Visuals have accompanied musicians during their performances for decades now, from Pink Floyd to Beyonce. And usually, an engineer is responsible for the visuals -- not the actual musician on stage — and they're usually created far ahead of the performance.
But Las Vegas audio-visual artist and longtime local musician Brett Bolton is different. He creates musical pieces with digital visual accompaniments together, in real time, using nothing but a drum kit and a touch pad.
"The visuals are just as important as music to me," said Bolton. "So I often come up with an idea for the visuals first, as opposed to the music, and then I kind of go back and forth — 'Oh, this like looks like it could sound like this' — on the touchpad. So I'll make a sound effect for that, and then I'll play with that a bit, realize I can make a rhythm out of that, and then start making a song. And then it kind of builds back and forth from visual to audio and back — you know, to make a song, to actually build out the full thing."
And this is just the latest iteration in Bolton’s fascinating career devoted to the evolution of audio-visual entertainment. He also designs visuals for resident performers at Sphere and major touring acts, from classic rock titans The Rolling Stones to indie favorite Purity Ring. And he works with visual media production companies that forego the traditional green screens for computer-generated scenery, and instead use extended-reality stages and LED screens that actually show said scenery in real time.
Regardless of the medium or setting, Bolton's goal is clear: to create a focused, multisensory work. It's complicated in its execution, but for its projected scale, the musician/designer uses a small toolbox to keep things surprisingly simple — especially onstage, where he'll be on November 7, at Dustland, for the release of his first solo work, EP1.
"It's all basically piecing all my different hobbies together: building these real-time visuals, and also doing sound design and making music, playing drums," said Bolton. "I try to keep it limited within those worlds."
Brett Bolton, audiovisual artist and designer
