How What So Not Developed His Own Immersive Rave—And Found His Purpose

“The storyline of this show I hope inspires people to take on those challenges and defy those people who are pushing them away from where they belong in this world.”

What does it actually imply for a present to be immersive?

Thanks to the misleading nature of far too many in leisure, nobody actually is aware of. After the explosion of livestreaming within the wake of the pandemic, the phrase “immersive” was crushed into oblivion by the music trade. It began out as a silver-tongued strategy to make the metaverse sound interesting, however has since develop into nothing greater than hole jargon.

The phrase additionally transports many again to these darkish and lonely occasions, when the unbridled euphoria of raving was changed by “immersive” streams that includes snakebitten DJs who carried out from their bedrooms on tools they may not afford. So when the time got here to purchase tickets to real-life exhibits marketed as “immersive,” we rolled our eyes as a substitute of our cube.

But within the case of What So Not and his bold immersive rave idea, it is completely different. And after these sold-out exhibits are by means of, they could show as disruptive to the trade as a heavy metallic live performance is to a neighborhood bed-and-breakfast.

“This is going to be better than anything anyone’s seen from me,” What So Not, whose actual title is Chris Emerson, tells EDM.com.

What So Not’s “Anomaly: Immersive Mode” tour, which kicked off tonight in San Francisco, takes its title from 2022’s Anomaly, his scintillating sophomore album. However, its roots return to 2016, when an apathetic Emerson discovered himself “kinda over DJing.”

“I’d been doing it for so many years and I was at such an exciting point in my career,” he recollects. “But I was like, ‘I just don’t like this anymore.'”

But if the pandemic did something—apart from trigger a psychological well being bloodbath—it galvanized us to cherish the little issues that make us most comfortable. For Emerson, that was the creativity he derived from DJing.

Emerson says he knew he needed to proceed making music, however this time round, he wanted to ensure he received extra out of it so as to keep away from the fateful path to burnout. So he drew a line within the sand between his DJ units and his ambitions to deliver one thing a lot greater to life.

“Here’s DJing… fun afterparties, just spontaneous and rogue vibes—whatever I’m feeling at that moment,” Emerson explains. “And then here’s this incredible, exciting, immersive, curated show with the room for all these organic, live and intimate moments.”

What So Not’s immersive raves have been within the works since 2019. After producing his track “Anomaly,” which he says “set the dynamic” for the eponymous album wherein it finally appeared, he started to conceptualize the bespoke live shows’ phantasmagoric visible course.

“I went about building this reality where I was imagining this dystopian future, and what will happen if we continue the way we are,” he explains. “Will we just plug ourselves in and exist in a space that is not even in a real world because of what we may do to it? All of these complex questions and probabilities and where they may end up—that was the creation of this entire storyline and all the visual aspects you’ll see in the show.”

And from there, he was all in. A laissez-faire angle wasn’t an possibility. After all, you may’t simply let life run its course when you’ve gotten an enormous dream.

“The important part of the storyline for this whole show and the album is it emulates—in a grander way—my own life,” Emerson says. “And the changes in thoughts about myself and my own existence, and how that had such an impact on my own life. And shifted what my own existence was going to be.”

It’s an enormous second for the famend digital music producer, who minimize his tooth as a child in slightly seashore city in Australia, the place he says his innate musical creativity was largely written off as an aimless interest. At one level, he “snapped” and have become resolute in his pursuit to comprehend his potential.

“I was like, ‘No I’m going to do this.’ This is all I’m going to do and I know this is where I need to go,” he recollects. “And I went there, and look what it’s become. I wonder how many people in this world are stuck in the wrong side of that, where they’re discouraged. Where they’re brought down and belittled for doing the very thing they were meant to be doing—what they were put on this planet to do.”

It’s clear that the muse of Emerson’s artistry has an existential nature, rooted in the concept that we every have the power to create our personal sense of which means. But regardless of this mission’s influence on his personal life, it is greater than him.

“The storyline of this show,” he continues, “I hope inspires people to take on those challenges and defy those people who are pushing them away from where they belong in this world.”

Still, placing your self out there may be robust. Even although he has a crystal-clear imaginative and prescient and the dogged grind to meet it, it is troublesome to ship in your convictions once they don’t have any previous experiences with which to tether.

“I have certain fears in myself about being up there on my own and having to deliver it all, and deliver it all to such a high level,” Emerson says. “I’ve compelled myself into this spot the place I’m going to have to try this. I’ve compelled myself into this spot the place I’m rehearsing day after day after day for like virtually a month now to get this dialed. To do one thing that I’ve actually by no means executed onstage earlier than and ensure it’s above the extent of every little thing anybody’s ever seen earlier than from myself.”

So what precisely makes these live shows immersive, you ask?

“You might have seen in the trailer how there’s a sweeping grid. And you play with the size of this grid over a stationary background and it looks like things are actually coming toward you out of the screen once you’re standing in the middle of the room,” Emerson explains. “There’s moments where you might even have vertigo. There’s different profound moments you’ll find where certain objects are existing in different spaces around you, and when you look around the room, you’ll have a totally different digestion of the experience based on the music and the visual.”

Emerson, who will be performing live with modular synthesis onstage for the first time in his career as well as singing and playing drums, says he’s worked with four different teams since 2019 to bring his vision to life. The production has gone through many iterations as a phalanx of visual artists, VJs, lighting directors, stage designers and more spent countless hours developing it. Emerson himself also learned the ins and outs of 3D animation, studying software like Cinema 4D and Unreal Engine.

Without a big budget, he says the buildout was “brutal.” The project’s inception coincided with the NFT boom of 2020, when visual artists were commanding exorbitant amounts of money to design a measly 15-second clip. So the idea of developing an hour-and-a-half show wasn’t feasible.

Moreover, calibrating the shows to cater to different venues has been a major hurdle, a process Emerson called “very difficult.” One venue, for example, has a transparent screen à-la Eric Prydz’s subversive HOLO production, while another has a cuboid stage and onsite installations he has to map around.

“I’ve seen firsthand how troublesome it truly is to tug this off correctly,” he says. “But I understand how quick the tech is advancing.”

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Emerson recollects a time in 2022, when his staff was tasked with creating video clips of photorealistic avatars singing lyrics carried out by actual people. He requested singers to obtain a particular app, file a refrain and ship the file for his crew to load into the Cinema 4D software program, whereby they programmed the voices and synced them with animated characters. Before this tech existed, you needed to rent a staff and pay a five-figure sum to animate the avatar’s actions, he says.

He additionally bought movement seize fits to check out the immersive raves’ visible course, which interpolates depth notion, vanishing factors and different ideas. Emerson’s phrases paint an image of a deeply iterative course of that led to some astonishing—and oftentimes unintentional—outcomes.

“Even some of the mistakes look so cool and so interesting,” he digresses. “I’ve had that as well with different teams, where they do something that’s technically wrong but I’m like, ‘That will play so well in the show.'”

The true influence of those immersive raves stays to be seen. But one factor is for certain—What So Not has found his function, and he discovered it on the intersection of innovation and self-acceptance.

“It’s just the start of a whole different phase,” he says. “I’ve sort of unlocked a few things that are beyond what I’ve done before and I know they’re going to get even better from there.”