About Me
Hi, my name is Ben Glasser (they/them)
I am Musician, Lighting Designer, Crafts person, and Audio Engineer based in Boston. I am a house LD at Royale Boston as well as Roadrunner. I am fluent in GrandMA 2 and GrandMA 3, Pangolin Beyond, and Resolume Arena. Over the course of the last two years, I have programmed and operated shows for an extensive range of genres. I have worked with staples of the EDM world, such as Rusko, Chase & Status, Crankdat, Bear Grillz, Odd Mob, Hol!, and many more. I have worked an equally broad group of concerts, including Lamp, Louis Cole, Franc Moody, Cascada, Free Throw, Earl Sweatshirt, and countless more.
Every day I am working a new artists show, pushing my boundaries in my own art, and inspiring me to make every show better than the last. My experience as a house LD has exposed me to the workings of functional
touring artists, and my time building a venue in my house has taught me to create a beautiful stage with extremely limited resources and physical constraints.
Monkey Palace
I have always wanted to open a music venue, and when I moved to Boston I was able to start making that dream a reality. I moved into a house in Allston and began turning my basement venue into what it is today. The initial renovations took about a year and a half, and once those were completed I began the process of adding my lighting rig and audio equipment. In April of 2022 I hosted and played in the first show in my basement, which was the birth of Monkey Palace. The lightning rig in its infancy had only LED strips, as of today my rig has forty-seven DMX controlled lights, and is still growing. I am always trying to find new ways to make my shows as beautifully lit as possible.
My current lighting rig consists of four moving washes, six scanners, eight lasers, one effect light, twenty-six led pars, and two led bar lights. I use lightkey with a Launchpad and an APC40 MKII for control. All lights have been collected over time, primarily from Craigslist and Facebook market. The audio rig was built in a similar fashion, and we currently run up to twenty-four inputs at a time, with full multitrack recording capabilities. Building these rigs from scratch has given me a deep understanding of the fundamental function of each stage element, and the ability to create art I envision in an extremely limited environment.
Over the course of under a year, our shows went from forty audience members, to consistently over 145 audience members every show. Monkey Palace has grown into one of the most popular basement venues in Boston.