Fran Magazine: Issue #112

A guest post from Phil

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Hi again from the woods

I’m (Fran) still away on residency but today I’m happy to share the second of three guest pieces from Phil about our shared experience seeing the ABBA holograms in London — a nightlife event that both made us feel very strange, to say the least! Phil previously wrote for the magazine about Big Little Lies, and it was awesome.

What Do You Call a Miracle When God Is Not Present
by Phil

There is an overwhelmingly popular narrative surrounding The Lumière brothers’ 1895 film The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station: when the film was first exhibited, audiences would shriek in terror, cowering in their seats thinking the titular train was real and headed straight for them. It’s a tremendous tale, beloved by pop historians and film-lovers alike for the concise and satisfying way it shows both the ways in which ‘the past is a different country’ and the innate, almost spiritual power of the moving image. There is a problem, however: there is simply no contemporary documentation of this phenomena. It appears to be borne of myth and hearsay and doesn’t make its way into written record until some forty years after those initial screenings in 1895 and 1896. In writing dissecting and disproving the ‘founding myth of cinema,’ researchers point to the sensationalist nature of advertisement, especially at the turn of the century — if people were fainting, or running screaming out of an exhibition hall, this fact would’ve surely been touted in the marketing material for the Cinématographe Lumiére touring road show. Much of that marketing material survives, and none of it makes any mention of terrified audiences believing the projected moving image to be real. People who lived 129 years ago are, on the whole, no more stupid  than you or me. They may not have had access to the same information that we do today, but their critical faculties were no better or worse. To think people would mistake a projected, two-dimensional image on a screen for the real thing is uncharitable and silly.

Last April, Fran Magazine editor Fran Hoepfner and I went to London to celebrate her birthday. We packed our schedule with museums (John Soane House Museum was the best of them all, simply not to be missed), delicious food (my favorite was probably Watani Sheeryakh¹), and shopping (I spent more money than I care to admit on rare disco and reggae records alone, to say nothing of all the cool pants and vintage Harris Tweed). Our schedule was full, but we made time to squeeze in some last minute tickets to ABBA Voyage, perhaps better known as “that ABBA Hologram thing.” The show, billed as a multi-million dollar technological extravaganza celebrating the near-flawless, hit-dense discography of the beloved Swedish wunderkinds, has largely been kept under wraps. Any bootleg footage is guaranteed to be swiftly taken down through a copyright strike, and the official promotional material gives away very little beyond the fact that the show revolves around de-aged ABBA holograms (hilariously and sinisterly called “ABBAtars”) that look like characters in a AAA PS5-exclusive. I have seen hologram performances before: in 2016, I flew to Seattle to see famous anime girl and software mascot Hatsune Miku “live in concert,”² which was pretty damn fun and novel. The tickets for Voyage were pricey — cheaper than seeing the real ABBA, sure, but more than seeing a cover band which, unlike ABBA Voyage, would feature real human beings playing instruments and singing songs.³ Though Fran and I mostly listen to different music, ABBA is a mutual favorite, a staple in the car when I’m burnt out on Berlioz and she can’t take any more Cannibal Ox. Thusly, the opportunity to dance and sing along to their music in a crowd of other ABBA fans (presumably with some kind of fancy light show and an amazing sound system) felt like it would be worth the price of admission, regardless of how good (or bad) the show itself really was. 

It ended up being one of the most profoundly terrifying experiences of my life.

ABBA Voyage is impossible to “spoil,” because ABBA Voyage is impossible to comprehend without witnessing it in person. As you amble into the ABBA Arena concert hall after getting, say, an Aperol spritz and one of the best hotdogs you’ve ever eaten,⁴ you are greeted by several semi-translucent projection screens blocking your view of the stage, displaying looping footage of a painterly winter landscape (which one must assume is meant to evoke the tranquil boreal forests of ABBA’s native Sweden), as gentle ambient music pipes throughout the auditorium. This is somewhat impressive — it’s very pretty and the screens are quite large — but if you have dancefloor tickets that put you close to the stage, it’s easy to notice that these projected images are of middling quality. The image is ever so slightly pixelated, the edges of the screens imperfectly masked. This mediocre pre-show set up, I would later surmise, is intentional misdirection designed to lower your expectations, and therefore your guard, against the overwhelming horror of what is to come. As the auditorium slowly fills, the ambient music grows louder, and new details emerge in the looping winter forest. Anticipation builds — this really feels more like a live concert event than a scripted theme park attraction — and when the lights dim to black and the projection screens recede up towards the rafters, everyone, yourself included, screams.

Everything goes silent, everything is dark, real darkness, true black, until an impossibly large, impossibly bright vertical beam of white shoots forward from the inky depths and across the entire auditorium to the tune of a pounding synthesized thrum. It’s magnetic and consuming. These pulses continue, quickening their pace until they become a strobe, moving quicker than your eyes can trace them. The accompanying sound morphs from a pulsing rumble into a tangible bassline, and then, as the futuristic, glistening synth tones of “The Visitors” intro criss-cross through the arena, the true magick of ABBA Voyage reveals itself: In the center of the stage, rising slowly from trap doors in the floor, Agnetha, Benny, Björn and Anni emerge. My jaw literally dropped. Though obviously smooth and digital, they are real, tangibly three-dimensional figures with weight and substance. I immediately felt an urge to move a few feet to either side, to see if I could “break” the illusion by revealing their lack of parallax, but I couldn’t. These things, these entities, though obviously not real humans or animatronics, are nevertheless physically present. As they started to move, singing and dancing around the stage, a knot of unease formed in my stomach. My simple, human brain was wholly unable to process what I was seeing. Everyone around me was dancing and cheering and singing along and I was frozen in place, unable to move or breathe or even mouth along the words, though The Visitors’ haunting opening refrain was apt for what had consumed me:

I hear the doorbell ring and suddenly the panic takes me

The sound so ominously tearing through the silence

I cannot move, I'm standing

Numb and frozen

Among the things I love so dearly

By the time they launched into their second song, the bouncy, compulsively danceable “Does Your Mother Know,” I was completely unmoored, spiraling, sinking and levitating all at once. Fran squeezed my hand.

“Are you doing okay?” she asked. 

I turned to her to say, “yes, I’m fine.” Instead, I burst into tears. 

As the show progressed, the “trick” became apparent: ABBA Voyage, at its core, is simply a very large LED screen: 65 million pixels to be exact. For context, the resolution of a true IMAX screen is estimated at a paltry 18,000. The magic comes from the way the big screen is used to blend the real environment with the fake: the real stage lights are indistinguishable from the fake, rendered stage lights on the screen. The fake stage, where the ABBAtars are performing, blends perfectly with the real stage where a live band provides accompaniment off to the side. It is impossible to tell where the real world — the stage, the auditorium — ends, and the false world of the giant LED screen begins. In the cleverest trick of the whole production, there are fake LED screens rendered behind the ABBAtars on the real giant LED screen, and the masterfully calculated light occlusion effects lend everything a sense of unimaginable flesh-and-blood dimensionality. Another thing that should break verisimilitude but actually just adds to the uncanniness of it all, is that the ABBAtars are all nine feet tall. This is probably to facilitate there not being a bad seat in the house: if you were, say, stuck behind a six-foot-three American man who is glued to the floor in terror, you would have no problem seeing the ABBAtars. It takes a while to notice, but once you do, you can’t unsee them as giants.

reluctant credit to abba voyage

But, no matter how much I scrutinized the edges of the screen, no matter how closely I studied the angles between the live band and the ABBAtars, my rational brain and my emotional heart remained diametrically opposed. Though I had figured out how the trick was pulled, I refused to accept what I was seeing as anything but “real,” which is to say existing in three dimensions in front of me. This may read as though it is just a particularly neat, even overwhelming, bit of high tech stagecraft; it is simply impossible for me to overstate how terrifying it is to see digital humans, perfect de-aged simulations of figures you know and love, moving in front of you. It feels miraculous, something so magnificent it shouldn’t be possible, and yet it is! I was seeing it happen before my eyes!

These days, the word “Lovecraftian” is bandied about in such a way as to be almost meaningless, often used as a descriptor for anything full of tentacles and eyeballs that is very big or very ancient or very far away, but if you actually read Lovecraft’s tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, you know the horror comes not from witnessing something very grotesque, but from witnessing something impossible, something you are wholly unable to comprehend, let alone describe to another. Angels, when they appear to lowly humans in the Bible, always lead with “be not afraid.” In this way, ABBA Voyage is fundamentally an exercise in Lovecraftian horror, a miracle without God. I could write a thousand more words on what it looked like, sounded like, felt like, and I would never be able to properly describe the effect it has on you. The show should come with a warning: ABBA Voyage could have irreparable effects on the mental stability of spiritually-minded or otherwise noided persons. That such a wholly convincing illusion was crafted by mortal minds and hands carries with it a horror that I cannot pinpoint to any single thing — it is slippery, existential, impossible for me to accurately convey with words, or even with reproduced images: If you watch any footage of ABBA Voyage, either officially released or bootlegged on a phone (hard to find but it’s out there), it looks patently fake and two-dimensional. Impressive, maybe, but just a big screen with lots of expensive lights all around it, and that is, to me, where this whole affair becomes something more magickal, and thus, horrifying. In the moment, this thing that can only be reproduced as obviously fakery, is so wholly and terrifyingly real. Any technology sufficiently advanced, says Arthur C. Clarke, is indistinguishable from magic; any intelligence sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from God.

As the show went on, I managed to calm myself (thankfully, the ABBAtars are not present for every second of the show: much of it is bizarre anime-inspired animations, or lovingly restored archival footage of the band’s legendary EuroVision run), but my mind continued to race with the implications of what I was witnessing. I thought of Project Blue Beam, a conspiracy theory that posits that The Powers That Be™ are attempting to create a new world order led by the Antichrist, by way of a technologically advanced holographic simulation of the Second Coming. I thought of the caves at Lascaux and Chauvet where 17,000 years ago, early man toiled for hours in dismal conditions, hundreds of feet into the earth, to craft complex and beautiful depictions of Animals and the world around them. I thought of Richard Doty, the AFOSI special agent who, under instruction of the United States Air Force, fed false information about UFOs to business owner Paul Bennewitz, going so far as to take Bennewitz in a helicopter to a fabricated Alien crash site somewhere in the hills of New Mexico, for reasons unknown (this eventually drove Bennewitz insane, culminating in an extended hospitalization).⁵ I thought of Plato’s cave, Gnostic cosmology, The Matrix. I thought of Robert Oppenheimer’s recollection of the Bhagavad Gita; of how, after the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were callously leveled to the tune of 226,000 deaths, mankind for the first time supplanted God as the thing that could destroy all life on earth with a wave of the hand. I thought for a long time, in the moment and after, of Lumiére brothers’ Arrival of a Train, and that apocryphal tale of audiences fleeing in terror. It no longer seemed so implausible to me.

1. You can read more about Watani Sheeryakh, along with all the other great food we ate, in Fran Magazine: Issue #102 here.

2. Not accepting any questions or comments on this, btw.

3. We found out, of course, upon seeing the show, that there is a very talented 10-piece band that accompanies the ABBAtars.

4. The ABBA Arena hotdog is probably the second or third best thing I ate in London. It’s really that good. If you go see ABBA Voyage, DO NOT SKIP GETTING A HOTDOG.

5. Unlike Blue Beam, this is not an outlandish conspiracy theory. You can read the memorandum, declassified in 2003, detailing the psychological war waged against Bennewitz by the AFOSI here, on the official CIA website.