Watch Five Minutes of Meshuggah’s Light Guy at Work

Just a couple of months ago I found myself stoned (shocker) at Meshuggah’s packed show in NYC, absolutely transfixed by their stellar, perfectly in-time light show, wondering “Are those lights programmed or is there a real live guy pushing buttons who knows every Meshuggah song really, really well?”

And now I have my answer, via The Monolith: Edvard Hansson is Meshuggah’s lighting technician, and here’s a video of him hard at work at the band’s show in Paris last December. There are moments when he’s flying across the control surface like Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation; unreal. Bigs ups for being able to keep track of all those crazy time changes and polyrhythms. The lights themselves — at least on the North American tour — were way more impressive than they look here, so I wish we had like a split screen or something for full effect. But this is still super-cool.