Rob Sheridan, the art director for Trent Reznor’s side project How To Destroy Angels, is up on stage, but he has no instrument. More accurately, he is playing an instrument, but it doesn’t play music – it plays light.

How to Destroy Angels, a band that includes Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, his wife Mariqueen Maandig, Atticus Ross and Sheridan, is the midst of a 12-show tour around the U.S. that includes a Coachella date tonight around midnight. Throughout the show, Sheridan uses a Livid MIDI controller and an iPad Mini running Lemur to tweak, trigger, and control a huge projector and a sixteen-foot wall of LEDs that create a shimmering, three-dimensional cube of light effects.

Set up in front of the stage is a 16-foot tall curtain of 14-inch surgical tubing, which offers a semi-transparent surface for the projector. The effect is a masking, shading substrate for an abstract lighting effect. Panning the video down can cause a cascading rain, or a trickle effect. As the music intensifies, digital dots make a frantic red snowstorm.

Originally the show was supposed to have four projectors, one from each side, and another curtain of tubing in the back. But while that might have worked at Coachella, most of the other venues would have lost the effect.

“We were realizing, this is going to suck at all the shows except Coachella,” says Sheridan. “It’s not even remotely the same thing. That’s when Trent says, 'well, don’t kill me for asking, but how much would it cost to get an LED screen in here?' Miraculously it happened. We were able to afford it, and get it in, and it saved the show, basically. It made a tremendous, tremendous difference in how everything looked.”

The result is an abstract texture, wherein images from the projector and the LED screen interact, creating a three-dimensional feel, with the band almost floating in between.

“A lot of what this thing ended up being had a lot to do with what the band is and how we envisioned kind of being presented live,” says Sheridan. “It was very much about structure and architecture and how to make something that didn’t feel at all like a rock show, felt more like an art installation.”

He worked with production designer Roy Bennett and lighting and projection mapping company Moment Factory to design a show for Coachella. But by the time Sheridan had visited Moment Factory’s Montreal studio to prototype the stage design, they had so much invested in the project that they decided to build a tour around it.

“It was really about creating depth of textures and creating a certain volume in the stage,” says Sakchin Bessette, Moment Factory’s co-founder. “It’s really based on a lot of layering, this show. Basically the front projector and the LED screen in the back kind of work together, with the band in the middle.”

It’s a gamble, hiding the band behind a screen, even a translucent one. The tubing is strung in four rows, and depending on how Sheridan’s got it lit, you can see the band’s silhouettes, faces, or nothing at all.

But the tubing is in sections: at Coachella, five units hang from a track above, and Sheridan can move them, rotate them, and slide them out of the way.

“It’s this whole idea of kind of like structuring the show so that it stays mysterious at the beginning,” says Bessette. “The first song, it’s just silhouettes of the band that we see … but as it opens up, it becomes more human and personal.”

Risk it may be, but on the reveal, the crowd screams. The payoff is there.

“The reaction we’ve gotten has been really really good,” says Sheridan. “There’s that moment when you’ve been working for months and months on end, when you wonder, is this good?”

Sheridan compares the project to some of what you see at electronic dance shows, like Amon Tobin, who has featured projection mapping effects in his shows.

“But we also have a distinct advantage over that type of stuff,” says Sheridan. “We have actual musicians on stage playing real instruments, and a lead singer who carries a lot of emotion and personality and voice.”

During the single, “How Long,” a discreet Kinect captures lead singer Maandig, translating her image through the projectors as a bright white silhouette, with a vortex of moving red lights spinning out of it like red blood cells.

Dressed all in white, with a Kinect-generated halo, she looks a bit like an angel.

Photos: Moment Factory