What is a liquid light show? Here’s how to see one in Dayton

Billy Gruber moved back home from Dayton after studying world music and percussion at Bowling Green State University. He’d been a working musician since he was a kid, but he wasn’t finding a lot of projects in the Dayton music scene that called for those worldly sounds produced by congas or djembes.

In Gruber’s words: If you don’t need a drummer, there’s no real place for Billy.

But around 2016, as Gruber was hanging out in the various Dayton scenes — at basement shows and DIY venues like Pretty House — he recalled his early influences: Pink Floyd, the Velvet Underground, and the visuals of Mark Boyle and Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable parties.

Through those reconnections, Gruber discovered a way he could collaborate with bands without adding another musical instrument to the mix, a method that could use his rhythmic studies nonetheless: liquid light shows.

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At its core, a liquid light show combines the two elements of its name to project onto live — more often than not, psychedelic — performances. The ephemeral, near-unpredictable nature of the liquids are swished around between stacked clear plates, producing colorful visuals that transiently tattoo the performers on stage with projectors.

The liquids can be anything translucent with a low viscosity: water, mineral or coconut oils, isopropyl alcohol or glycerine. For dyes, watercolors and food coloring work well as they don’t make the liquids too opaque for light to shine through.

And as for the plates, Gruber swears by clock faces because of their curvature. How they fit into each other, and in whatever combination, will push the liquids in different ways, making each performance a one-of-one — whether he plays with the same act fifty times or plays with a hundred different acts over the year.

“The way that I ended up developing a style was rhythmic and pulsing,” Gruber said, to the delight of his post-grad intentions. “[Light shows are] just another way to jam along with the band. It’s very in-the-moment and intuitive to what’s happening.”

Gruber started lighting at house and basement shows for Dayton bands and hip-hop groups, then moved into lighting shows at Blind Bob’s and at Fairborn’s defunct One Eyed Jacks. Thus, the official birth of Gruber’s Synæsthetic Oil Spill, or SOS Lightshow.

Gruber was first aware of the overhead projections through his interest in Warhol and Boyle — as anyone who’s seen a documentary on the 1960s psych-rock scenes also should be — but the resources on the how-to of liquid light shows were slim at the time. He cited one lone YouTube video for reference, though that number has surely increased.

“How I got started was very hands-on,” Gruber said, adding that he originally employed an overhead projector only slightly higher in quality than the ones found in schools. “I was learning on the fly and making things up.”

Perhaps it’s because of that non-rigid discipline, in tandem with his tight improvisational and rhythmic skills, that allowed him to hone a style that is all his own, while complementing those influences of tried-and-true supplemental stage productions.

To jam with a band by stimulating the audience’s other senses, to end a night with oil-stained garments, is the way of SOS.

Liquid light shows weren’t as big in 2016 as they are now, especially in the Dayton region. Gruber took advantage of the untapped market, bringing back what defined the aesthetic of an entire genre of experimental rock music in the ‘60s.

SOS has since worked heavily with local bands like Salvadore Ross and Grateful Dead tributes, whose innate aesthetics blend well with the SOS hallucinogenic style. Gruber also gets quite a bit of work in Pittsburgh and has been invited to collaborate at liquid light show festivals on the West Coast.

Out there, performing alongside Southern California’s Stranger Liquids, another light show, Gruber saw a mesh of styles that combined analog techniques with updated technology — more updated, that is, than a slide projector. At that time, SOS was still liquid-heavy, often employing old-school methods, like boiling liquids with the heat of the projector’s lamp.

Then, in 2019, Gruber had the opportunity to add a digital element to his primitive rig: the television.

Lining the stage of Yellow Cab Tavern with nearly twenty CRTs, Gruber daisy-chained them all into a video mixer that projected back onto the band. He messed with feedback, glitching effects and decolorization while he played Nintendo 64 and an “Austin Powers” VHS through the TVs.

Since that show, Gruber has often combined digital and analog elements into a visual union, often optically outshining the bands SOS supplements.

Brady Anderson, a Springfield resident, had been doing hobbyist light show experiences before he teamed up with Gruber. Since then, Anderson’s taken off less as a protege and more as a peer. His light show, Yesteronics Lightcraft, deals with more of the electronic, vintage multi-cam installations. He works heavily in the Columbus vaporwave scene, as well as in Dayton.

The duo often share bills together, teaming up to bring audiences an amalgam of analog visuals.

Billy Gruber’s been doing more freelance percussion, his first passion, than visual projections these days. He still has dates on the books — solo projections and with Yesteronics — including the upcoming Pink Floyd tribute, Have a Cigar on Dec. 21 at the Brightside.

Gruber says updating to modern standards is a goal moving forward. But considering his medium is from the old school, and everything comes back around anyway, he seems to have an grasp on it so far.

When asked what the next element SOS Lightshow will introduce, as his rig evolves, Gruber jokingly responded: pyrotechnics and fireworks.

And he might be serious about that.

Brandon Berry writes about the Dayton and Southwest Ohio music and art scene. Have a story idea for him? Email branberry100@gmail.com.