Never Say Goodbye To Phish LD Chris Kuroda

Authentic and accomplished are two ways to describe Chris Kuroda, the perennial lighting designer for the veteran jam-band Phish. With close to 1,500 shows at the console, Kuroda is constantly striving to enhance the experience for his longtime client and its faithful fans, while bringing his particular artistic presentation to new audiences and projects, including Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj, and others.

 

“I’ve been here more than half my life, and in many ways, my entire existence is Phish, which is good and bad at the same time,” said Kuroda at the Halloween-weekend conclusion of the band’s 2014 Fall Tour. The band finished out a 45-show per-year schedule with a New Year’s run in Miami. “It’s been all-consuming, and there are times when I feel like I’ve been here too long, and there are times when I feel like I can go another 26 years.” 

 

Working with a band known for improvisational shows that never repeat the same set, Kuroda takes a thorough approach when building his lighting palette for each tour. “I don’t like to start a tour, especially with a new rig, without at least 150 unique and different looks, especially with this band playing a three-hour show,” he says.

 

“It’s not your typical 75-minute show that many people put up. I have to keep it unique and creative. A lot of the looks are designed with front truss lights washing the band, and everything else in the rig and the floor package is either during something aerial or onstage or a few other varieties. I’ve got to keep it interesting. Sometimes, in the middle of a tour, we just change all the looks because we know the same people are coming—out with the old and in with the new.” 

 

Phish Fall Tour 2014. Photo by Andrew Giffin.

 

Kuroda relies on his decades of experience with the band’s repertoire and combinations of chases and effects to create between 500 to 600 distinct visual elements while designing his shows in realtime using two networked MA Lighting grandMA2 full-size consoles.

 

“It depends on what is going on musically,” he says. “Where is the music about to land, and where do I want to be when it hits? Sometimes I’m 15 seconds ahead, and sometimes I have a half-second. It all really depends on what’s going on onstage. I have my whole palette on the console set up to do both. I have a whole bank of buttons set up for ‘oh, I instantly need this now’ moments, or I can think ahead and set this up because I know this is happening in a few seconds.”

 

After years of touring with the same rig with three circular screens, Kuroda and the band members got together and sought some outside influence for this latest outing, looking to keep the music’s dramatic tension in the visual elements.

 

They ended up collaborating with designer Susanne Sasic. “She’s very artsy and asymmetrical, and has a much more theatrical vision,” says Kuroda. “Instead of this big looking, symmetrical thing that I’ve always been doing, we got her involved and came up with last year’s version of the show. That gave us a new direction.” 

 

One addition from this collaboration was an upstage cyc lit in three horizontal sections and used in sheds and proscenium venues. “When we’re playing 360° in arenas, we can’t put them up, but it’s been great to create a whole new layer,” says Kuroda, who adds that he got the idea after attending his daughter’s choir performance where the group was backed by a white cyc. “We’ve taken that surface and written all kinds of neat tricks and effects. It’s the oldest trick in the book. Our task was to make it look unique. We don’t just light it up. We have it changing colors linearly or wiping across or using paint stroke changes with offset timing and that kind of stuff.”

 

Phish Fall Tour 2014. Photo by Andrew Giffin.

 

Another recent addition to the Phish show is the 37-pixel Clay Paky A.leda B-EYE K20 fixture, making it one of the first tours to carry this relatively new LED product, which, according to Kuroda, required 169 channels to program each instrument. “When I was thinking about spec’ing it, I talked to my programmers and told them, ‘If we put this light on, you’re going to be busy. We’re not going to use the stock stuff. We’re going to start from scratch and make it for Phish,’” says Kuroda, who called on his touring programmer Andrew Giffin for assistance building the cues. 

 

“We spent two months programming DMX in 169-channel mode, so we could do the unique tricks that we are doing that you don’t see on other shows with that same light. It’s pretty deep, intense, and tedious. It’s an LED digital product, and we put a lot of time and effort into making it look more organic and less digital.”

 

In an era of touring video walls, this organic approach has kept video elements off the Phish tour, so far. Come summer, for sheds and festival shows, the band even forbids I-Mag screens. “Phish has a very purist type of thinking,” says Kuroda. “Video is a very digital medium. We never want to be in a position where we are putting an image into someone else’s head of what a song represents. You are supposed to hear some music and be in your own imagination and figure out what it means to you. If I put a picture of a tree or some rain on a video wall, there is going to be a connection to that image. That’s something we never want to do. The day may come when video appears on Phish, but it won’t look like video. That will be our goal.” 

 

Phish Fall Tour 2014. Photo by Andrew Giffin.

 

This purist approach was thoroughly proven when he brought his Phish flavor to the Justin Bieber Believe global tour in 2012, with positive results. “Everything was different,” Kuroda says. “Instead of just writing a giant palette of stuff like I do for Phish, where you can grab and access whatever you want at any given moment, that tour was structured from start to finish. Phish is a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, no set list, 400 possible song thing, and Believe was scripted from start to finish with 2,736 lighting cues always in the same order.”  

 

The designer says the Bieber tour helped him bring a little bit of Phish into the pop world. “There were many cues on the Bieber show that people described as looking ‘like a Phish cue,’ and it worked out really well. It turned out to be one of the best looking pop shows ever,” adds Kuroda. “For me, that job has been a game-changer. I got myself out of this cultish, hidden Phish world into a poppy mainstream culture.” Some of his new projects include several Vegas architectural installations, a Super Bowl commercial, and shows with EDM powerhouse Martin Garrix and rapper Nicki Minaj. He is also currently designing the upcoming tour for Ariana Grande.  

 

With these new projects on the horizon, Kuroda is committed to continuing with the Phish tour as the only remaining crew member from the band’s New England college town origins. “Ultimately, I am here for those four guys on stage, and in the end, those are the guys I don’t want to disappoint,” he says. “I am the last holdout. Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in; it kind of feels like that. There really is no out for me, the way it’s all gone for the last 26 years and the way I’ve established myself out there. I can’t just say goodbye.”

 

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