Quick Vegas Trip for a Sphere Concert

The whole point of flying down was the Sphere concert, so the day before the show was just Vegas in July, which mostly means staying indoors. From high up across the Strip we watched the Bellagio fountains cycle through a couple of shows, the fake Eiffel Tower and Paris casino stacked up behind the lake, then headed over to Paradise for the main event.

The venue seats 17,600 and the screen wraps the whole dome in 16K, and the trick before the show was that it didn't look like a screen at all — the dome came up as bare scaffolding and catwalks, work lights hanging off steel, all of it rendered. People kept craning around trying to sort out where the actual building ended.

During the show the sky behind the stage went deep purple for one stretch, then dropped to black with nothing but the light towers running. The audio comes from behind the screen — wave field synthesis, apparently — so the vocals sat right on the stage instead of somewhere overhead. For the encore the entire dome went to stars and every head in the place tilted back.

Tie-dye everywhere on the floor.