Faultlines Live: When Music Meets Raw Energy
Capturing the intimate performance of Faultlines, where folksy melodies and rich harmonies create pure musical magic
Published 2015-02-20
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Capturing the intimate performance of Faultlines, where folksy melodies and rich harmonies create pure musical magic
Studio portraits are controlled. Live music is not. The light shifts mid-song, people move, and you're guessing one beat ahead with a camera that hates the dark. I like that better.
Last night I shot Faultlines in a tight room at a small venue, with loud harmonies and no do-overs.
Faultlines is a local folk-leaning band built around acoustic instruments and stacked vocals. If you haven't heard them, start on Spotify or wherever you stream.
Their newer stuff still sounds like them, which is harder than it sounds when a band keeps writing.
The small venue let me see the performers' faces clearly. The harmonies carried most of the set. They played without backing tracks.
The crowd was close enough that the band could read the room. Each song picked up energy from the last. By the encore the whole place felt loud in the good way.
Live music photography is mostly logistics:
I chased interaction more than solo hero shots. Glances between players, hands on strings, the face mid-phrase. The lighting helped. Hard shadows made boring angles usable.
Shot with:
Hard to file under one genre label. Acoustic folk bones, contemporary songwriting on top, harmonies doing the heavy lifting. Quiet verses, then everyone singing at once.
You hear breath, mistakes, crowd noise, the way a chorus lands when fifty people already know the words.
Faultlines responded to the room as they played through the set.
Full set from the night is on my Flickr album.
If Faultlines plays near you, go. Small room, loud harmonies, worth the late drive home.