All photos by Bradley

It’s no secret that Bluebrain is BYT’s favorite ever of all time in the history of time. And it’s also no secret that we’re quickly becoming huge Artisphere fanboys. So when we saw that Bluebrain would be playing this past Saturday we braved the orange and blue all the way out to Rosslyn to watch the magic happen.

Over the past year, the Bluebrain brothers, Ryan and Hays Holladay, have developed into much more than just your average hometown band. They’re constantly innovating and testing the boundaries between playing music and creating art. Their presence has become more and more interactive, whether it’s a boombox walk, a downloadable soundtrack to a silent dance or teaching their fans how to create their own ambient sound generator.

True to form, Bluebrain had more surprises in store for their audience on Saturday night. And in a nod to DC’s broad scene, Geologist of Animal Collective warmed up the crowd with steady, grooving mix of 1960s garage, psychedelic rock and international tunes while DJ Natty Boom closed out the evening with every indie dance hit you’d ever want to hear.

Bluebrain started their show in perhaps the most illuminated conditions they’ve ever played. Either way, Artisphere’s performance space is ideal for their set. A giant video screen was separated into thirds above their heads while two other smaller projector screens flanked the walls on either side of them.

As usual, the visuals were alternately beautiful and unsettling, a perfect complement to the haunting melodies and driving beats emanating from Bluebrain’s gear. There were images reminiscent of fireflies caught in a jar. Then an amorphous white blob with neon shading – something akin to a kid in a ghost costume trying to remove the sheet from tangled limbs. And smoky images that could have been incense burning or a precipitate dropped in water.

With the exception of Up & Down and Restriction, Bluebrain played mostly new, instrumental tracks, and added some new performance elements as well. In the middle of one song with particularly sparse percussion, Batala, DC’s all-women percussion band entered the performance space, drums a-bangin’. After a thumping routine that combined their signature Afro-Brazilian / Samba-Reggae rhythms with some good old-fashioned drum line fills, the drummers moved through the crowd, hitting their rims to the Bluebrain beat so that the sound was in super-stereo.

Then a set drummer, Kotchy, took the stage between Hays and Ryan to play out the rest of the show. As the videos took on the look of the most beautiful microscope slides you’ve ever seen, and the crowd got a wee bit grindy on the dancefloor (grinding to Bluebrain? yes, it happened) and just when we thought the show couldn’t get any better… they gave us 3D FREAKING GLASSES.

To be fair, this wasn’t Avatar. These were old-school blue and reds. But the split screen images of docks, space, weird people and geometric shapes were sufficiently trippy. And the Artisphere crowd was sufficiently ecstatic with the result. Because let’s face it, what more do you need beside incredible music, crazy videos, two dozen live percussionists and 3D freakin’ glasses? Whatever it is, be sure Bluebrain will figure it out for their next show.