Photo: Tim Dobrovolny
In what marks a new development in the interaction between musicians and their audience, 9 May 2014 saw German house duo Booka Shade controlling their audience's smartphones to project sound and colours during a gig.
Walter Merziger and Arno Kammermeier were able to take over each audience member's smartphone via an app, which projected different sounds and colours to introduce a whole new dimension to the average gig-going experience.
The interactive gig, which took place in Berlin, saw 600 audience members able to "collaborate" with Booka Shade by synchronising their phones to the different sounds and lighting of the event. Speaking before the gig, Merziger and Kammermeier admitted it'd be interesting to embrace, rather than discourage, the presence of phones at a show.
"The last couple of years, there was an explosion really," Merziger said of the invasion of smartphones at gigs - a trend which has irritated many artists, and led the likes of Savages and Yeah Yeah Yeahs to ban them from live shows. "In the best moments of a show, you'd have all the mobiles out instead of people cherishing or experiencing the moment."
Watch the video for Booka Shade's 'Love Inc' below:
"The idea was, once all the phones were there, they're not going to be taken away - so we should try and do something creative with it," added Kammermeier. "This is an experiment, so things could go wrong, but we'll see."
Luckily the experiment, which is part of a series called Vodafone Firsts, seemed to go without any major hitch, with the duo airing fan favourites such as 'Body Language' and 'Movements' during their high energy set.
