World - Pearl Jam embarked on their Dark Matter world tour in May, sharing their introspective brand of rock with audiences across North America and Europe before heading to New Zealand and Australia in November. Lighting designer Kille Knobel has worked with the band since 2000 and complements the Dark Matter shows with a minimalist yet impactful design that uses Elation KL Panel XL soft lights as a key visual element in creating the distinctive looks.
The show brings video projection to the forefront with soft, organic visuals and minimalist lighting. When choosing fixtures for the tour earlier this year, lighting vendor Upstaging hosted a fixture shootout in Los Angeles for the designer, where she ultimately selected the KL Panel XL and Proteus Maximus as part of a larger lighting package. The fixtures were essential in creating the desired balance between video projection and lighting, two visual components that trade prominence throughout the show.
Knobel reveals that the band has always liked colour washes and in the early iteration of Pearl Jam shows – before she came on board – they often played beneath PAR can rigs. “The band loves the feel and simplicity of soft colour washes and they brought that back up as a discussion topic for this tour,” she shares.
“In the early design phases, I kept coming back to the idea of a ‘light box’ above the band to create very dispersed light, like you would have in a film shoot, but in a way that wouldn’t disrupt the projection. The KL Panel XL gave me the control I needed, and with the addition of barndoors and intensifier lenses, I could manage the light perfectly.”
Knobel’s lighting concept included five lighting pods, each pod equipped with two soft light types, a row of KL Panel XLs working with beam wash moving heads (Elation Proteus Brutus for the European shows). “The pods were a hybrid idea,” the designer said, “a combination of a light box with a beam wash fixture that could move and do more but was also soft.”
The KL Panel XL’s full-spectrum LED array, with RGBW + Lime + Cyan colour mixing, provided Knobel with what she says is the best-mixed colour she has come across. “I think the KL Panel XL has the most beautiful colour range of any fixture I’ve used,” she stated.
Knobel says that because the colour is so rich, the fixtures are best seen when they stand on their own. “I add them to contribute to the big looks, but when they’re the backbone light of the look, that’s my favourite way to use them,” she says.
Knobel, who has 75 songs programmed in the lighting console, says she has a whole range of colours in her palette that she calls dirty colours. “It’s really easy to create them with hard-edge lights but it’s hard to achieve them with LED panel lights. That was my only challenge with the KL Panels.”
In addition to the KL Panel XL, Knobel utilised Elation Proteus Maximus fixtures as the hard-edged lighting component. Although initially uncertain about using the 50,000-lumen LED profile, Knobel ultimately found it outperformed her expectations in a side-by-side comparison with a comparable fixture that she had used before and liked.
The Maximus, positioned upstage, on the sides, and in stadium wings, provide dynamic backlighting and effects along with occasional washes into the audience or onto the stage, complementing the softer wash from the KL Panel XLs.
