As I sit at my desk back in Brooklyn after four memorable nights of Phish inside the spectacular Sphere in Las Vegas, NV and one (always grueling) day spent dragging my weary carcass home, everything feels right. Well, everything except our theme theories. [Read recaps of the rest of the run here: Night 1 | Night 2 | Night 3].
Since guitarist/vocalist Trey Anastasio and Phish Sphere show director/co-creative director Abigail Rose-Holmes revealed earlier this month in a Washington Post interview that these four shows would be linked by a theme, fans have attempted to guess what that unifying thread might be. Most theories, however well thought-out, have been incorrect.
Anastasio further goaded Phish sleuths in an interview with The Associated Press published on the day the run kicked off. “Every conversation about the Sphere,” he said, “has been, ‘We have intelligent, focused fans, and we have to honor that. … It’s our responsibility to keep raising the bar.” Elsewhere in the conversation, he added, “[There] were ideas on what the thematic narrative that was going to run through the four nights that went on for a month. Then we landed on one. Then it was what songs we’re going to play? What the [visual] content was going to be? How literal we wanted to make it? The answer to that is, ‘Not very literal.’ Our fans are really smart and really involved, and we wanted to take a night or so for people to figure out what we were doing, plant a lot of Easter eggs and things like that.”
In case you were wondering, Trey, it didn’t take a night or so to figure out the game—it took all four. I still have plenty of friends who disagree, too, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got it worked out now. Yes, I know I said the same thing after night one (I was wrong) and night two (I was wrong), and we sort of had it on night three (but really, we were wrong), but now, I’m pretty sure I’ve got it. I think. Hear me out…
Following night one of Phish’s inaugural Sphere run, I detailed what I thought was a relatively pronounced “time” theme. After an overtly aquatic night two and some detective work by fans on the internet, I was convinced that the run’s theme was the Earth’s natural subsystems or “spheres”—”lithosphere” (land), “hydrosphere” (water), “biosphere” (living organisms), and “atmosphere” (air). That would have meant that night one was the lithosphere, not time (okay, I could see it) and night two was the hydrosphere, with the biosphere and the atmosphere on deck.
I was sure that was it. The first two nights lined up, there were plenty of “air” and “living organism” songs the band could pull from for the last two nights, and the “spheres” connection was too perfect not to be on the money. This was it. It was obvious. But I was wrong.
When night three was all about matters of the “air,” I counted it as a partial win in the theme guess department. Okay, I had presumed that biosphere was next instead of atmosphere (based on nothing but an unordered list of four scientific concepts—whoops), but that was a minor oversight. We’re still on track with the four “spheres,” we’ll just do the biosphere on Sunday, right? You know where this is heading…
It didn’t take long on Sunday evening to register that the “living organisms” I was expecting were nowhere to be found. Instead, the show’s opening song—and the pre-recorded music that welcomed Trey, bassist Mike Gordon, drummer Jon Fishman, and keyboardist Page McConnell to the stage for the fourth night of Phish at the Sphere—told us all we needed to know: “Plasma”.
How much do you know about “plasma,” really? I’ll admit that my grasp on the concept was base-level at best before Sunday night, so let’s brush up: Plasma is the electrically charged (or “ionized”) gas that results when numerous gas atoms are broken into electrically charged particles. As the Coalition for Plasma Science explains, “Most of the light that we live by—outdoors as well as indoors, both during the day and at night—comes from plasma. … Outdoors during the day our light comes from the sun, which is a plasma; at night, along with some sunlight reflected by the moon and some starlight (stars are also plasmas), we have street lamps and other arc lamps to light our way. Indoors, both day and night, most of the light we work by comes from fluorescent lamps and high intensity arc lamps. In all these sources – every one of them – light is produced by plasma.”
Another fun fact about plasma: It is the most abundant of four fundamental states of matter found in the universe—along with solids, liquids, and gases. Sunday’s setlist was clearly not about the “biosphere,” so the spheres/subsystem theory was out the window, but like the plasma that helps illuminate our lives, this new development cast the previous three nights in a new light. Pun intended.
The Thursday show we thought was about time land could definitely fit in a “solids” box, too. Friday’s aqueous motif aligns as neatly with the concept of “liquids” as it does with the hydrosphere/water. You could categorize Saturday’s airy theme as “gases” just as easily as we labeled it “atmosphere.”
Much like the thematic thread of the weekend was hard to define even as we gathered more data, the transition of other states of matter to plasma is not well defined and is a matter of interpretation and context. A grade school child can understand a chart showing how ice (a solid) melts to become water (a liquid) and evaporates to become vapor (a gas). Plasma, the fourth state of matter, is a little more abstract, a little tougher to grasp—a scientific explanation for complex natural phenomena like lightning, the magnetosphere, St. Elmo’s fire, the solar wind, and interstellar nebulae which exceed the layman’s understanding of the universe.
Even after the opening “Plasma” spelled it out for us, Sunday’s show was filled with celestial sights and songs about glowing lights, ethereal materials, and cosmic phenomena. Solid, liquid, gas, plasma: the four states of matter that make up our universe—and the four thematic guideposts behind the first-ever Phish weekend at Sphere.
After “Plasma” (adorned by a glowing, bending column of light) came “Evolve”, the recently revealed title track from Phish’s forthcoming new album. While this one was bound to make an appearance this weekend, I initially took the title at face value and figured it would be part of a “living organisms” progression. Therein lies my first mistake.
The lyrics to “Evolve” do concern the evolution of life, but the story they tell begins long before the Darwinian model of natural selection we often think of when we refer to “evolution.” As the song starts, “I paused a moment once in time, before the Sun began to shine.” If the Sun is a plasma and “Evolve” starts here, this song is really more about light than it is about life (“First came the light, then came the sound”).
A glowing “Ghost” first cast three towering robots outlined by colorful neon bars across the darkened dome (guess what state of matter makes the colorful glow inside a neon light), then traded them in for a single, Iron Giant-style robot who shined fluorescent light (i.e. plasma) beams at various pockets of the audience. (Hey, what’re you trouble-makers doing over there?)
Phish – “Ghost” [Pro-Shot] – 4/21/24
A beautifully played “Divided Sky” placed the Sphere above realistic clouds and played slightly with the sunlight’s effect on the scene, though it may have been a missed opportunity not to actually, you know, divide the sky in some more clearly defined way. (Editor’s Note: This may have worked better thematically on “gas” night, but we’d take “Divided Sky” at every show, so we have no complaints.)
Anastasio grabbed an acoustic guitar for the short and pretty “Shade” that came next as the song’s visuals—a total eclipse that engulfed the stage (“I only like the shade when you’re blocking the light”)—nodded both to recent events and the ball of plasma we like to call the Sun.
A strong, grooving “hey stranger” sent sparks swimming around the dome as the lyrics to the Anastasio Mercy track took on new plasmatic significance: “I’ve got music / So, who needs anything more / To extend the time / With invisible weight / Absorbed and unalterable / In delirium / Sightly deceiving / In living light, living light.”
Those living lights returned on the set-closing “Character Zero” that followed, casting the band as pulses of plasma light within glowing frames against the swirling nebula above. The electroluminescent visuals probably connected more closely to the “plasma” theme than the lyrics did here, but there’s one line in “Zero” that felt thoroughly appropriate as a sold-out Sphere, several days into off-the-mark and not-quite-right guesses, howled along: “I’m convinced the whole day long, that all I learn is always wrong.”
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More galactic streams of glowing blue light accompanied the inverse of luminosity—”Oblivion”—to open set two (“No stranger sunset have I seen / The wavy lines I float between”) before “Down with Disease” began in front of a long knot of tangled white and yellow lights that evoked a spine/ribcage and glowing blood plasma flowing through the Sphere’s anatomy (that’s a different kind of plasma, but still). Theme stuff aside, this consistently engaging, 34-minute masterpiece of a “Disease” made a strong case as the “jam of the run.” A must-listen for any fan.
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An excellent, focused “Beneath a Sea of Stars Part 1” (stars = plasma) placed surreal, geometric gold accents around a sprawling night sky before “2001” sent us higher still as kaleidoscopic views of Chris Kuroda‘s (plasma) stage lights spread across the walls and ceilings, lending the live Phish favorite a classic feel even in the novel Sphere environment.
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Mike offered a reminder of the evening’s theme with a well-placed “Plasma” tease during the top-notch, multi-section “Light” jam that illuminated a 22-minute chunk of the set under brightly hued skies and moving mandala accents. A brief reading of newer tune “Ether Edge” gave Anastasio a chance to sing about “tangerine light beams splintered in rays” and “luminous colors [that] breathe and sway,” while a roaring “Piper” summoned the nightly “lantern” physical props to the sky above the stage, this time with free-spinning, iridescent circles attached to lend the now-familiar sight a reflective glow.
“First Tube” finally closed out the Phish Sphere run’s eighth and final set as a spinning, colorful cosmic vortex appeared above the band, pulling in light from all directions while Trey raised his guitar toward the oblivion at its center.
After returning for an encore and thanking the many contributors to the Phish Sphere project by name, Trey Anastasio led Phish through “More” as a Magic Eye-reminiscent, dragon-like array of colorful strips “pulsated with love and light” on the venue’s overhead screen. “Slave to the [plasma-based] Traffic Light” ultimately struck the Las Vegas crowd like one final, powerful blast of emotion as swelling rows of geometric columns rose and fell around us, calling back to the visuals that kicked off the run alongside “Everything’s Right” on Thursday.
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“Video Killed the Radio Star” played over the P.A. as we filed out, serving as both a reference to the plasma-based ionosphere (which influences radio propagation to distant places on Earth) and a tongue-in-cheek nod to a past overhaul in entertainment tech whose echoes resonate particularly clearly as the history of concerts enters the age of the Sphere.
Phish at Sphere was a wonder to behold, and this is only the start. Imagine how much better the Sphere experience will get as performers continue to refine their approaches, improve upon past ideas, and hone its power in new ways. Remember the original iPhone? Your laptop from the early 2000s? Madden ’98?… The first Phish Sphere weekend is over, but this new chapter is just beginning. There’s a new phenomenon at play, and it feels like what we’ve seen so far has only scratched the surface of what this thing can do. It’s only a matter of time.
For now, though, I’m more than content to count my blessings for having been there, hit pause on the guessing game, and watch this story continue to unfold. A million little things to solve… Or not, I’ll let them all evolve.
Phish is now off until mid-July when the band is due to kick off its 2024 summer tour. For a complete list of upcoming Phish shows and more information about the band’s festival this summer, Mondegreen, head here.
View photos from the plasma-themed fourth night of Phish at Sphere below via Alive Coverage, Rich Fury, and Rene Huemer.
Revisit audio from Phish’s Sphere debut—and every Phish show since 2003—with a subscription to the LivePhish+ subscription streaming service. For more information or to subscribe to LivePhish+, head here. [Editor’s Note: Live For Live Music is a LivePhish affiliate. Ordering your Phish Sphere webcast or LivePhish+ subscription via the links on this page helps support our coverage of Phish and the world of live music as a whole. Thank you for reading!]
Setlist [via phish.net]: Phish | Sphere | Las Vegas, NV | 4/21/24
Set One: Plasma, Evolve, Ghost, Divided Sky, Shade, hey stranger, Character Zero
Set Two: Oblivion > Down with Disease, Beneath a Sea of Stars Part 1 -> Also Sprach Zarathustra > Light > Ether Edge > Piper, First Tube
Encore: More > Slave to the Traffic Light
The band took the stage while pre-recorded music similar to Plasma played, before beginning the song. During Ghost, the neon-colored outlines of three giant robots appeared to tower over the band, with their facial expressions varying and their arms and bodies swaying slowly. The three robots were then replaced by one massive robot, with spotlights utilized to make it appear as if beams of light were coming from the robot’s eyes, before the original three robots returned for the remainder of the jam. During Divided Sky, the dome became a view of a sea of clouds, with patches of blue sky above. As the clouds moved, their appearance varied from purple sunset hues to dark and stormy, with the movement stopping and all of the color fading during the pause before returning for the rest of the song. Page teased Linus and Lucy at the end of Divided Sky. Trey began Shade on acoustic guitar. During Shade, an eclipsed star was shown behind the band, with its corona of changing colors visible and a silhouette of the band in the center. During Sea of Stars, the dome became filled with a curtain of gold-colored four-point stars, which twinkled and waved in front of roiling clouds. During 2001, the dome became a starfield before being illuminated by replicated images of the stage lights. Mike teased Plasma during Light. During Ether Edge, a string of umbrellas with colored drops trailing beneath were raised to either side of the stage. The umbrellas were lowered again during Piper. During First Tube, the dome again became a starfield, this time with a ring of stars centered above the stage slowly swirling. As the second “verse” of First Tube began, a white vortex appeared in this area. As the stars in its orbit began to become multicolored, the vortex pulled in their light and created flowing, rainbow-hued ribbons that grew as the jam progressed. Prior to More, Trey thanked the production team behind the Sphere shows, and said that he thinks the band will return to the venue. After Slave, the band gathered at the front of the stage to take bows and have a picture taken in front of the crowd. This show was connected to the other three with each night’s setlist tied into a state of matter. This performance’s matter type was plasma.
