Musician and fronmant of indie electronic band Miro Shot (and former lead singer of Breton), Roman Rappak is an artist well-versed in virtual reality concerts, having toured his live music & VR show internationally for several years. Rappak is an emerging technology enthusiast who embraces new artistic and technological adventures. His new project Ristband, a metaverse platform co-founded with Anne McKinnon, was launched to explore how game engines can be used to augment the live concert experience, and the connection between musicians and fans.
This article is an open discussion before their official launch at the next South by Southwest (SXSW) Music Festival March 14.
Miro Shot at The Hideout (SXSW)
Ristband launch (SXSW) – RSVP!
Across the Metaverse: Independent Music in XR (SXSW – Conference)
From live to immersive concert
Roman Rappak – I’m a musician. I’ve always played in bands : Breton, Miro Shot… But I found everything that was happening in the music industry felt like the last gasps of an old way of doing things, fighting for copyright and tiny fractional revenue sources like streaming. At the same time, I was noticing friends working on new media, gaming and VR, which I found super interesting, so I started picking up things like Unreal. I guess it was a quest to see how music culture and gaming culture could be used together! Just after Facebook bought Oculus, I met an amazing artist called Ash Koosha, who was doing concerts where he would perform in a VR headset with virtual instruments. It utterly blew my mind and I started putting together a team of my own.
R. R. – The idea was to bring everything together, taking the excitement of a live concert and combining it with the power of game engines and VR. At the core of a live music performance there is an immediacy – there’s a beginning, a middle and an end. There’s a sense of it being fleeting, of something that doesn’t last. The way we write music is changing, the way people consume music is changing. Our VR shows are about trying to take a snapshot of this new era, of doing this through a collective experience. There are of course a lot of discussions about the negative aspects of VR, of the way it’s a kind of metaphor for everything bleak about modern tech, the idea that it can be claustrophobic, a kind of dystopian example of where the world is going. But for me virtual reality is at its best when it is rooted in reality, with aspects like social interaction and emotional engagement. It’s a way of augmenting what is already amazing, which in our case is the kind of visceral intensity you get from seeing a band play live with your friends.
R. R. – When playing in front of an audience who are switching between the real and the virtual, you develop a unique connection. It’s a little like when you play on a TV show, which can be incredibly strange, and works on a different level to a regular concert. But there’s a real art to doing it! You have to communicate the music in a different way, to transmit your performance in a new context. For me, the role of the artist or performer is the same regardless of if you are playing a radio show, a festival or a small club in the middle of nowhere. At its core art is about creating experiences and temporarily fracturing reality.
An artist through a pandemic
R. R. – Things started to move really fast for us once we began playing the live VR show- just by word of mouth really, as we didn’t even have any music out! Nuit Blanche in Paris, the Barbican in London, VRHAM in Hamburg…We started to build a little following, with people coming to these events from completely different demographics, there were music fans, but also scientists, architects, performance artists, gamers, and of course people from the emergent XR industry. This current wave of XR is still an amazing melting-pot of talent and ideas, and being able to be part of that is really meaningful to me. It felt almost like a deconstruction/underground gathering around VR, where people were trying out all kinds of new approaches and ideas. When the pandemic struck, it was initially the worst possible thing that could happen to a project like ours, with our US dates, festivals and shows cancelled. But in other ways COVID did a lot to evolve how people were using the idea of the virtual, from Zoom calls to Roblox, digital habits changed forever.
R. R. – Not being able to play our VR shows in the physical world forced us to look at the project in a new way. After all, we had been making a physical event where the audiences were transported to the metaverse, so it wasn’t a huge leap of imagination to ask how we could have people attending virtually. We built out our platform to be accessible on PC and mobile, and we started to hold events in a virtual venue, which then grew into a whole town with cinemas, bars and shops. We invited other artists and creators to take part in it, and it just took on a life of its own. After word got out about the platform (which we called Ristband), Epic reached out to us and we received the Epic Mega Grant, which literally changed our lives overnight.
R. R. – I often think about what the Internet was like in its early ages. Web 1. Obviously, no one could predict social media and other developments! The metaverse and Web 3 is in many ways still a series of walled gardens that are not particularly interoperable- for technical reasons, as much as financial and business reasons. If you look at the landscape of music in the metaverse, it is not the open, democratised platform everyone is getting so excited by (at least not yet). I mean, being an artist has never been harder: 80000 songs are released on Spotify every day… Magazines, blogs, radio stations don’t have anything like the influence they used to have. The discovery of music comes through an algorithm, which is pretty limiting when it comes to discovering new music, and yet here is a new technology paradigm shift which could help all small artists and grassroots venues, if only we had a platform they could use to enter and create in the metaverse. A little like WIX/Squarespace/Shopify allowed everyone to have a space, or a shop on the web.
Virtual worlds VS the old system
R. R. – Large, established acts like Travis Scott and Ariana Grande have the resources and level of exposure to create high quality performances on platforms like Fortnite. It’s important to note that these were 25-minute, pre recorded shows, which costs 10 million dollars with a team of nearly 100 engineers working on it for around 6months . Obviously it’s a positive sign for the evolution of the metaverse. But this isn’t something available to the vast majority of artists, those people who don’t have huge budgets and large followings. All artists deserve to have an opportunity to have a platform in front of the 2.8 billion gamers who have suddenly started attending shows. On top of that, physical venues are struggling! I think there is a way virtual concerts can support the physical world, and actively help artists reach their fans and sell virtual items.
R. R. – If you think of what music actually is, I’m not talking about the industry, I’m talking about music’s role in culture and society, over human history, it’s about a person creating an experience, of weaving a narrative with sound and melody. What we think of as the music industry (and what is often misleadingly simplified to “music”) is actually a construct that is not very old, and also something that evolved out of copyright/IP laws that are completely at odds with the world we currently live in. There is a natural fit between music and virtual worlds, because music is about creating an experience that transcends reality, and moves the listener. VR is perfect for this.
R. R. – I don’t think anything will ever replace live concerts, I feel like we evolve new ways of experiencing music, even new layers of reality in which to do it. Listening to an album on some headphones is a kind of virtual concert, but has aspects that alter the experience of what listening to music is. Watching Glastonbury on a screen is never going to replace going to Glastonbury- it’s a different perspective on the event, and with other advantages… you can watch your favourite band without getting your feet muddy, and you can still attend in some capacity even if you afford a ticket to the IRL concert- it also helps the festival sell tickets, promoting the experience so that people buy tickets for the following year. It all helps the fan experience and rather than replacing it. That’s at the core of what we’re trying to do with Ristband.
SXSW 2022, NFTs and more
R. R. – We’ve been asked to create the music metaverse and NFT stage for SXSW (link), which is a huge honour, and has been a fascinating look at the scene itself. For me the exciting thing about the metaverse is that it is still so undefined. One of the reasons we were so excited to be working with NFT artists is that they are already living in quite a futuristic vision of the world, which feels like a window into what will happen next. In terms of NFTs as a movement, I think it’s one of the most exciting things to happen to art since surrealism or Pop Art. It’s making people question the idea of value in art, and I think it’s a really powerful statement about where we are and where we might be going.. It’s the technological breakthroughs like blockchain that made it possible, and art movements are always punctuated by a technological revolution. Impressionist, the invention of the camera or photography or the Internet…
R. R. – I’m interested in working with artists, and featuring artists, who are already Web3 natives. There’s a lot of talk about NFT scams on Instagram etc, which I think people need to be really careful of, and it does feel like every 10 minutes there’s another NFT drop or article, but when you really get down to it, it’s a surprisingly small and closed community. The key thing for us at SXSW 2022 is to make a snapshot of what’s happening in music, metaverse and in the NFT space. It’s going to be a VR show by Miro Shot in a virtual theatre (link), we have guests such as an artist who created an AI that can learn from songs and write its own music, and some other special guests. Everything will be played in front of a live audience and and also take place on our multiplayer platform, powered by Unreal engine.
R. R. – As for the Ristband NFT Gallery, we’ve tried to not just go for established artists, so announced a call for content, which then got picked up by Superrare & Opensea- which then led to us receiving over 1000 artworks! Some of them are absolutely incredible. Alongside a physical event in Austin, we will have a (virtual) city block that we’ve built in Ristband – with a gallery. In that space, you can discover artworks, you can interact with them, you can even purchase them. Some of the NFTs are hidden in different parts of the world, so in a way it’s a kind of treasure hunt- part game and part gallery.
And next?
R. R. – I feel like we are only scratching the surface of what’s next, but it’s also the moment where some truly remarkable things are being tried- with very talented people working together to see what’s possible. I’m sure we will look back on these days fondly : as a time where anything was possible, and the rules had not yet been written.
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