The Music Never Stops // Monomad Challenge 📷

This is my entry for the #monomad challenge by @monochromes. You can read more about the contest and how to enter here.

I recently attended a live show of the Izraeli musician Avishai Cohen.

Funny thing, I landed at this peformance by complete coincidence.

There’s another jazz musician also called Avishai Cohen and that one plays the trumpet. I saw an ad and immediately bought the tickets, and didn’t realize my mistake until halfway through the show.

It was a great performance nonetheless, and I was blown away by the lady on the drums Roni Kaspi, she really killed it. Actually, all three were pretty amazing and the venue was packed.

We had a lot of debates with my musician friends over the past two years whether the “new normal” will take away live gigs and replace them with online concert streaming and virtual experiences with VR glasses. Attending shows like this one makes me confident that that won’t happen anytime soon - people still crave the human connection and true live experience.

But that artificial experience is probably coming first to certain genres with younger fanbase, like electronic music.

Imagine wearing VR glasses combined with augmented reality where once you put the glasses on you share the space with your friends who are also wearing their set of glasses. If you ever tried the VR glasses with a rollercoaster experience, you know the brain can’t tell the difference, your heart rate and the adrenaline goes up as if you were on a real rollercoaster.

In this case, there’s no need to leave home, drive somewhere, possibly search for parking, wait in line to get to the gig, get beer spilled over your shirt by other people at the show, etc. Surely some find this hassle-free way of attending a show compelling, just like working from home seems pretty normal and brings lots of convenience these days whereas a few years ago we were listening about how it’s not efficient and how people need to meet in person and have water cooler conversations.

As a big music fan, I still think it’s worth going through all the “pain points” of getting to the gig - it’s part of the experience too! - and until the virtual thing is at least as good as a real one, I’ll stick to the live shows.

I’m so glad for random mistakes like this one.