As Summer Dregs, Carl Cadwell, Paul Smallman and Josh Green, from right, have created a performance piece featuring songs that are synced with programmed lights.If you go
* What: Summer Dregs with Napoleans World and DJ* When: 8 p.m. Friday, May 13.* Where: Granfalloon, 400 E. Main St., Suite 120* Admission: $9 advance, $10 at the door* Phone: 661-3185
When everything is synced up just right, the light tubes attached to three 4x8 sheets of black-painted plywood behind Carl Cadwell's keyboards and Josh Green's drum kit become as much a character in a song as the licks they play or the lyrics Paul Smallman sings.
The emotions in the words and the musicianship can be seen - and felt - in the changing colors and the drama in the lights, which have been programmed not only to follow the beat but to follow the mood of the song. The lights can be whimsical or ominous, depending on the moment.
It's more like a Daft Punk or older King Crimson art show than an electronica or DJ concert filled with throbbing, blinking lights and laser beams.
"We are calling it either the 'Illuminati Light Show' or the 'Sensory Inversion Light Show,'" the 33-year-old Cadwell says. "I like the second one better right now."
The trio, known as Summer Dregs, are rehearsing for a show Friday at Granfalloon. It's only the second time the three have been able to run through the 40-minute set of 8 1/2 songs with the full light show, though they've been working on them for months. Figuring out the light programming has been a challenge for Smallman, a 24-year-old student at Covenant College.
"It was a lot of work figuring the right program to use and how to use it," he says. "Plus, we programmed for all nine pieces and each is different."
One of the numbers will feature local musician Stratton Tingle on vocals as well.
The idea for the show was born out of the Sewing Machine Orchestra Show, a project Cadwell did last year for a convention of employees and retailers from the Bernina International AG sewing machine company.
He recorded a variety of sounds by beating on, plucking, pounding and various other attacks on sewing machine parts, mixed them into a song, then programmed a light show to accompany it. This new show is much more involved, he says.
"With this, we've been trying to integrate the lights as if they are another part of the band. They are programmed so it's not just shock and awe, or 'lights, lights, lights,'" he says, opening and closing his hands to indicate pulsing light.
He also says that anyone prone to light-induced seizures might want to reconsider attending the show.
But the lights, the 39-year-old Green says, give the audience something else to focus on and engage in.
"It makes you focus on the performance."
The light tubes, five to a panel, are mounted horizontally. They are opaque and about six-feet long with a string of LED lights running through them.
Behind the panels is a snake pit of wiring, all of which is connected to one of two Apple laptops that Cadwell uses in addition to his keyboard and Launchpad, a square pad with 16 different-colored buttons that holds the tones, notes and sounds he's programmed into the laptop. Some of the music is prerecorded and the musicians play along with those tracks for some of the numbers.
"I resisted using [prerecorded] tracks for a long time, but it actually gives us more freedom to play," Cadwell says. "We can focus on putting on the best show possible."
Cadwell and Green have worked together in several bands and other projects in the past, but Green calls this one special.
"I've never been this excited about anything as much as this," he says. "I don't know anyone else who is doing this.
"Next, I want to do something with even more grandiose absurdity. I'm thinking of how to make a well of drums with lights."
Contact Barry Courter at bcourter@timesfree press.com or 423-757-6354.