Friday, June 21 marked a momentous day for fans of extreme metal music. On that evening Dimitri Minakakis returned to join The Dillinger Escape Plan for the first of three shows at the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre, held to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the band’s seminal Calculating Infinity album, a work hailed by critics as “capturing a major shift in extreme music sensibilities. Minakakis, a potent force in multi-award winning band’s early formative years, hadn’t performed with the group since 2001, other than a few guest appearances at shows, the most recent of which was in December of 2017. Given his compelling guitar riffs and fierce, unmistakable vocals, Dimitri Minakakis’ homecoming made huge waves in metal circles. Also making a return on that unseasonably hot night in Brooklyn, though it was after a far shorter hiatus, was Victor Zeiser, owner of Squeek Lights.
A longtime LD, Zeiser has been busy much of the last five or six years, building Squeek into a successful business. But when Travis Wade, the tour manager for The Dillinger Escape Plan, asked if he could light this very special series of shows, well… the calling was just too hard to resist. “When I got hit up by Travis, I thought it would be the perfect couple of shows for me to get out the old LD jacket and dust it off,” said Zeiser. “This show was a special one for a lot of people involved, including me. We had a long lead time to work on it, and went through a couple of revisions of the design before landing where we did. I also wanted an opportunity to play with some of the new toys we had in inventory like our Maverick Storm Hybrids and Maverick Storm 4 Profiles.
Zeiser did indeed get to “play” with 25 of the Maverick Storm Hybrids and 16 Maverick Storm 4 Profiles. Other CHAUVET Professional fixtures in his rig for the landmark shows were 12 COLORado PXL Bar 16 motorized battens, 20 STRIKE Array 4 blinders, and six Rogue R3X Wash units. “I went for a layered design with a large deck package and a flown truss with additional hybrids,” said Zeiser. “You can see the big beamy moments paired with some quieter moments. Some of those subdued moments, like when the PXL bars lighting up under the riser with a single STRIKE Array 4 on behind the drummer, were favorites of mine.”
Zeiser did indeed conjure up some moving emotional looks during the show, but at other times –goodness gracious! He shook the venerable theatre to its very foundations with lighting ferocity. Arranging his STRIKE Array fixtures in five horizontal rows, he called forth some intense crowd lighting that played off well against deftly done fog. He also mesmerized with overlapping beam patterns, while always maintaining a clean symmetry to his design.
“Beams were a new look for these guys, so I wanted to go for a clean look and keep all the fixtures in a straight line,” he said. “One of the favorite parts of the design was the PXLs they spanned the stage upstage of the riser and backline. I kept them zoomed wide a lot and blew through the backlight creating a lovely clean wash of light. We also did the same trick with the Storm 4 fixture. The two lines of Maverick Hybrids, one on the deck and one in the air, created most of my beams.
“This was the first time in over five years that I left the office to get back behind the console for a non-timecoded show,” continued Zeiser. “We had a couple of passes at the show with the band at our Ruby Stage preproduction space. Jake Spann, my tech was a big help as was my wife, Ari who picked up the slack with our son Leo while I was out doing these shows.”
And what kind of reception did Zeiser’s work receive on this return to the saddle? It went over as well as Minakakis redux. As one New York critic noted: “Dillinger’s classic material still holds up and sounds as fresh today as it did in 1999, and the band still look and sound incredible… while Dimitri’s shouts pierce your soul.” Then, turning to the design, the same scribe noted: “Throw in the visuals and a huge crowd going crazy, it was sensory overload in the best possible way.”
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