How Phish Reinvented Sphere Forever

Phish was nearly 17 minutes into a song called “Fuego” when the world’s highest-resolution LED screen went completely black.

It was late April, the fourth night of a nine-show run at Sphere in Las Vegas, and the band had just begun its second set. As they slid from a thin boogie into an atonal blur, the screen that swallowed them took the sold-out audience of about 17,000 on a grisly animated tour of a damaged body—teeth pocked with fillings, a tummy laden with plastic toys, lungs puffing hard. As the camera wormed its way up and out of the body and back to the mouth, a wrecking ball swung toward the teeth, smashing them with three terrifying hits. The image faded. The room went dark. The band kept playing. The crowd erupted.

Trey Anastasio knew this would happen; in fact, when he told the rest of the band that they might have to play in the dark for at least 30 seconds, they were thrilled. “They were all like, ‘Oh, we love playing in the dark,’” Anastasio tells me two weeks later, a few days after the end of Phish’s second run at Sphere. “If we had our way, we’d do a whole show in the dark. You know, it’s fun.”

Alive Coverage

The screen needed to go black because a fleet of video teams with a squadron of computers and servers at their command needed time to load a system that has forever reinvented the way Sphere can work: a physics-defying virtual model of Phish’s famous light rig, programmed and run by a pair of technicians so legendary in lighting and jam circles that they have been profiled by The New York Times. The system, the most expensive visual element of Phish’s two Sphere residences, allows Chris Kuroda and Andrew Giffin to control 7,080 individual sources of light, all designed to look like they’re part of physical light fixtures flying above the band. Because it is not mechanical, it can move in directions and with a nimbleness that traditional lighting rigs could never match. It can charge the audience like a bull or pull back into a bright vanishing point.

But most of all, because it is being run in real time by real humans who have choreographed most every note the band has played for decades, it allowed Phish, for the first time, to treat Sphere like most any other venue. They could improvise at will. “We have cracked the code of content,” Anastasio says in his first interview about what the band accomplished at Sphere this year. “We didn’t feel like we were playing any differently, and that was the goal.”