As well as swimming, aperitifs on the beach at sunset, delicious local cuisine, and screenings of films and music-themed documentaries, music fans at the Siren Festival (24-27 July) were also able to attend countless DJ sets and concerts by numerous Italian bands and headliners of the calibre of The Drones, Dry The River, John Grant, Mogwai, The National and Alexis Taylor.
Audio contractor for the event was Blackout, who also supplied the lighting and video, and company owner Gaetano Lombardi, comments, "We worked for months on ensuring the success of the festival, which involved approximately 40 bands from Italy and abroad, so meeting everybody's requirements was no easy job."
The sound systems increased in size from the Outline DVS enclosures installed for the small stages at the Palazzo d'Avalos gardens and Rotonda Viale Dalmazia, through the Arena delle Grazie, where bands had at their disposal 6+6 Outline Mantas and two DBS 18-2 subs, to the courtyard of the 16th century Palazzo d'Avalos, which was equipped with two main hangs of 12 Mantas systems and six DBS 18-2 subwoofers.
The town square (Piazza del Popolo) hosted the main stage, which featured a wide variety of genres. To cater for such a wide-ranging sonic palette, from intimate to hard-hitting sounds, Blackout fielded two main hangs of 12 Outline Butterfly line array elements and eight Outline DBS 18-2 subs.
Kenny MacLeod, production manager and FOH Engineer for Mogwai, stated, "The Outline Line Array was very nice to work with, the crossover between the main array and the subs was pretty smooth and the main array had excellent coverage with minimal comb filtering as I moved across the axis. The HF was very pleasant and in no way did it sound harsh, even though it was very hi-fi and had a very musical presence to it."
After the event, Lombardi stressed his satisfaction, "We proposed our rigs with Outline PAs and monitors and the various sound engineers' enthusiastic response was confirmed during the event, at which we good numerous positive comments from the 'users' - as always, the Outline brand is an international guarantee of quality."
(Jim Evans)
