Saturday!

I had thought that this was going to be my first time enjoying a laser music show but, as I sat there in the planetarium, I remembered seeing The Muppets Christmas waaaaay back in the late 80’s.

What I recalled back then was that the show consisted of, primarily, a laser pointer kinda contraption drawing shapes on the ceiling on a rotating background of various christmasy astronomical tableaus. It wasn’t particularly complex or convoluted… during the 12 Days of Christmas, for example, they did little drawings of a drummer drumming, a piper piping, a lord a-leaping, so on and so forth down to a tree with a bird on it.

Each of these drawings consisted of one color, though they did have different drawings of different colors (like, the tree was green, the rings were yellow, the drummer was red, so on and so forth).

Aaaand, that’s it. That was the show. Listening to music with one-color laser pointer drawings on the ceiling.

So I sat down to enjoy Lazer Floyd’s rendition of Dark Side of the Moon. (Sigh.)

Anyway, there have been significant advances in Laser tech since the late 80’s. Sure, the show opened with the heartbeat and a red laser doing the heartbeat monitor thing, but after that the ceiling exploded in color. Like, there were several colors of drawings at once going on and some of them were terribly complex. I expected spirograph drawings, for example, but these were pulsing, shifting, full ceiling spirograph drawings in all the ROYGBIV colors. At the same time, there were other lasers hung on the walls designed to do horizontal shapes (limited, as it were, by being set at a fixed point and only doing horizontal stuff, but still) and so we had grids above us, or waves, or… okay, mostly grids. But they were really cool too.

As it was, it was a really enjoyable evening (spent with friends) and I listened to the whole album, start to finish, for the first time since a little after I saw The Muppets Christmas laser show.

Anyway, all that to say, if you have a laser music show in your area, you should go and check it out. Our little planetarium had Laser Deadmau5, Laser Queen, Laser MGMT, Laser Beatles, Laser Marley, Laser Gorillaz… something for everybody’s taste. Unless, of course, you wanted “Laser Classical”, or something like that. They didn’t have that.

But there have been significant advancements in Laser Music technology in recent decades. You should go check it out.

So… what are you playing?

(Picture is “Untitled” by our very own Will Truman. Used with permission.)