![]() ![]() People watching was actually one of the most entertaining parts of the event, as everyone took in the VR, as with music, in completely different ways. This was not a collective live experience, more a lot of people watching the same thing at different times in the same room. The audio from the festival is within the app and you don’t listen to the vinyl whilst wearing the headset, so the name VR Vinyl may be a tad misleading.Īs everyone wore their own headset the actual experience was very solitary and it became clear the word ‘screening’ in the title was carefully chosen. The experience centered around the PHAROS Earth app which links to the VR Vinyl when ‘activated’. Walking into the theatre at House Of Vans we were handed a phone, a pair of headphones and a decorated, cardboard VR headset. “I was enjoying not knowing what to expect,” said Sian from North London. Outside of that however the fans I spoke to were unsure of what would happen – a fairly common theme in the career of Childish Gambino. That PHAROS would be a big part of the vinyl release shows how much planning had gone into the release of ‘Awaken, My Love!’, and the chance to finally experience the festival was an exciting prospect. Reviews were glowing, with Tyler Mitchell in The FADER calling it a chance to live “fully inside an artist’s idea of the world” and Nathan Slavik for Bundle.Media writing, “The future is now, and it looks exactly like Donald Glover.” Gambino used the opportunity to premiere the first of three episodes of Atlanta and the new music that would become ‘Awaken, My Love!’. ![]() Phones were completely banned from the performance areas and ticket holders were instructed to wear blue, the “vibrancy colour”. ![]() The PHAROS Festival took place in the Joshua Tree desert in September. A little over 24 hours later the timer reached zero and it was revealed to be a festival announcement. The app opened to an animation of speeding through space with a mysterious timer counting down to what most presumed would be new music. Almost two years after all of his social media blacked out following the release of ‘STN MTN / Kauai’ Gambino returned with a single Tweet that linked to the PHAROS Earth app. PHAROS was how Donald Glover announced the return of Childish Gambino in June last year. This finally gave us an indication of what to expect from a VR Vinyl. Tickets were free, but balloted, and promised “world-first access to this hyper-immersive showcase” that included “the incredible 360° footage shot at immersive PHAROS concerts last summer”. The event was to celebrate the launch of the ‘Awaken, My Love!’ limited edition VR Vinyl, which had been announced months ago to general bemusement (VR Vinyl works how…?). When Donald Glover does something now people take notice.Īs such, when House Of Vans announced an ‘Awaken, My Love!’ “VR Screening Party” earlier this month it generated quite a lot of buzz. His TV series Atlanta was a critical and commercial success, his PHAROS festival out in the Joshua Tree desert was lauded as unique, and he released arguably the most acclaimed album of his career, ‘Awaken, My Love!’ In the last twelve months he’s also been cast as Lando Calrissian, Simba and won two Golden Globes, propelling Migos to their first number one in the process by shouting them out in his acceptance speech. In 2016 Childish Gambino went from being a cult favourite to one of the most respected artists in the world.
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