced equidistantly around the dome. The .4 refers to the bottom four channels that carry the subsonic and bass, all of which are placed at the foot of the theater. The totality of the sound is an experience in itself. It’s easily some of the best sound in the state.
“It’s tough to say,” said Neafus, “but it’s definitely the most sophisticated computer horsepower around, and the three-dimensional processing is the best in the state.”
Combining the words “sophisticated” and “computer horsepower” is curious to technological laymen, but it makes absolute sense after hearing The Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize?” and the intro to Fischerspooner’s “Emerge” blast out of these self-powered, digitally timed Meyer speakers.
It’s forceful, and it’s clarity embodied. But it is not loud enough. “I thought the volume could go up,” Winsett said after seeing the show for his first time all the way through. But Neafus said it was a conscious choice.
“This won’t be as loud as the laser show,” he said, talking about keeping the show appealing to a universal audience and reducing operator fatigue. “We used to run the laser shows hot, but this is a notch down from that.”
Neafus is a technological whiz first drawn to the museum via the laser show. After seeing a show in 1976, he started work at the museum two years later and has since done almost every job inside the old and current planetariums, the latter of which opened to acclaim in 2003.
And although the laser shows and SonicVision aren’t always comparable, there always has been something about hearing music in alternate venues. And part of what made the laser shows so memorable was the crowd participation. Ushers told those in attendance that if they liked what they saw and heard, they should vocalize it. But now the ushers are being trained differently.
“We’re not going to discourage it,” said Neafus, “and we’re not going to encourage it.”
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-820-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
SonicVision
PLANETARIUM MUSIC SHOW|Gates Planetarium inside the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, 2001 Colorado Blvd.; 7, 8 and 9 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays|$7-$10|Tickets available at Gates counter.
Enter via south entrance. Arrive 15 minutes early.
“Tobyyyyyy!”
When you liked what you saw at the laser shows that ran at the old Gates Planetarium from 1974-98, it was tradition to cry out your praise for laserist Toby Winsett, who ran sequenced images and improvised lasers over everything from Pink Floyd to Primus. “It was one of the best jobs you could ever have,” Winsett said of his laser years. “It shouldn’t even be called a job because I loved it so much.”
The top three laser show bands in Denver, according to Winsett:
1. Pink Floyd: “They have to be the No.1 laser show band of all time. They were huge.”
2. Led Zeppelin: “They were big for a while, but then it kind of died off near the end.”
3. U2: “U2 was a distant third place, but they still did very well.”
– Ricardo Baca
