Austin360 blogs > Globe-Jotting > Archives > 2009 > May > 14 > Entry
Also: It just looks cool
Plumes and puffs poured in, swallowing the floor, engulfing the dark figures on stage. Even hundreds of feet away, your cough reflex jolted. Huff-cack. But we are strong, our fortitude impregnable.
Can fake smoke kill you? I mulled this rare idea watching Nine Inch Nails on Tuesday night at the canyon-like Erwin Center. The stuff never stopped billowing and rolling and skulking around the performers’ feet and legs, pumped in from stage left and right. It rose, and tendrils entered their nostrils. They rocked on.
(I had joyous flashbacks of the KISS concert in 2000 at the same joint. If only NIN was mighty enough for mushroom-cloud fire bombs, blood and balloon drops. I miss explosions.)
The smoke was almost comical in its frothing excess, as if the machines had broken loose from human control and decided to belch walls of cumulous gauze until the whole place was shrouded in fuzzy whiteness. Being onstage must have been like being stuffed inside a bag of cotton balls.
Dry ice and chemical fog are de riguer atmospheric decor at rock shows, establishing a mood of mystery and menace. Portent. Spookiness. Surface artiness. Nothing-to-snicker-at-ness. We-are-slightly-demonic-ness.
It’s very Universal horror, circa 1935. It makes the musicians look like creatures emerging from an otherworldly place — a more pretentious realm where calculated smoke emissions aggrandize and bless those snared in its smokey fingers.
I’m putting a fog machine in my bedroom.
It was something like (hack) this.
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