Kill The Alarm, or KTA, is from the New Jersey/New York area, but still manages to come out to Chicago every few months. KTA is the brainchild of frontman Garen Gueyikian. Formally of Granian fame, Garen is a singer/songwriter who also manages to write songs that are equally fantastic acoustic and electric.
Garen is an incredibly passionate performer, and doesn’t need to employ fancy lights or lots of movement to keep his audience captivated. He is one of those special performers that can perform a song everytime with the same passion as the first time the lyrics were conceived.
Kill The Alarm doesn’t always travel with the same band members (or even with a band) but this time, I recognized several of the same members. The fact that guitarist Kyle Paas was playing with them was exciting, since his hairflinging enthusiastic playing is always a great addition to the show.
The setlist was as follows:
Shout It Out Loud
Never
Immune
Strangers
No More Excuses
Sit Up
Fire Away
Shooting Notes
Despite being forced to convert all the shots to black and white, Kill The Alarm’s set was one of the best lit sets that I’ve shot at Beat Kitchen. The light was randomly multicolored on different parts of the performers, which is the reason for the black and white, but for once, the light was bright enough for me to shoot at f/2.8, if I pushed the ISO to 3200 and dropped my shutter speed to 1/80.
I focused mainly on Garen since he is Kill The Alarm, but I couldn’t help but shoot several pictures of Kyle Paas as he fully rocked out during his solos. I found that wide shots worked best for Kyle’s energy, while tighter, mid-range shots worked best with Garen in order to capture his passionate expressions. Because I didn’t want to be switching lenses, I stuck with my 24-70mm and switched between focal extremities.
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