However, the album was only part of the puzzle. In 2022, Daze presented the visual Blue, which was promoted as "a 33-minute expedition geared towards having the observer understand how sound may look," at the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science's planetarium. The audiovisual experience popped up again at III Points in October 2023, requiring festivalgoers to lay on beanbags inside a temporary dome.
"That was a trial run," Daze tells New Times of the 2022 show. "We ended up doubling down and going for the final product after we saw what was needed."
The final product is set to be screened on Friday, January 25, at the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science during its nightLAB event, a series of adults-only evenings at the museum. The multiple showings, now sold out, require advance registration separate from the ticketed admission.
"It took another nine months to finish the entire thing the way we wanted to," he adds.
The "we" Daze is referring to are the two Glaswegian animators, Connor MacDonald and Joseph Nickson, who he worked with to bring ::Blue:: to life. Sending files back and forth from either side of the Atlantic, they collaborated to put Daze's music to motion, giving special consideration that the visuals needed to be projected on the Frost Planetarium's domed screen.
"One of the bigger challenges for them was that [MacDonald and Nickson] had never worked with this kind of spherical screen," Daze adds. They are used to working on flat surfaces, so it's a lot easier. Once you throw a curved element in, it creates an entirely new challenge because you have to make sure that the aspect ratio is right and that people are not getting dizzy. There's a lot to take into consideration."
Musicians creating visuals for their music isn't a new phenomenon. The Beatles released everything from comedy musicals (Help!) to psychedelic animations (Yellow Submarine), while Pink Floyd's The Wall is perhaps one of the most lauded examples of the audiovisual experience. Contemporary acts have experimented with the medium, like Beyoncé (Lemonade and Black Is King), Kacey Musgraves (Star-Crossed: The Film), and Travis Scott (Circus Maximus), during a time when fans are spoiled with choices when it comes to what commands their attention.
For Daze, ::Blue:: offers the viewer a peek inside his head while creating music.
Frost Science Museum photo
"The album's visual side of it just came from years of me wanting to do it," he explains. "Usually, the way that I make music is I'll make a loop, I'll sit down, and I just meditate on that loop. It can be for it can be for 30 minutes to an hour. I'll sit here, and I'll just listen and keep listening. I'll close my eyes until all thought is gone. Once that thought is gone, it looks like something to me."
During the recording of ::Blue:: Daze kept a composition notebook at his side to draw anything that popped into his mind during these meditative exercises. He also knew that he wanted the visuals to be projected inside a dome, like a planetarium, to give the viewer the sense of being inside someone's head. "For me, that's the closest you can get to getting inside my head and seeing exactly what I saw when I closed my eyes," he adds.
The project also challenged him to make music that wasn't necessarily tailor-made for the dance floor. "Most people would know me as a dance club DJ or producer. I can produce a song in my head and automatically know if it will work in a club," Daze says. How about creating music where the audience must sit down and look up? That was admittedly a bit trickier for Daze. "It's something that for me I had never done before. Maybe I did it on a per-song basis because I've made some experimental music before. But as a project, it was very different. I've never done this before, and putting together even the sequence of the way the songs flow together, the way they transitioned together. All that was extremely meticulous; it was very thought out. I moved things around quite a bit within the album in order for them to make sense in a way that made sense to me as a story, whether you had the images or not."
With the album and visuals done, Daze is ready for the world to peek inside his head. "This is opening some new doors for me when it comes to going further with artistic mediums. I'm hoping this is not the only time that I'm going to be doing something like this," he says, adding that he's already hard at work on another album.
Eventually, he hopes to take ::Blue:: on the road and show it in other cities, but because of the requirements of a domed screen and precise curvature (23.5 degrees, if you're curious), it isn't exactly a small task. "I'm hoping it's something that can live on," he says.
nightLAB: Danny Daze ::Blue::. 7 to 10 p.m. Thursday, January 25, at the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, 1101 Biscayne Blvd., Miami; 305-434-9600; frostscience.org. Sold out.
