Bon Iver gets immersive in Santa Barbara
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With such a broad range of sonic elements in the mix, Bon Iver’s show at the Santa Barbara Bowl on an L-ISA Hyperreal Sound system recently served as an opportunity for 4,500 lucky fans to hear the group in an expansively panoramic soundscape for the first time.
“Bon Iver’s records are amazing and Grammy Award-winning, but anyone who has seen them perform will quickly tell you that their live show is infinitely better,” says L-Acoustics’ Scott Sugden. “And none of it is pre-recorded or set to timecode. Everything is done live - organically and dynamically - by the band, which never plays the same set twice.”
Knowing the group’s reputation for staging an engaging show on a traditional left/right PA, Sugden invited Bon Iver FOH engineer Xandy Whitesel to join him and L-ISA Labs’ Carlos Mosquera at L-Acoustics’ North American headquarters in Westlake Village to explore L-ISA’s even greater potential.
“I brought in a multi-track of a live show that I had mixed in a Cubase session, and I was immediately impressed with how easily my stereo mix transferred to L-ISA,” Whitesel recalls. “After some thoughtful spatial positioning in the L-ISA Processor for each channel, very little change in EQ and level were needed for a very presentable product. That began the critical process of converting my brain from a stereo presentation - or mostly mono in the live world, really - to the L-ISA Scene/Extension setup and how to apply L-ISA to Bon Iver’s current show.”
A collective decision was made to stage an L-ISA gig at the Santa Barbara Bowl, which had previously been the site of a successful L-ISA show by the chillwave duo ODESZA earlier in the year.
For Bon Iver’s Bowl performance, Clearwing Productions flew a 7.1 L-ISA configuration comprised of three centre hangs of eight L-Acoustics K2 plus four Kara down paired with two adjacent hangs of 14 Kara for the five-array Scene system. This arrangement was flanked by two outer hangs of nine Kara enclosures each for the Extension system, while a dozen KS28 subs were flown in two cardioid arrays directly behind the centre K2 hangs for focused LF.
Nine coaxial X8 spread across the stage lip delivered front-fill, while two ARCS II on either side of the stage supplied coverage for the fans on the extreme sides of the stage. L-Acoustics LA8 and LA12X amplified controllers powered all of the enclosures, and a pair of L-ISA Processors at FOH generated the show’s spatialisation.
(Jim Evans)
