Create Musical Art & ‘Melt Faces’ With Your Fingertips

If you’ve gone to an electronic dance music show or rave recently, you’ve probably seen people using LED gloves waving them around in front of someone, or sometimes even two or three people will stand in front of another putting on a double/triple light show. While you may wonder what the hell they’re doing and why they’re doing it, there’s a lot more to it than you’d think. This swift and meticulous movement of LED fingertips has really made a name for itself in the art category. Your hands are the paintbrush, and your imagination is the canvas!

“Gloving” puts a new twist on the old practice of rave light shows, in which people wearing gloves with LED lights in them perform dazzling tricks that look cool in the dark. While anyone could wave some lights around creating something that might appeal to the eye, gloving has become contagiously popular in the rave scene and extremely complex with several different styles and precise moves that take lots of practice to master. Most of the time you see guys with gloves on at shows, but every once in a while a girl will step up to the challenge which I myself have done, and let me tell you once I put those gloves on it’s hard to take them off. Now that I have my own pair I will sit in front of a mirror for hours practicing how to ‘melt’ or ‘tut’ until I get it perfect.

There’s two things that I think any glover needs to master and have under control before taking on a complete light show- musicality and technicality. It takes a lot of energy and experience in what you’re doing with your hands in order to act out an entire song with specific flicks of your wrists, rolls of your fingers, placements of your hands, and all of these put together. Ever glover has a different style but the basics are all the same from terms like finger rolls, figure 8’s, whips/tunnels/flails, liquids, finger tutting, and conjuring, to stacking. Some people are incredible tutters and can perform very sharp movements while others master the flowy melt moves and finger rolls.

But what really ties a show together and takes pure talent is when technicality and musicality are perfectly blended together. For someone like me who has such a strong love and ear for music, it comes pretty naturally to follow the melody of a song with my hands. Gloving is a type of dance, and like any dance style, you have to have rhythm if you want to achieve musicality and a clean show. Understanding the structure and flow of a song is important in a light show, and when someone is able to collaborate their technical skills with their knowledge of musicality, that’s when they can officially call themselves a glover.

Its no secret that gloving has become a quintessential asset of the raving scene, and many glovers out there including myself collect their gloving supplies from EmazingLights.com. Brian Lim, the CEO and founder of both EmazingLights and iHeartRaves has made a name for himself as “the world’s largest rave retailer” creating a $5 million dollar enterprise- not bad for a guy who used to sell gloving essentials out of the trunk of his car at an In-n-Out Burger shop. Lim, who realized there was a market for LED gloves after drunkenly messing around with his girlfriend’s light gloves in a club back in 2009, has since moved on to open his first retail shop in West Covina, California, and is currently operating from a 15,000 square foot warehouse in Anaheim, California, as well as four other retail stores located in California and Texas, with future locations planned to expand into Florida, New York, and Illinois. Plus, his online business remains extremely prosperous and allows the allure of lights to expand across the U.S. EmazingLights offers a wide variety of gloving essentials on their website from a $40 beginners pair of gloves to an experienced glovers set at $180. On their Youtube channel they have tons of different tutorial videos to learn from and some of the best light shows performed by their team of glover lovers, this one by “Blitzen” wearing the gloves that I own being my personal favorite.

Team [e] [LJ] Blitzen – Kaleidoscope Glove Light Show [EmazingLights.com]

Connect With EmazingLights:

Website: www.emazinglights.com/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/EmazingLights
Twitter: https://twitter.com/emazinglights