UK – Bristol’s ArcTanGent ‘post-rock and experimental’ music festival kick-drummed its way to its Fernhill Farm location in September with headliners Mogwai and a host of alt-favourites performing amid live visual content. d&b Solutions company Production AV was challenged with supplying, rigging and operating the LED screens with all content driven by their own Hippotizer Amba+ Media Server.
To do the “infectious, thrashy rock” justice, Production AV’s Olie Goulding specified an 8m x 4.5m Desay M6 screen for the Main Stage, which was selected as the best size to fit the stage and structure. The team then coupled this with their playback and control solution with the Amba+ Media Server at its core.
“As each band was supplying their own content, the Amba+ made it easy to manage large amounts of data and provides a platform that makes it simple to busk on,” says Goulding, who served as project manager for ArcTanGent. “The festival was celebrating its tenth anniversary, and they wanted to ensure fans got some bang for their buck, so the line-up was massive and the visuals needed to match.
“The Desay M6 LED panels are renowned for their great high-resolution images over large areas, with great colour reproduction and brightness. Therefore, we needed a robust and powerful Media Server that could handle the variety of content but also give us flexibility with a single HD output.”
Mercury Prize-nominated rockers Mogwai performed what Bristol 24/7 reviewer Robin Askew called “the very epitome of ‘post-rock’, with a grand, mostly instrumental sound”. Also headlining were American post-rock band Explosions In The Sky, and Swedish extreme metal band Meshuggah, over the three-day festival.
“The Amba+ with its portability and single HD output made it a great choice for festival use, and for touring lighting and video designers’ control of the screen for their shows, which was utilised multiple times across the festival,” adds Goulding. “We utilised the scaling and DMX control of the server as and when the content or touring creative team required and it worked great, with overall media server operation by Hamish Jardine and myself as video lead.”
