Elation DARTZ on Beartooth Disease tour
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Zeiser, who first met the hardcore rockers when they were an opening act for one of his other clients, Silverstein, and had put together a small timecoded show for the Ohio-based group’s last headliner tour, was well familiar with the band. So when Beartooth frontman Caleb Shomo and company came looking for a designer for their fall Disease tour, Zeiser jumped at the opportunity. “The band wanted to get more serious about their lighting and because they were familiar with my work they came to us looking for full service,” said Zeiser, founder of New York-based rental company Squeek Lights, lighting vendor for the tour.
“I was waiting for an LED beam fixture with good colour mixing and intensity and found it in the DARTZ and its narrow beamy look,” said Zieser, who uses the fixture’s 3-degree aperture to create classic ACL beam looks. When the tempo slows he accesses the fixture’s effects package of gobos and prisms to create big looks. “They are bright enough to stack a prism, gobo and colour and it maintains its power and still cuts through,” he said.
The design covers a broad extreme of tempos, a balance of big, powerful movements mixed with mellower moments in a refreshing array of primary colours you don’t necessarily see that often on a rock show. “It’s a show that has a constrained colour palette. We use orange a lot, which matches with the Disease album and its cover, and I like to use green and light green,” Zeiser says, adding that the green is a holdover from the last touring cycle and goes well with the bright orange. “It’s a unique colour combination that works.”
The setup comprises four truss towers, each with four DARTZ fixtures clustered together for a total of 16 units. Each tower also houses a moving head, 2-lites and an LED wash fixture. At the bottom of each tower sits a Protron 3K Color LED strobe that gives both big moment impact and added colour. A pair of compact Antari Z350 Fazer haze/fog machines is used to create a dry haze mid-air projection canopy. “I only run them at 20% and they really sip the fluid,” Zeiser says of the efficient, water-based effect. “Two weeks into the tour and I haven’t finished the first bottle of fluid yet!”
(Jim Evans)
