Lighting designer, Stephan Aue, and operator, Rico Münzer, were working with Swedish electronic dance band, Covenant - and making heavy use of SGM's new LED catalogue.
"The great thing about Covenant is that they are always looking for something extreme - and that provides a very good opportunity to try something new out," said Stephan. "During their very drum and bass oriented shows, the use of front light is almost not permitted and the stage is dominated by fog. I have been doing shows with them for almost 15 years and admire their courage and willingness to try out new things."
The idea for the festival show emerged at this year's Prolight & Sound [in Frankfurt], as Rico and Stephan were in charge of SGM's live stage. "Covenant, were considering doing 'something spectacular' at exactly the time I was thinking about a matrix of 72 [SGM LED] strobes; I thought that would be 'spectacular' enough! I wanted to set a benchmark in brightness for the next few years."
Rico has been working with this band regularly since 2011, to turn the ideas of Aue into reality. "It was always somehow special, new and exciting and the band was always full of praise. But they wondered 'Can it be a bit brighter?' And that was now the plan that Aue and I had at Prolight came about - to play with the SGM Q-7 strobes on stage." These had already been tested and approved on the Sunrise Avenue tour in February.
Stephan Aue noted that as is so often the case, there is not an infinite amount of power you can draw on to light a festival. "This is where the very low current consumption of all SGM fixtures is a huge benefit and in the end 40 SGM Q-7W and eight SGM P-5 arrived on the scene. As for the power of the Q-7W what can I say ...And as for the P-5 in the quieter moments, it made for a beautiful backlight and looked really great."
Rico admits that it took a while to get the structure clear. "We drove the strobe once conventionally with the DMX values as well as with video signals, using a Catalyst to map it. These values were then simply merged with a LAN node. Since then we also spent a bit of time to check what content worked well on the type of matrix tower we wanted to use with Covenant. For the matrix we also played around with the dimmer curves of the strobes."
(Jim Evans)
