The National Live — Sleep Well Beast Tour Stage Lighting

25 October 2017 · Amsterdam

Stage production at its most deliberate. White beam lights cut diagonally across a blacked-out indoor venue as red LED panels hang overhead, each tilted at a different angle. The guitarist stands centre stage, caught between the converging beams — small against the scale of the rig above. The National's Sleep Well Beast tour treated the lighting design as an instrument in itself: every cue timed to the music, the red panels shifting as the set moved through its quieter and louder registers. That tension between the intimate and the overwhelming is exactly what the tour kept returning to.