...Which I forgot to mention in my previous post: the video! As the Field played last night, a video played along on a projection screen hung to the left of the stage (would've been better right behind the band, but so it goes). The basic concept of the video was this: quick, flickering flashes between big modern/industrial landscapes (a freeway, some silos, telephone wires) and identically composed scenes of human scale, with a person wearing a paper mask of Axel Willner's face interacting with various ordinary objects. So, the video would strobe between the silos and some similarly arranged buckets, on which a flickering Willner, apearing only in the frames with the buckets, but leaving a ghost image on the landscapes, would drum, giving the appearance of a giant playing bongos on some factory. A stack of shipping containers became a stack of books became the shipping containers, with a wavering giant stepping over them. Telephone lines became loose, sagging harp strings to be plucked. A field beside a freeway became carpet for Willner to vacuum. It was such a simple idea, but it was executed so flawlessly and with such fun. It was fantastic. (A friend told me that the video, which appeared black & white when I saw it was actually in color at some point, and that while the b&w looked "artsy," the color version looked "cheesy" and "Eastern European"—I'm not sure about that, having only seen the b&w, but I thought it was great.)

You can catch some glimpses of it (in "cheesy" technicolor!) here (not from last night's performance):