LITTLE ROCK — The biggest impromptu Halloween party in the city this year was at the Pretty Lights show Saturday night at Verizon Arena.
Pretty Lights, aka Derek Vincent Smith, is an electronic music performer whose sound is a pastiche of music sampling and digital effects that very nearly imitate house music at a club but with more layering of actual, though distorted, vocals, keyboards, laser sounds and electronic pops.
Since his first album five years ago, Smith has grown his fan base by submitting to a heavy tour schedule and investing in stage sets that are impressive pretty lights in their own right. Without them, people might pay more attention to the fact they just paid $30 to watch a man play two laptops and a soundboard.
Saturday, the stage was set up with more than a dozen towers of LED screens made to look like a miniaturized big-city skyline. More than 2,500 people saw the show.
From a high vantage point and in the dark, the glow-ringed concertgoers themselves looked like a human Lite-Brite screen. Down on the floor, Olivia Holt of Conway worked a LED hula hoop that seemed like the highest order of glow stick ambition.
“And I got all my tricks off YouTube for free,” she said.
Pretty Lights would be proud. The performer has always offered all three of his albums free for download through his website. “That’s how it should be,” Holt said.
Shows like Saturday’s are how he supports his label, Smith has said.
Many came to the show in full costume. Wizards and fairies, Romans and country boys, succubi and she-devils.
Jane Embry Nisbet, Drew Selig, Alexis Nisbet and Adam Reid of Little Rock arrived as a zombie, a snake charmer eaten by his own snake, and Sebastian and Ariel from The Little Mermaid, respectively. The four had seen Pretty Lights twice before, at the Hangout Festival in Gulf Shores, Ala., and at a New Year’s show in Chicago.
“It’s always a great atmosphere and a fun crowd,” said Embry Nisbet.
And if it can’t ever be a sing-a-long kind of show, Nisbet said, it’s a “dance-a-long.”