Miro Shot, a UK-based indie rock band that’s recently gained quite a lot of renown and airplay (especially in Europe), just announced a mixed reality/virtual world music tour starting next week, including live appearances in AltSpace VR and Sinespace.
This is not surprising, because founder and lead singer Roman Rappak was greatly inspired by a chance encounter he had with a taxi driver who told him about his second life.
If you listen carefully, in fact, you can even hear a snippet of audio from that conversation in “I Used To Say Things To Strangers” (above), one of the band's latest videos. In it, the driver is telling Roman about his alternate life in a Second Life community for Zen Buddhists.
“He kept talking about ‘this world’, as if his life in Second Life was much more important,” Roman tells me now, with wonder.
It helped him realize that “entire populations are more at home or feel more effective in the virtual world and have a greater level of agency there as opposed to the real world.”
Rappak got out of the cab, he recalls, “feeling amazed and scared.”
That was about three years ago, roughly around the time that the Brexit vote, which was greatly influenced by Cambridge Analytica’s manipulation of social media, had upended Britain, setting it on an unknowable course. “In a way Cambridge Analytica was a massively multiplayer RPG (Facebook) that made something fictional a reality,” Roman now observes.
With those two incidents, “I went through a complete epiphany, on how nothing a band can do can be a statement unless it adapts to the tools of the era.”
He means that in the same way how, in another era, artists like Jimi Hendrix used the latest technology in the 60s to create a sound that came to define that decade. It’s not enough to express how much of a change we’re going through, Roman believes, unless bands of this era adopt the technology of today.
“Things like Second Life say more just by existing than anything bands are doing,” as he puts it. "We should have gigs where after people leave, they feel like they had a view into a virtual world.”
Miro Shot has been doing just that over the last few years, performing shows where the audience wears VR headsets, putting them into an XR experience of the virtual and real. (The band even describes itself as “an AR/VR band/collective”.
A lot of these thoughts are reflected in this Miro Shot video and others. And while they also feature sardonic or darkly ironic images of technology use, it would be a mistake to assume their intent is anti-technology:
Rappak performing in XR before a live audience wearing HMDs
“Is it about unplugging, or integrating more?" as Roman puts it. "With Trump, Brexit, Cambridge Analytica, we’re just sleepwalking through this technology -- we’ve been feeding this powerful machine. If that’s the case, we should all return to the concept of virtual worlds.”
In this sense, what Miro Shot is doing now in XR and virtual worlds is a culmination of a creative journey that began for him as a kid, playing around with Doom mods, then moving on to filmmaking, then seeking a response to a sense that with music, everything has already been done.
“The people who are defining the world aren’t musicians but they’re building games, and the music they chose and the art for these games, it’s genuine pop culture,” as Roman Rappak puts it. “You can condense powerful messages that are consumed very intensely -- that’s when this becomes a new era.”
More on all this in Miro Shot’s non-manifesto on Medium -- and more about the band’s virtual tour soon.
Disclosure: Sinespace is a sponsoring media partner to this blog.
Comments