Resonant Dave
Kick Drum Head, 2014
- Role
- Art direction & artifact design
- Relationship
- Four years into the Rubblebucket collaboration — three films together, and then this
- Target
- A custom kick drum head that identifies the man behind the kit from the back of a room, in a stage show built on blacklights
- Constraints
- 2014 · the artwork has to perform under UV rather than under stage light — a completely different problem, where ink choice beats composition · and it has to survive a band playing roughly a hundred shows a year out of a van
- Force fielded
- Nick Charney Kaye — art direction and artifact design
- Time-to-dispatch
- Delivered July 2014, onto a kit already on the road
- Result
- A ferociously glow-in-the-dark kick head that lit up huge under the band's blacklights — so that everybody in the room knows who is on the tubs, a detail audiences routinely miss
- Principal
- Dave Cole — drummer, Rubblebucket
- blacklight performance mediumArchival · 2014
- ~100 shows/yr the touring load it had to surviveArchival · 2014
This ferociously glow-in-the-dark custom kick drum head was made for Dave Cole, one of the original members of Rubblebucket during their early days touring a hundred shows a year by van.
The stage show involved a lot of blacklights, and this thing lit up huge. You know, to make sure everybody knows who’s on the tubs. Sometimes the audience misses that detail.
Wearer: Dave Cole, one of the original members of Rubblebucket.
Lighting design it has to survive: blacklight, in quantity.
Ink: glow. Ferociously.
Viewing distance: the back of the room.
Job: name the drummer, who is otherwise the least visible person on the stage.
Designing for ultraviolet
A drum head is the only piece of band merchandise that faces the audience for the entire set, and almost nobody treats it as a design surface. Under normal stage light that is an oversight. Under blacklight it is a waste of the single best canvas in the room, because UV changes the rules completely: contrast stops coming from the artwork and starts coming from the pigment, and a composition that reads beautifully in daylight can simply vanish.
So the design decision that matters here is not layout, it is which parts of the drawing are allowed to glow. Everything else — scale, weight, the legibility of a name at forty feet through a crowd — follows from that one call. Get it right and the kit gains a light source. Get it wrong and you have printed a very expensive shadow.
The brief underneath is affectionate and slightly pointed: drummers are structurally invisible. They sit behind everyone, below the sightline, obscured by their own equipment, and a hundred shows a year is a hundred rooms that never learn their name. This head fixes that with the bluntest instrument available.
Four years earlier the same collaborators made “Came Out of a Lady” and, on the road, “Raining” — the tour film about exactly the van this kit was riding in.
A real person made this — on purpose, per the manifesto, and in this case a real person is also the subject. Nobody needs a custom glow-in-the-dark kick head. Making one anyway, for a friend who spends his working life behind the rest of the band, is the entire argument for doing unnecessary things properly.
Record: a one-off artifact for a working musician — proof: [], no storefront and no catalog. The head above, photographed lit and at full resolution, is the evidence.
