Beacon, the brainchild of producers Thomas Mullarney and Jacob Gossett, turns music into visual imagery. On Wednesday at Kilby Court, the duo came to Salt Lake City for the first time and highlighted the illustrative component of their music by coinciding their mix of trip hop and R&B sounds with an elaborate stage setup of lights and video.
Throughout the performance it was clear Mullarney and Gossett were more than musicians — they are artists. While the two have focused on fashioning electronic music, they have a strong foundation in art. “We were both more visual artists before this band really started going. I spent years in my studio making paintings and video,” Gossett said.
Gossett and Mullarney met at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating, they teamed up to make music. So far, the collaboration has worked well.
Since 2010, Beacon has pushed out two EPs and a full-length album. Released in early April, their debut LP “The Ways We Separate” has seen attention from sources such as Pitchfork and The Fader.
The string of songs on “The Ways We Separate” have influenced a succession of images and animations, all of which are shown in video format at each show.
“Every song has video components. A lot of them are based loosely on the theme of the album art,” Gossett said.
Before turning dreamed up pictures into movie format for “The Ways We Separate” tour, Mullarney and Gossett worked together to conceptualize an illustration for the record’s cover. Once they accomplished that, they drew up abstract depictions for each track.
Though many of the images are nonrepresentational, they follow a central theme that parallels to the album’s artwork. For “The Ways We Separate” cover, Beacon decided to feature a drawing of a woman sawing a man in half. The picture is sewn together with soft lines and light shading. They carried that style over to the visual component of their shows by breaking the conceptual aspect of the drawing into a series of abstract images.
This was witnessed at Beacon’s Salt Lake City performance. At Kilby Court, the video set started with an image from the record’s artwork, and the depiction of the drawing eventually faded into smoke-filled shapes.
While the aspect of art was experienced throughout the show, the venue and setup caused problems. Concert attendee Jackson Kelley was disapointed with the visual component.
“[The visual component] was good. I kind of expected a little more. There was less control over it, in regards to the music,” Kelley said.  He also thought the venue got in the way of Beacon’s vsion. “They were in the way of the projector and the right side of the wall had nothing going on.”
From images to sounds, the team is always looking for ways to cohesively tie ideas together. The entire song selection of “The Ways We Separate” works to resonate the feelings of connection and disconnection. The lyrics, “We’ll pick up / Right where we left off / Like the calm / Waiting on a storm,” from the song “Feeling’s Gone,” depict how easy it is to fall in and out of patterns — patterns found in the many types of relationships.
The album is packed full of tunes telling the stories of togetherness and separation. By mixing distinct genres of music, “The Ways We Fall Apart” flows seamlessly and puts listeners into an electronic trance. It sweeps them into the emotions of each song.
To say the least, Beacon has mastered the mash-up of art mediums. “We both come from different backgrounds … those two things coming together is the result of what we’re making. I think it’s as simple as that,” Gossett said. “We both have differences in the music we listen to and in our style of writing. The combination of those two things is what developed over the last few years.”