Ether Wave

This is Fez Moreno from Austin, I've been running Ether Wave Light Show since 2013 and I was told to contact you by Anna from Silver Cord Cinema. She told me you were updating the Light Show Index, just wanted to say thanks for doing this over the years and I would love to be a part of this little slice of history!

I had just graduated film school in 2012 and moved to Austin. I decided to start projecting my experimental films and videos at shows, and shortly after, I met my buddy Levi who had an overhead and wanted to start a light show with me.

Joshua Light Show was the only light show I knew of at the time. I got to hang out with Curtis from Drippy Eye Projections (one of the best light shows), who worked a lot with Joshua White, back in 2014 at the Austin Psych Fest and taught me a lot of invaluable information that allowed me to expand my vision and technical knowledge of the art.

We've worked with too many bands to to name - did light shows almost every week since 2013 up until the pandemic.

The most memorable one was Kikagaku Moyo from Japan at the Scottish Rite Theater in 2017. The video of the whole performance is up on youtube. The other memorable one was Roky Erickson's 70's birthday party - we did rear screen projections for the band on a huge screen in a beautiful outdoor venue.

We have worked with Drippy Eye Projections (Brooklyn) during Levitation 2015, Acid Light Show, Lysergic Lights, Astral Violet, Bob Mustachio (all from Austin), Silver Cord Cinema (Nashville), Mad Alchemy (California), and Blindspot Project (California).

My buddy Levi that started the light show with me came up with the name. He is from the West Coast and I'm from the East Coast, so together it was like Ether (either) Wave but also the element of ether which reminds us of the ethereal nature of the light show. We later found out that Moog has a theremin called the Etherwave, but at that point it was too late to change our name.

Personnel has mainly been the same but with different guests coming in to do overheads - I do everything else. Levi left the light show around 2015 and the current plate operators are my girlfriend Ellie and my friend Shawn.

One time we decided to do a light show on a huge blank wall of a hotel building by the south Congress bridge where people line up to see the bats every night, and the bats didn't come out that night but people started cheering when we turned on the projectors (we had to cover some uplights with trash bags and borrow power from a loading dock but the security guy didn't seem to care or notice). Quite sure a bunch of people and cars saw it but we couldn't tell from our vantage point.

At first we just videos and camera feedback, then an overhead, then two optikinetics with various effects, then slide projectors with custom/hand painted slides and color/warp/strobe wheels and also other types of slide projectors to do heat slides and splodascopes, which I made by hand.

Then I got more overheads to do different oil effects and used 16mm loops for a bit.

I also made a moving prism contraption using a rotating clock display from china and glued different prisms to it to place in front of the projector.

In the beginning there was one video and one overhead projector, have now probably gone through 20 of them and most totally stopped working after a while.

Right now I still have 3 working overheads, 2 Optikinetics, 2 carousels, 2 Kodak Signets, one Aldis Tutor, and one video projector.