To accomplish this he turned to Nigel Hodgson of Core Design, who in turn enlisted Mark Brown of Marquee Installations. Hodgson's brief was to get the ground floor bar fully functioning as a multi-purpose chameleon venue in its own right - from an early breakfast and coffee operation through to a pre-club feeder. "As well as the interior design our brief was to re-design the flow round the entire building to enable it to function as a single unit," says Hodgson. The original club entrance is now a fire escape and the first floor dance venue is accessed from steps at the rear of the downstairs café bar."
Brown specified the entire audio and visual infrastructure. Eight of his favoured RCF Monitor 8s (wall-mounted) reproduce the daytime music from a Pioneer multichange CD player in the two-zone main bar, matched with a pair of Tannoy T40 bass bins. By night, source playback devices can be bought out of store to the DJ plug-in point, the Technics SL1200 decks are cased in a DJ coffin, alongside a Pioneer DMJ-500 mixer and Denon 1800F twin-CD player.
The music is switched via a Cloud Z4 four-zone mixer and the chill-out areas are washed with Pulsar ChromaDome LEDs, matched - at either end of the venue - by Abstract VRX colour-changers (with rotating gobos). The main bar also has plenty of visual aids, with a pair of Samsung 42" plasma screens taking feeds from Sky TV and a DVD jukebox, custom-built by Leisurelink, while a pair of 17" Neuvo TFT screens provide spot monitors. A BENQ LCD projector front-projects onto an electronic drop-down 6ft screen, in 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio.
In the chill-out/stairwell area leading upstairs a pair of Bose 203s provide a hint of what is to follow. The main bar is serviced by four further Monitor 8s, with the low frequencies this time reinforced by an RCF ESW1018 Event series sub. A further step up leads hardcore dancers into a soundfield created by four of Logic Systems' two-way hi-packs and four (2 x 15") compact subs, controlled by an XTA DP226, and like the downstairs, all powered by QSC PLX and RMX series amplifiers. Dance floor speakers comprise three Technics SL1200s and Denon DN1800F CD player, mixed through a Pioneer DJM-500 mixer, complete the highly-specified (and permanently anchored) DJ station, while reference monitoring is provided by an RCF Vision 1000.
Marquee Installations have designed a multicoloured lightshow over the dancefloor, including a mirrorball to further scatter the beams. A combination of Abstract VRX scanners and Martin Pro Wizard multi-coloured effects spots, Destroyer X250 rotating beams and CX-2 colour changers are also brought to life by a JEM stage hazer.
(Sarah Rushton-Read)
