Fun fact: Boston’s planetarium holds regular Pink Floyd laser shows and the city is about to get legal weed. Unfortunately, our planetarium isn’t as cool and the Coney Island Laser Light Shows haven’t returned for the season, so we’re left scrambling for other ways to relive those high school stoner days. Luckily, two of them are on the horizon.
First up: If reading about the Joshua Light Show’s psychedelic projections at the Fillmore East made you nostalgic, take note. On March 30, Steven Pavlovsky, artist-in-residence at Astoria’s brainy events venue QED, will be putting on a similar spectacle to the recordings of Pink Floyd. These aren’t the usual laser projections of pyramid prisms. Pavlovsky kicks it old school, manipulating blobs of water, mineral oil, oil dyes, and isopropyl alcohol atop a projector to create something resembling live-action tie-dye. The result is trippy af, as you can see from the live visuals his Liquid Light Lab did when Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead came to Brooklyn Bowl last year. The Floyd show is at 11am, so this might be a wake-and-bake situation.
If you’d rather hear Pink Floyd songs live (and at night), well then Brit Floyd is celebrating 45 years of Dark Side of the Moon with a world tour that hits Radio City Music Hall on April 10. (They’ll also be playing cuts from The Wall and Animals.) Sure, a cover band isn’t the same as Pink Floyd in the flesh, but these guys are so spot-on that if you keep your eyes on the big circle screen, lasers, inflatables, and all the rest, you’ll have no problem becoming comfortably numb. Their light show is said to have cost $1 million, so this is pretty much the polar opposite of the homegrown experience at QED. Like they say, any colour you like.