Juno-winning acoustic folk quartet the Fretless plans a dynamic live show for the Glasswing Tour.
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The Fretless: The Glasswing Tour
When: Oct. 6, 7:30 p.m.
Where: York Theatre, 639 Commercial Dr., Vancouver
Mention an acoustic string quartet and the image of four musicians in formal wear bowing into their charts in a semicircle under bright white lights instantly comes to mind.
For a folk quartet, it might be around a table at the back of the pub decked out in pint glasses and plaid.
While lasers and confetti cannons are best left to stadiums, the band wanted to devise a presentation to take its more intimate soft-seater venues beyond standard fare.
In a pre-tour Zoom chat, Sawitsky and Gallow previewed how new tunes such as the galloping Lost Lake and soaring ballad Icarus will takeoff in performance:
“Madeleine has been touring with us for around two years now after we met playing at the same festival, where we discovered that she was such a great fit puzzle piece we didn’t know we were missing,” said Sawitsky.
“Having her along for the writing of the album was a new direction for us and that was the beginning of a new direction for us musically. My wife is an actor, and the experience of going to theatre with her has always made me envision putting together a set design pre-tour that we could take out with us.”
Both Gallow and Kafarowski have extensive experience working with musical presentation and movement such as opera and ballet. An earnest conversation began about how to move the Fretless beyond four chairs, four mic stands and some stage monitors. There could be more to the canvas to tell the story before they played a single note.
“It’s certainly something new for me having never worked directly with a band and look at the varied types of venues they will be working in and how to design something that became lighting hand-in-hand with the visual experience,” said Gallow.
“Karnnel got things rolling coming with the idea of bringing in sodium vapour lights, which strip colour from your eye and make everything appear black and white. It’s a slow process as the light warms up and, inspired by that, the idea of going from something older and more traditional in black and white to something new in bright colour could be created.”
Gallow noted that to get that concept to work, what was being made black and white needed to begin as something very colourful. There was no point in achieving that effect in an already black and white theatre layout. She brought in vibrant carpets and a string curtain that was light-reactive behind the band for the lighting tech to play around with.
“Technology now is not limited by gels and you can create a world of light and colour that can then evaporate in front of the audiences’ eyes as they travel back in time,” Gallow said. “They can go back in time to one of the traditional tunes in their repertoire and then propel forward into something colourfully new from the Glasswing album.”
It’s a surprisingly simple idea likely to create some inspiring thematic tableaus during the performance. Of course, nothing is ever as simple as it seems. Sawitsky had first come upon the idea of sodium vapour lamps watching the Netflix series Abstract: The Art of Design episode on Danish installation artist Olafur Eliasson. It turned out that sodium vapour lights aren’t the easiest components to source.
“I saw that and thought right away, ‘How could we use that in our show?,’ ” he said. “That led to ordering the components from various places and spending a lot of late nights experimenting in my makeshift home mad scientist lab while my six-year-old slept upstairs.
“It was really fun, but the logistics of travelling with this setup is something I just got off the phone talking to the lighting tech about.”
Everyone is looking forward to taking this concept on the road and joke about the 2030 tour being the one with the pyrotechnics and Jumbotrons. Gallow says that her and Kafarowski mostly wanted to come up with something that the lighting designer could comfortably implement into the different venues and set up from a ladder. They will save the harnesses and rigging for later.
It’s important that the Fretless can focus on making music and not fret the illuminating aspects of the show.