Intimate,
By Andrew King
Immersive
Inimitable
Mixing Lights’ Skin & Earth Acoustic Tour
The crowd
that filled Toronto’s Danforth Music Hall to
capacity for the July 27 th stop on Lights’ Skin
& Earth Acoustic Tour was seeing – and hear-
ing – something much different than they
would have the last time she graced that
particular stage.
In March 2018, the luminous electro-
pop artist delivered an impactful perfor-
mance supporting her fourth studio LP, Skin
& Earth, reciprocating the energy emanating
from the 1,500 fans in front of her with a sig-
nature swagger. This time, though, despite
the same amount of people being packed
36 PROFESSIONAL SOUND
into the venue and the music being equally
as enveloping, the scene was much more
still and the atmosphere more serene.
A couple of weeks prior to the show,
Lights released Skin & Earth Acoustic, a col-
lection of stripped-down selections from
the studio LP of (almost) the same name
each recorded in unique and noteworthy
environments, from a truck cab to the des-
ert to the edge of a cliff. At the Danforth,
the artist and the acoustic guitar on her
lap were joined by her usual backing band
and a small string ensemble to recapture
the delicate beauty of those recordings in a
communal setting with a captivated crowd.
Among the technical crew helping to
LIGHTS & HER BAND ON
THE SKIN & EARTH ACOUSTIC TOUR
deliver that experience on this and the 16
other North American stops was FOH engi-
neer and production manager Chris Kaplins-
ki, who actually started his ongoing tenure
with the artist on the original tour support-
ing Skin & Earth nearly two years prior.
“The biggest difference between the
two is volume, obviously,” he says with a
chuckle, before elaborating: “There are sec-
tions here that are so quiet ... It’s not that
it’s more challenging, but you need to pay
a lot more attention to what the room is
doing. It’s interesting, when you can get the
volume down to 85dB in the house, what
the room actually sounds like. All the little
idiosyncrasies really come out.”