Nikos Koutoulas/Flickr
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(Photo via Gary Ullah)
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The Palace continued to upgrade its laser shows over the years. By 2002, Live Sound International reported that its most recent iteration included "a full-color 10-watt laser system consisting of an Argon and Krypton blend," as well as "a NEOS Color Crystal that provides one billion user colors." Repeat: one billion.Even if lasers weren't in vogue for much of the 80s, they had a busy decade anyway, thanks to the compact disc. Five inches in diameter, aluminum, and played by a laser in an enclosed space, compact discs debuted in Japan in 1982 and were formally introduced to the US market in 1984. A CD cost double what an LP did, and played for up to 80 minutes—or twice as long as most two-sided LPs. The record business put its chips into this format, spending the next two decades cashing in bigger than ever while vinyl LPs were being rendered obsolete.But lasers unto themselves gained a lot of traction at the end of the decade, thanks to the early UK rave scene. Lasers were a key element of early London parties: Paul Oakenfold's Spectrum, which began in April of 1988, followed the foundational Shoom—where Danny Rampling had kicked off the UK's "acid house" craze the previous December—and blew up even larger by ladling on the gewgaws, lasers being key among them. The swiftness of acid house's rise was remarkable: Within a year, Shoom's MDMA-fueled model had metastasized from 500 people (the size of the gym where Rampling threw Shoom) to mega-parties of 15,000. Not coincidentally, that meant more money to buy lasers, which became a crucial part of the carnival atmosphere surrounding the mega-raves that soon began sprouting up, and the perfect cutting-edge tool for elevating an age-old bacchanal into a cheesy sci-fi future.Lighting is to disco as love is to marriage, as tonic is to gin, as music is to dancing.—Radcliffe Joe, author of This Business of Disco
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(Photo via Beatnik Photos)
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Lasers even played a role in the chill-out arena. Ambient, the music that soundtracked rave's chillout rooms via the Orb, Aphex Twin, and Mixmaster Morris, particularly appealed to an audience that would, in an earlier decade, have been following the fledgling Pink Floyd, then graduated to watching laser shows set to full plays of Floyd albums. To help publicize its Excursions in Ambience series—which featured such artists as Ultramarine, Spacetime Continuum, the Future Sound of London, and Aphex Twin—Astralwerks Records founder Brian Long put together a series of planetarium concerts: "Fifteen to twenty planetariums across the country would play the record and do their planetarium show," he recalls to me. "We would do it with the local rave promoters."Nowadays, practically every club on every corner has some kind of laser tchotchke.—Laserium's associate creative director Jon Robertson
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(Photo via David Trawin)
(Photo via Jörg Weingrill)