Technological innovation has made possible solo live performances that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. As a result, such excellent sonically immersive artists and comrades-in-arms as Lustmord and Black Mountain Transmitter are now able to offer very effective performances in concert.
This fact led me to imagine, hypothetically, what a live Bestia Centauri performance might be in an ideal world. Almost needless to say, the financing, the demand, and most likely the technology for such a performance is non-existent. But what if...?
One idea for a Bestia Centauri live event would be to create a wholly immersive environment using either holograms or VR headsets. Bestia Centauri would establish, say, a week-long residence at a difficult-to-locate venue, and audiences would be limited to fifteen or twenty persons per "performance". The venue would be decorated to resemble an old-fashioned mental institution, and audience members would be either seated in chairs or lying on gurneys (straitjackets optional for those especially adventurous audients who might want to try to replicate the out-of-the body experiences and past life regressions of Darrell Standing in Jack London's oneiric 1915 novel The Star Rover).
Bestia Centauri would play parts live, accompanied as needed by backing "tapes". Each audience member would be connected to monitors, so that Bestia Centauri would receive basic physiological information from random audients (brain waves, temperature, heart rate). Bestia Centauri would then modify the backing, the sound, the volume, the lighting, and even the room temperature accordingly.
Another idea would be to perform the music, as described above, but to have the audience in an induced hypnagogic state, in which they are balanced equally between waking and dreaming. Or perhaps the audience would be fully asleep, and the sounds would be adjusted according to EEG feedback, particularly during the REM stages of sleep.
An impossible dream for an impossible project.
