A&E

Las Vegas multimedia artist Brett Bolton builds dazzling concert visuals for some of music’s biggest stars

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Brett Bolton
Photo: Wade Vandervort

We’re sitting next to an interdimensional portal of Brett Bolton’s design. It’s not really a portal; that’s just what I like to call it.

One of the walls of the Downtown cocktail lounge Velveteen Rabbit was damaged in an electrical fire years before the bar’s 2013 opening, and owners Christina and Pamela Dylag decided to preserve its scorched beauty with a coat of protective lacquer and a piece of projected, constantly-changing digital art, courtesy of Bolton. When you cast a shadow on Velveteen’s burnt wall, the wall plays with it; the negative space around your outline breaks into woozy, geometric ripples. The burn marks on the wall act as rocks would, diverting those waves in new directions.

Brett Bolton

The 34-year-old Bolton, as polite and easygoing a man as you could ever hope to meet, seems a bit embarrassed by my praise of his Velveteen Rabbit piece. He didn’t pick our meeting place because it has his work in it; he just likes the bar. (Artist Spencer Olsen, with whom Bolton has collaborated on several cool projects—including pieces for Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart—accurately describes his friend as “aggressively chill.”) Bolton takes the opportunity to explain how he imagined the piece, demonstrating a talent that probably serves him well in his work: He can explain pretty much how any piece of sound or visual technology works in a few seconds.

“Something two-dimensional like this wall—you take a photo of it, bring it into the software, and then map it,” he says. “You take the outlines of the shapes, and then you can do all types of things with them.”

The original Velveteen wall employed a Microsoft Kinect, a motion-sensing input device that was originally offered as an add-on for the Xbox 360 in late 2010. You could stand in front of the Kinect and move your arms and legs, and the device would read the movements and replicate them in an on-screen avatar. In essence, it made your body the controller.

Microsoft used the Kinect for more than 120 games, but I’d wager none of them were half as fun to interact with as the old Velveteen wall, which ran visuals created in Quartz Composer (“The iTunes visualizer!” he says, chuckling). At a given moment it could bury you underneath a cascade of plastic balls, or manifest a virtual version of a Velveteen bartender taking a long drag off a cigarette and enveloping you in a billow of smoke.

“This was self-taught, from the internet,” he says. “There weren’t a lot of people making installations like this at the time, just because it was either, like, proprietary systems that were really expensive, or they had to hack things together like I was.” Bolton picked up the information he needed from various web forums—“Just nerds going back and forth, trying to figure out how to do things.”

Bolton has since updated the wall with an Intel RealSense, a more advanced version of the Kinect technology. “It spits out an infrared reflection of what it sees, right back to the sensor—so that anywhere that your body is on the wall, it creates a white value, like a mask. You can use that image to drive anything,” he says. “Once you get to 3D scans for multiple projectors, though, it gets a lot more intense, but you have operators that are trained for that.”

Steve Aoki and Travis Barker

Steve Aoki and Travis Barker

As Bolton explains this stuff to me, two things become evident from his description of the Velveteen wall: He has an immense gift for seeing beyond what a piece of hardware or software can do to what it might do; and part of the reason he’s reluctant to accept my praise for a decade-old art installation is that he’s moved so far past it.

Today, Bolton is all about virtual stages, augmented reality—and his aptitude in creating content for those arenas, both real and digital, has led to him working with some of the biggest music stars in the world.

Bolton’s CV reads like a Billboard chart. Over the past decade, he has designed stage visuals for Billie Eilish, Bruno Mars, U2, Katy Perry, N.E.R.D., The Chainsmokers, Harry Styles and The Rolling Stones. Even now, he’s working on a raft of superstar assignments, most of which he can’t talk about due to nondisclosure agreements. But you can easily find his past work on YouTube: Mars and Anderson .Paak performing on the 2021 Grammys against a swirling backdrop of stars; U2 framed against a massive, desert canyon-like backdrop of dreamlike images during the 2017 Joshua Tree tour.

It’s beautiful, immersive stuff—much more intense and epic in scale than Velveteen’s motion wall, but Bolton is up to the challenge. He’s certainly got the right temperament for it: No matter how elaborate the project or how much circuitry is needed to realize it, Bolton keeps the soul intact. It’s never just pixels he produces. It’s wonderment.

“I’m always ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the stuff that he does,” Olsen says, “and like this amazing humble collaborator, he says, ‘Nah, man, the stuff that you do is magical.’”

The how and what of Brett Bolton is all out there. The why of it—well, that’s what brought us here this evening, to have some beers by the Velveteen Rabbit portal and talk about what makes someone see music as pictures.

BIllie Eilish’s ‘Where Do We Go?’ livestream

BIllie Eilish’s ‘Where Do We Go?’ livestream

Brett Bolton’s family moved to Las Vegas from Orlando when he was 2 years old. “I travel a bunch,” he says. “Most of my clients are in New York, Montreal, London and LA, so I’m usually bouncing between those places. But Vegas has been my home.”

He got his education here; attended Faith Lutheran High, then went to UNLV, where he studied … business. “That was a practical thing,” he says. “Basically, throughout high school, I was just addicted to music.”

Bolton played drums in “bunches of pop-punk bands, and bunches of emo bands after that,” including Nightlife, Sidewalk Stereo, Red Light School District and Jr. Anti-Sex League. After college, he found work as a sound designer, primarily making music for slot machines. Concurrently, he was teaching himself motion graphics, and learning the ins and outs of home production— “basically experimenting with all the different instruments I could, and recording myself.” Before long, his restless learning and compulsion to make music resulted in one of the Vegas scene’s most unique homespun bands.

Kid Meets Cougar was an indie-electronic power duo comprised of Bolton and Vegas scene stalwart Courtney Carroll. (The two were dating at the time; the name of the band was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the relatively small age difference between them.) “We started out as just two regular ol’ drummers, trying to make some weird monster drum set,” Carroll says.

Realizing they needed to add instruments “if we were going to actually write some songs,” Bolton rigged together “his drum machine, a guitar and a couple Line 6 looper pedals,” and Carroll added a keyboard to her percussion setup. “After a while Brett realized he could also sync up visuals to the drum pads, and basically ‘play’ the visuals and sounds at the same time,” Carroll adds. “Then, of course, we had to build a whole set which the visuals could be projected onto, and Brett had to learn how to map the visuals to that set. The songwriting and projection mapping began going hand-in-hand.”

Kid Meets Cougar

Olsen remembers his first encounters with Bolton. “He was a musician; that was his art form, and the video stuff was more like his day job,” Olsen says, adding that once video became equal to audio in Bolton’s mind, “he really became centered around performance. He’s not necessarily about releasing singles, at least not that I’ve seen; it’s usually a video on YouTube.”

Eventually, Bolton and Carroll had created their monster. Kid Meets Cougar had a killer set of smart, catchy indietronica, which they delivered with visual panache the likes of which Vegas had never seen. Using Bolton’s homebrew gear, the band was bathed in eye-popping graphic art from start to finish.

“That was the first time I’d done interactive projection mapping,” Bolton says. It wasn’t just a light show, or a screen behind the band showing unrelated images; the visuals clung to the players themselves, accenting the music—and commenting on it, too. (One of my favorite bits: the digital clocks that appeared on Bolton and Carroll’s t-shirts, counting down the seconds until the song concluded.)

As you’d expect, Bolton’s influences are both musical and visual. He loves the music of German indie rockers The Notwist (“Their Neon Golden album was a huge inspiration”), British electronocist Rival Consoles (“Electronic instrumental music that has so much impact, depth, and feel to it)” and Brooklyn electro-rock duo Ratatat (“I just love the guitar-driven beats they create. Their live shows have always been inspiring as well … especially after seeing that they added and triggered their own visuals live.”).

His audiovisual inspirations include Nonotak (“An AV duo that’s constantly creating new and dynamic real-time live performances and installations”), Max Cooper (“The super intricate layers and textures he adds to the sound design of his music is perfectly matched with the visuals of his live shows.”) and Daito Manabe (“He writes his own code to create these really intricate and beautiful performances and installations”).

Keke Palmer hosts MTV’s 2020 Video Music Awards.

Keke Palmer hosts MTV’s 2020 Video Music Awards.

Still, it’s rare for an artist like Bolton to have a notable inflection point—a moment when the light bulb goes on and one says, “This is what I wanna do.” Carroll believes she can pinpoint it for Bolton.

“When Kid Meets Cougar played the Kernel Festival in Italy in 2011,” she says. “It’s an electronic sound, audiovisual-mapping, interactive and digital art festival at a very old villa in [Monza,] Italy, [and] it friggin’ blew our minds. His drive to create visual art only got stronger after seeing what was possible and thinking about what could be possible.”

By the time I happened upon Kid Meets Cougar’s show in May 2012—totally by accident—the band’s sets were kaleidoscopic, intoxicating celebrations, a happy state the band called “Super Party Time.” But all parties, even super parties, eventually wind down. In 2013, the band split, as did the couple—though Carroll and Bolton remain solid friends, and Carroll appreciates what she learned from the partnership.

“I had to learn how to sing, play keyboard and play to a click track. It made me a better drummer and musician for sure,” Carroll says. “As for my influence on Brett, I was into dancey and ambient electronic music and brought aspects of that into the band, so I think that musical influence may have stuck with him a bit.

Queen + Adam Lambert

Queen + Adam Lambert

“Our biggest success was creating a show and a space where people could dance and have so much fun,” she says. “[It was] definitely one of the funnest times of my life.”

Kid Meets Cougar opened doors for Bolton, both in terms of combining his own music with visuals and applying his art to different, larger commercial projects. He created visuals for some of the Strip’s tall, rectangular digital signs—the Linq’s sign, in particular—and began to land bigger and bigger projection-mapping gigs, in both status and scale: parties for Zappos, events for MGM and, on New Year’s Eve 2016, a date with a giant, venerable Strip icon.

“They had this crazy idea to projection-map the Mirage’s volcano—and I was like, ‘I’m in.’ I did all the content myself. We had like a company come out to scan it with a laser, and that gave me a 3D model that I could then manipulate in software. Then we had another company actually set up the projectors and blend them all.

“And I got to sit there and play the videos for the night,” Bolton says, with the disbelieving grin of someone who was handed a landmark to play with. You can find video of the installation on YouTube (bit.ly/2U3HMDv), and you really should watch it. The way his animations transform a slab of textured plaster make a strong case for making Bolton’s volcano a permanent part of the streetscape.

Bolton did the volcano project through Space Cadets AV, the interactive design company he co-founded with his friend, sound designer Benton Corder, whom he met while working up slot-machine soundtracks for local firm Dog and Pony Show (now Monster Sound and Picture). It was the beginning of an eruption of jobs for Bolton, as word of his talent spread. He designed show visuals for Blink-182 and Tool’s Maynard James Keenan, and soon fell in with Silent Partners Studio, a video design firm that employs Notch—a game-changing piece of real-time motion graphics software—to create concert visuals and “extended reality” environments. Imagine the Velveteen Rabbit’s funky wall, only it’s the entire world around you.

Brett Bolton’s “Potential Energy,” a 2019 interactive installation “that allows people to control the music as well as the visuals.” He plans to update it for future interactive festivals.

Brett Bolton’s “Potential Energy,” a 2019 interactive installation “that allows people to control the music as well as the visuals.” He plans to update it for future interactive festivals.

“[Silent Partners’] J.T. Rooney said, ‘If you learn this software, we can hire you.’ It was the next step for me, and perfect timing for that, too,” Bolton says.

A short time later, Bolton was invited to a small town in Pennsylvania for a couple weeks of Notch work. He accepted, and was told matter-of-factly that he was working for Bruno Mars.

“Oh, damn!” Bolton exclaims, recalling his reaction at the time. “Luckily, we had a whole crew of Notch designers all learning the software on site, making new versions of it.” (Remarkably, for a piece of software that’s become an industry standard, Notch is still in beta; Bolton often speaks with its developers about ways it can be modified. “They’ve become good buddies of mine,” he says.)

Bolton speaks excitedly about his work for U2 (“particle-heavy; really cool”) and what Silent Partners is doing with “extended reality” (putting bands at the center of an “LED volume”—a curved bank of super high-definition video walls capable of displaying environments that change in real time, similar to what Disney/Lucasfilm use to make The Mandalorian). It’s a level of technical sophistication most of us are incapable of understanding without the benefit of doodles on a whiteboard, but as Courtney Carroll says, it’s the kind of new world Bolton was made to build.

“I don’t even pretend to know how Brett’s insanely genius brain operates,” she says. “He’s the hardest-working, most tunnel-visioned person I know—in the best way, of course. When he has an idea, he will not stop.”

On the day I wrote this story, Bolton texted me a piece of good news: he’s creating all the visuals for Canadian electro-pop band Purity Ring’s upcoming tour. “Pretty excited about it, since I’ve been a fan of theirs for years now and it’ll be my first time creating a show directly with the band.”

Radii

Radii

But that group’s music isn’t the only sound playing in Bolton’s head right now. He’s begun another musical project called Radii (the plural of radius). The first such project he’s done under his own name (he previously recorded solo as Kitze + The CPUs), Radii features a circular interface, projected on a drumhead that Bolton uses to trigger sounds and video effects. Go to brettbolton.net/radii, watch the videos and let the sheer, indescribable magic win you over.

“It’s not just music, with video supporting the music,” Olsen says of Bolton’s solo work. “It’s more like a symbiotic, harmonious thing.”

Bolton plans to build Radii out—“to a full show; I’ve got like eight songs or something,” he says—and submit it to several festivals built around electronic-based art, like Montreal’s MUTEK or North Carolina’s Moogfest. “I would love to get on that circuit.”

In the meantime, his Notch work will continue, Space Cadets AV will proceed and Bolton will likely figure out some other piece of hardware or software that stands between him and the audiovisual dreams he has yet to make real. It’s rare talking to someone who feels like they’re in a ceaseless ever-forward motion, but that’s Brett Bolton. Who knows what he’ll be inventing a year, a week or even a day from now?

“I just love creating new things, spacing out and thinking up new ideas, pulling my hair out trying to figure out how to make things work, finally figuring it out and then being able to release something new into the world,” he says. “I love every step of the process, and I’m super fortunate that I’ve been able to make a career out of it.”

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