Pretty Lights is on a mission to steer away from creating tracks that are released on albums. Derek Vincent Smith is looking for a new direction of thinking in terms of making music. Hence, recently he elated his fans by compiling a playlist of funky “flips;” live cuts from his live Episodic Festival stops and west coast runs over the course of 2016.
Pretty Lights’ playlist of his live sets from 2016 will bring all the butterflies back.
The 31-track playlist features standout improvised “flips,” a term that references a transition in Pretty Lights live sets where Derek filters out the produced track and his band of live musicians perform an off the cuff, electronic version of the song. The collection of live tracks includes versions of ‘Still Night’, ‘Yellow Bird’, and ‘Evening Sun’.
Each track in Pretty Lights’ playlist cites the show location where it was originally played, so you can know you were there and recall the dance moves you were pulling at that moment in time.
Let’s find out what Derek Vincent Smith has to say about the new playlist:
“We ended up devising something we call ‘flips.” We’ll start with a produced song, and everyone has a philosophy for playing on top of the produced songs. Alvin has acoustic drums that he’ll play on top of it, and we also have drum triggers for electronic drum sounds so we can get a produced sound from the live kit. When I call a ‘flip’ everyone knows that I’m about to filter out the produced track. When the produced music disappears, the live musicians completely switch their sound to something that’s more electronic. Borahm will drop into a synth bass, Alvin will switch to an electronic kick and an electronic snare. It’s like a quick crossfade. It allows us to go from the produced track, with the band accentuating it, to a fully live band without losing something…It’s completely improvised but we’ve put a lot of time into making sure they know, stylistically, where the bounds are.”
Listen to Pretty Lights’ playlist of improvised “flips” from his 2016 live shows below:
To dive into our review of Pretty Lights‘ run in Telluride during the Episodic Festival that features majestic photos and an interview with Greg Ellis aka “The Lazer Shark” click here. We can only hope he will pull off that electrifying run again…
