Ayrton MagicBlade-FX on song with Sylvan Esso
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The duo engaged production designer, Zach Sternberg - who has been with them since their first album in 2013 - to devise a dynamic set and lighting design that could be toured across venues of various capacities.
Sternberg based his design around a giant cantilever system of custom trapezoidal truss attached to six weighted carts, each of which carried four new Ayrton MagicBlade-FX fixtures which he used to define the geometric shape. The result is a sculptural element formed of a series of chevrons, the outline of which had been present in Sylvan Esso’s first tour as a static LED array.
“Nothing is horizontal or vertical,” he says. “All the carts, trusses and fixtures are at different angles in all three planes which gives me a great starting point to break free from the limits of conventional linear LED battens.The MagicBlade-FX give us more creative freedom as we can use them to mimic the structure, then break the geometry of that structure with their movement, or even make it ‘disappear’ by zooming all the MagicBlades out and pointing them at the audience. It’s a really fun design to play with, to be able to affect the perspective as well as the structure, and the MagicBlade-FX are the key to making that work.”
Sternberg is familiar with Ayrton fixtures having used them on several one-off shows and festivals in the past: “I know Ayrton products and they are by far the most superior products out there,” he says. “So when we specified the MagicBlade-FX for what I had in mind for Sylvan Esso, it was a ‘do-or-die’ fixture. Everything else could be substituted but not the MagicBlade-FX. There is nothing else on the market that has that beautiful big square glass lens and the capabilities that gives.
“The way the MagicBlades are rigged, paired with their features, allows me to use them as an effect light as well as a wash. We can get big beam effects or use it to create structures in mid-air; zoom it in to act like a standard LED batten or zoom it out to look like stars. I can splay them out or create a cage around the band, or use just one pixel from each MagicBlade to focus on and illuminate each band member.”
Sternberg programmed the show on a Chamsys console with the 24 MagicBlade-FX used mostly in extended mode.
The MagicBlade-FX units were part of a full floor package supplied by Clearwing Productions’ Milwaukee team who purchased them specifically for the Sylvan Esso tour from Morpheus Lights as part of the first shipment of MagicBlade-FX to the States.
Sylvan Esso will be playing dates across New Zealand and Australia in the New Year before returning to North America.
(Jim Evans)
