Uncategorized

Sonos Studio Presents: Listening Party with Bleached

Brendon Goldwasser
 
 The up & coming rock n’ roll 4-piece Bleached recently took the stage at Sonos Studio in Los Angeles, in collaboration with “Light House” by SOFTlab. The group first came up to do an interview with SPIN’s Chris Martins and then later played a small set in front of the light installation.
 
 During the Q & A session, sisters Jennifer and Jessica Clavin talked about learning how to play bass and guitar when they were 13 and 14 years old. They discussed their musical influences which include older 60’s rock and more modern, post- and punk-rock.

 Bleached performed songs from their debut album Ride Your Heart and they looked really cool while the lights behaved magically behind them, in tempo with their live music. SOFTlab, commissioned by Sonos, created an interactive light and sound installation that responds in real-time to Sonos components. It’s pretty much AWESOME.

 The installation is a grid of 600 fluorescent light tubes at varying heights and lengths to create an interior volume. Sound is gathered from Sonos components in 4 channels and sent to processing where various behaviors are programmed to respond to the amplitude of the 4 channels. The state of each bulb is then sent to an array of arduino boards that control custom built chips with relays for each individual bulb. Now I actually have no idea what some of that means, but it sure sounds awesome, and it looks even cooler.

 If you have a chance and you’re in or around LaBrea & Beverly in L.A., stop by Sonos and check out the installation. The installation is in L.A. until Aug 29th. It’s definitely an experience worth having.