Slovenia - The Lent Festival in Maribor (21-29 June) is the largest open-air festival in Slovenia and, each year, attracts tens of thousands of visitors to the former European Capital of Culture. National and international artists from all musical genres perform on the large and small stages, which are strewn about the city centre.
In order to cover the stylistic diversity in terms of event technology, the organisers - together with the numerous local service providers - once again relied on a wide range of Cameo lights and a Maila array system from LD Systems.
Top stars of the Slovenian and national music scene, including Magnifico and the vocal group Perpetuum Jazzile, performed on the Main Stage in the centre of Maribor. Lighting designer Matevz Giganovič relied on an almost identical setup to the previous year: Opus X Profile, Opus H5 IP65 beam-spot-wash hybrid moving heads, Evos W7 LED wash moving heads and the Zenit W600 outdoor LED wash lights.
New to the rig were the Pixbar SMD IP G2 IP65 SMD LED bars, which were used in a vertical arrangement as front and effect lights and for pixel effects. “I was really impressed by the versatility of the Pixbar SMD IP G2,” comments lighting designer David Cvelbar. “Great colours, seamless chases, and extremely powerful.”
Smaller festival stages - such as the Večer Stage - have to manage a special balancing act: maximum flexibility with little equipment and weight. “Artists from different genres play on the Večer Stage - from rock to pop to electronic music,” explains lighting designer Urban Kolarič. Here too, the Pixbar series was able to prove its versatility. Kolarič arranged the Cameo Pixbar 600 Pro RGBWA+UV LED bars as a central design element in the stage backdrop in four squares and used them for pixel and chase effects as well as blinders.
As an eye-candy effect, further Pixbar 600 Pros are used in a vertical arrangement on the front round arch truss. Kolarič lined up four Evos W7 LED wash lights next to each other in the centre of the back truss to illuminate the stage and artists in colour, supplemented by the Auro Spoz Z300 LED spot moving heads for gobo projections and mid-air effects.
For the sound reinforcement of the Večer Stage, the Lent team relied on a combination of suspended Maila XXL as the main PA and Maila M ground stack sets for the out-fills and delay lines. “Maila really surprised me,” says sound engineer Marko Jakopanec. “I would never have thought that such big sound could come out of such a compact system.”
