Juturna Balls

When we were preparing for our first headlining tour for the Juturna album cycle, we threw around a lot of ideas for fun things we could do to improve the show experience. A few things we came up with were to use an oil lamp projector over the whole stage for a psychedelic effect. We also bought like 50 of those bobble head owls that are used to keep birds away. But the best idea, which also simultaneously was the worst idea, were these transparent beach balls that you put a glow stick inside to make it glow. We had a moment in the set where we had our tour manager Scott turn off all the lights in the room and throw out anywhere from 10 to 50 of these, and it was fucking awesome. If any of you were at the Henry Fonda Theatre in LA on this tour, then you got the best example of this when we launched 50 of these from the back of the balcony over the unsuspecting crowd. 

     The problem with these beach balls was that they were small enough and dense enough to grab and really throw them at a pretty high speed. I certainly took a few hits to the face on the tour, but the absolute worst thing that happened was that we completely bought the entire stock of the larger 24" balls from the company we got them from, and when we ran out, all they had left were 12" versions. We used those for a few shows till we were able to get back to the 24" ones but we all definitely got nailed a ton for the few shows we needed to use the smaller ones. 

      Fast Forward to 2015 while we were preparing for the Juturna 10 Year anniversary tour, we decided to try and get our hands on the glow in the dark beach balls again! But this time we thought we were going to be smart. We thought if we filled them with helium then they would be slower and less likely to be thrown at us violently. The video above is Steve and I testing that out at the creek house. The first video shows two balls being thrown, one has helium, and one has air. As you can see, the helium did nothing, but we had already bought the entire tours worth of them so we did it anyway! Good times!!!!

Beard