USA - It was a happy union for metal fans when Killswitch Engage and Anthrax, two of the genre’s most influential bands, announced earlier this year that they would be joining forces on the Killthrax Tour. The 34-city tour, which concluded in May, more than lived up to its advance billing, serving up heaping helpings of KSE’s signature metalcore sound with its heavy guitar riffs and Anthrax’s compatible, but distinctly different, thrash brand of metal music.
Helping to set off the KSE section of the dual concert was a fast-paced multi-dimensional and richly coloured lightshow anchored by Chauvet Professional Rogue R1 FX-B and Rogue RH1 Hybrid moving lights supplied by JDI Productions. Josh Mihlek, KSE’s production manager, designed the rig with the JDI Productions team.
“The idea behind our show was to use a lot of colour and big looks but at the same time p

Belgium - The Belgium-based percussive entertainment group Drumspirit has consistently pushed the boundaries of performance for 35 years with its unique blend of dance, theatre, comedy and music.
Continuing with this tradition, the group has added a new more theatrical feeling to its current series of Hexahedron shows featuring Milk Inc. drummer Michael Schack and Netsky. Key to creating this new mood is an evocative Bart Rogge lightshow that features 12 Maverick MK2 Spot and 48 Rogue R2 Wash moving lights from Chauvet Professional.
“Given the genre-defying performances of Drumspirit, to bring a theatrical feeling to the Hexahedron shows was no easy feat,” commented Rogge. “The versatile Maverick and Rogue fixtures, however, proved to be essential elements in the implementation of my theatrical lighting concept.”
Both the Maverick and Rogue fixtures were

UK - Chroma-Q's award-winning Color Force II and Space Force luminaires have been selected to help a roster of international artists deliver star performances on the iconic, premier Pyramid Stage at this year's Glastonbury Festival.
The Festival's Pyramid Stage provides a global showcase for some of today's biggest artists - including this year's headliners, Radiohead, Foo Fighters and Ed Sheeran.
Andy Porter, head of lighting for the Pyramid Stage and rental company, Neg Earth Lights, felt that the Chroma-Q fixtures would be suitable for the high-profile slot, so specified nearly 50 Color Force II 48, 1.2m LED battens and six Space Force LED soft sources.
The Color Force II fixtures are being used to provide coloured illumination of the stage from the distinctive Pyramid-shaped enclosure, with the Space Force units providing soft, white side lighting.
Des

USA - The USS Constitution was the third frigate of six built in 1794 to help fight Barbary pirates and saw its most famous actions during the War of 1812, where it heroically defeated five British battleships. Indeed, President George Washington named and commissioned the Constitution, and – despite the centuries between then and now – the Constitution is still an active-duty ship in the US Navy.
Although it is usually berthed in the Boston Navy Yard and used for special events, free tours, and ceremonies, the ship went into dry dock in the summer of 2015 for three years of restoration activities.
During that time, Audio Associates (Orleans, Massachusetts) took the opportunity to replace the Constitution’s aging loudspeakers (new versions of which are no longer manufactured in the United States) with nine new Danley Sound Labs GO-2-8CX loudspeakers, three to a m

UK - Star Events helped carry the Stone Roses’ perfect 90 minutes across Wembley Stadium as the band performed for a capacity crowd on Saturday.
Following the tantalising trail of their era defining debut album, opening with I Wanna Be Adored and closing with I Am The Resurrection, this was a first London show for the Stone Roses since Finsbury Park 2013.
Getting the sound right was crucial and production manager Michael O’Connor liaised with Star Events and SSE to ensure Stone Roses’ FoH engineer’s requirements were fully met.
Star Events’ design team customised the VerTech stage wings to accommodate Wembley’s steep rake, elevating four twin hangs of sub bass and main audio boxes some 19m above the stadium bowl.
Upfield, the company’s 20m high Z Towers pointed the delays to the gods, their narrow gauge design leaving sightlin

South Korea - In South Korea, one of the first big events of the music season is the Green Plugged festival, attended by 45,000 people. Now in its eighth year, Green Plugged features more than 60 Korean bands and singers, including headliners Gukkasten, Dean, Junggigo and Romantic Punch.
Staged in Han River Nanji Park in Seoul, the two-day festival is also a two-stage festival. In fact, the wide double main stage has become something of a trademark for Green Plugged, and a familiar challenge to regular PA provider Way Audio.
One of the early adopters of Nexo’s flagship modular line array, Way Audio debuted the STM Series on the Green Plugged festival five years ago and has been using it ever since as the primary PA for the main stages, named Moon and Sky.
Way Audio’s audio chief and system engineer Jordan Lee exploited the modular design of the STM Series, us

World - The Claypaky Scenius Unico and Claypaky Mythos2 have been selected by award-winning lighting and production designer Mark Cunniffe and lighting director Matt Jones as the workhorse fixtures for Ed Sheeran in his current record-breaking worldwide tour.
Cunniffe has been working with Ed since the artist began touring in 2011, developing a close creative partnership that has evolved over time as the star's music has spread to reach international acclaim.
"The first thing that we created for Ed was so small it fitted into the back of a truck," says Cunniffe. "Since then the shows have grown to reflect Ed's natural career progression. For this tour, we wanted a show that could go from arena to stadium. We wanted it to play as wide as it possibly could."
To achieve this, Cunniffe designed a goblet-shaped set, fondly named 'the chalice' by the designer who worke

Belgium - Tegen de Sterren Op (TDSO) is a highly popular, TV series on Flemish commercial channel VTM that uncompromisingly satirises and sends up politicians, celebrities and anyone else on the ‘fair game’ radar - all in the name of incisive entertainment by a very talented cast.
There is also an equally talented production team behind this success, including creative practice Painting with Light, who were tasked with designing a completely new set together with lighting and video.
They worked on the set elements with scenic specialist Deusjevoo, their near neighbours at Genk’s C-MINE complex. It was a visual concept that brought an urban chic feel to the seventh TDSO series, also delivering dynamic lighting and video.
The show was recorded in the NEP Studios in Londerzeel with a live audience and was produced by Dedsit.
Two interconnected stages we

UK - Open Technology will secure energy savings of up to 40 per cent for Cardiff University after installing its intelligent lighting system to an additional four lecture theatres across the campus.
Last year the company was commissioned to install its LiGO intelligent lighting system in seven of the University’s lecture theatres. The installation, done by consultants Houghton Greenlees and installers Evans Electrical, brought the total of LiGO controllers across the university campus to more than 30.
Cardiff University explained that Open Technology and LiGO were chosen due to the lighting system’s features, which include: presence detection to reduce energy use when rooms are unoccupied; time control settings to match occupancy times for lecture theatres; and, daylight balancing to complement available daylight.
These features will deliver up to 40 per cent

Singapore - The National Museum of Singapore is the nation’s oldest museum, and its exhibits are among the most progressive. Its galleries adopt cutting-edge and multi-perspective ways of representing history and culture, to redefine the conventional museum experience.
The museum’s Glass Rotunda currently hosts an immersive digital art installation, titled Story of the Forest. It is inspired by the National Museum of Singapore’s prized collection, the William Farquhar Collection of Natural History Drawings. This prized collection is brought to life through a spectacular interactive digital presentation in which visitors are transported to the natural ecology of 19th century Malaya, viewed through the eyes of artists of that time and re-imagined today through digital art and technology.
In 2014, the museum closed off the Glass Rotunda, to explore new and i

USA - The Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival returned to the 700 acre field known affectionately as The Farm with more than 65,000 in attendance in search of good vibes and great music.
Bandit Lites was proud to be asked by Lambda Productions to provide a lighting package for multiple stages, the iconic Tower at Bonnaroo, along with several floor packages for artists in attendance.
This year’s line-up of more than 100 acts included U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Weeknd, Chance the Rapper, Major Lazer, Flume, Lorde, The XX, Travis Scott, Cage the Elephant, Marshmello and The Head and the Heart.
U2’s show designer, Willie Williams, designed the mainstage festival system for U2’s immense show on Friday night. It was then dropped, re-hung and re-configured for the acts to use on Saturday and Sunday.
“Willie’s design had a similar flavour to their curren

UK - Anna Valley helped LAMDA (London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art) celebrate their new £28.2m training centre by providing AV for their official opening event on Wednesday 14 June. Attended by Royal Patron HRH Princess Alexandra and alumni including Brian Cox CBE, David Suchet CBE, Ruth Wilson and Jemma Redgrave, the event showcased the new theatres and training spaces that are transforming LAMDA’s west London home.
Anna Valley provided a turnkey AV solution for the event’s gala performance. Guests in the 200-seat Sainsbury Theatre watched students perform against the backdrop of a developing photographic timeline which was projected using two 21k projectors onto a 14.4m x 7m cyclorama fed by a Macbook Pro running Qlab.
Because space in The Sainsbury Theatre was limited, Anna Valley also filmed the event using two Panasonic AW-UE70 4K remote-head cameras a

USA - Country superstar Eric Church’s Holdin’ My Own tour begins to create an immersive experience for fans as soon as they enter the concert venue. Forget standard house lights. The first thing that strikes visitors when they walk into the arena, whether it’s Barclay Centre in Brooklyn or Staples Centre in LA, is the warm white (and very bright) glow from the 63 Chauvet Professional STRIKE 1 fixtures in Church’s touring rig.
Butch Allen of Blame Funnel Creative, who specced the multi formatted STRIKE 1 units from Christie Lights, uses them in lieu of house lights to set an emotional tone for Church’s deeply personal tour. “We wanted the whole arena itself to be part of the show, to create a totally immersive environment, since this tour is all about Eric connecting to his fans,” said Allen. “The STRIKE 1s are our house lights. Then, once the concert starts,

UK - The Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone, London has just completed a three-week run of Robert Anton Wilson’s play, Cosmic Trigger, directed by Daisy Campbell and produced by The Cockpit Theatre.
Dave Wybrow, artistic director at The Cockpit contacted PRG XL Video for help in solving a video projection conundrum they encountered whilst planning to stage Cosmic Trigger.
Dave discussed the challenges they faced, bringing their creative visions to life: “We’d wanted to produce Cosmic Trigger at The Cockpit for a long time, I’m not only a huge fan of Robert Anton Wilson, but also the seventies American counter-culture he represents so well. Cosmic Trigger is a complicated piece to produce, it’s basically a play within a play within a play—and is more a play about ideas than it is about characters.
“Previous productions have been prese

UK - Triple E has supplied a ModTruss centrepiece for the Greenpeace Field at Glastonbury Festival.
Commissioned by Factory Settings and designed to highlight the Greenpeace campaign to protect forests, the 20m tree comes alive at night, serving as a hub for exclusive DJ sets and a beacon of the Stand for Forests campaign.
The ModTruss structure is simple to put together. The Factory Settings team was able to build the tree at Worthy Farm from Triple E drawings, ticking the requisite safety boxes in the process.
Lucy Edelstein, project manager at Triple E, comments: “We were delighted the Factory Settings’ team approached us with their designs. We made a 3D drawing for approval, test built the tree and shipped the parts.”
Factory Settings’ director, Lucien Mansell, says: “ModTruss is a unique product ideally suited to a one-off bespoke item lik

France - The Accor Hotel has played host to its share of high-profile sporting events, such as the World Indoor Athletics Championships. Recently, the 18,000 capacity venue was the site of another sports spectacular as it welcomed the Meeting de Paris Indoor, a one day track and field event that featured some of France’s top Olympic athletes such as Kevin Mayer and Renaud Lavillenie.
French production house Franck Sono provided suitably energetic visuals for the meet with a collection of Chauvet Professional fixtures supplied by Algam.
A total of 15 Maverick Hybrids, 16 Rogue R1 FX-Bs, 15 R1 Beams and 18 Nexus 5x5 fixtures lent added impact to the competition by creating a variety of impactful, and often contrasting looks throughout the venue. This was especially evident at the main podium, which was the centre of spectator and media attention.
To illuminate th

Europe - Popular Australian progressive rock band, Northlane, is currently travelling the European festival circuit with an ultra-compact dLive system from Allen & Heath to manage both FOH and monitor sound.
“I’ve come straight over from two years on a dLive S Class S5000/DM64 system on monitors with Bring me the Horizon, and wanted to keep the same workflow with Northlane,” explains engineer, Jared Daly. “As the band are from Australia, their gear is nearly always in a fly-in configuration; everything is in custom wooden racks that slot into fly-able pelican cases that all weigh 32KG. For this reason, the band decided to purchase the C1500 Surface and DM48 MixRack to manage both FOH & monitors.”
The C1500 is equipped with a Waves network card to allow virtual sound-checks and live recordings of all the band’s performances.
“The dLive surfac

UK - Illumination specialists LED Creative supported set designer Rudi Thackray and lighting director Gurdip Mahal, in helping set the scene for James Corden and The Late Late Show’s recent visit to London.
Filmed in front of a live studio audience, The Late Late Show transferred its regular format of star guests, sketches and musical performance from its US home for a run of shows at Central Hall Westminster. Maintaining the general feel of the US show, Rudi Thackray’s vibrant set, shrouded in fluorescent pinks and blues, was a perfect backdrop to the show, contrasting perfectly against the grandiose surroundings of the venue.
One of the key features in the design was the inclusion of over 40 LED Creative Sigma Pulse Wands, cleverly placed throughout the set to provide ultra convenient, colour shape and movement. Quick to install and easy to control,

UK - Garsington Opera Pavilion has undergone a number of major additions to its existing structure ahead of its summer 2017 programme of events that started at the beginning of June, thanks to Unusual Rigging. Visitors to the pavilion will this year experience enhanced protection from the unpredictable British weather as well as additional flexible space beneath the seating tier which will increase the champagne bar area as well as acting as a gallery space.
Angus Boyd-Heron, events manager for Garsington, said: "The award winning pavilion which Unusual constructed in 2010 was built as a demountable structure and has gone from strength to strength. Each year, we bring Unusual Rigging back to make some additions and improvements, which have escalated into some pretty major works as our ideas have become larger. As our ambitions grow and our season now extended enabling more p

UK - Having successfully produced Edinburgh’s first open air dance festival for the Fly Club in the city centre’s Princes Street Gardens last Autumn, alongside sister company Creation Live, Martin Audio partners VME moved to the outskirts of the Scottish capital, and the spectacular 6500-acre Hopetoun House Estate overlooking the River Forth, for the second Fly Open Air Festival.
Unlike the fixed Princes Street bandstand a festival infrastructure needed to be created in the grounds of the 17th century mansion and sound levels closely observed - a challenge that Martin Audio’s award-winning MLA Multi-cellular Loudspeaker Array was more than equal to.
“The scaffolding structure didn't help us - we couldn't get the height we wanted, which created a number of physical challenges,” admitted VME head of sound, Mark Cleator. “This required some late changes to the

Ukraine - Within the vast sound production called upon for this year’s Eurovision 2017 in Kyiv, a pair of TiMax SoundHub audio delay matrix units were supplied by Black Box Music (BBM) to manage multi-zone PA level and delay alignment between Main and B-stage performance areas.
The setup revisits a technique pioneered for Adele’s recent record-breaking world-wide arena tour. The TiMax SoundHub-S16 systems were inserted between Digico SD7’s and Lake master system processing feeding the amps, which in turn fed multiple distributed L’Acoustics line array hangs, subs and fills.
As the performance switched between the two stages, the TiMax dynamic delay-matrix delivered all mix outputs from main and backup console/system processor chains via onboard 96KHz SRC’s, to seamlessly re-align and focus all PA elements onto the current stage.
The power and versati

Israel - Tel Aviv based Light Architects Cochavi & Klein are known for their style and propensity for invention and they are also impressed with Robe’s Spiider LED wash beams.
The designers seized the opportunity of the Picnic Passover with Black Coffee, a pumping electronic music event presented by The Tripping in Tel Aviv’s most famous urban oasis, Hayarkon Park, to utilise 48 x Spiiders and 24 x Robe Pointes on a circular trussing structure, forming a massive ‘sun’, which was winched above the crowds on a crane.
The sold-out event featured sets from award-winning, rising-star South African DJ and music producer Black Coffee, plus DJs Jenia Tersol & Benji. They, together with a hugely enthusiastic audience, enjoyed the unique setting of the park, which is known for its magical aura and ancient rocks brought from all over Israel.
These ro

Europe - Canadian industrial band Skinny Puppy might not be mainstream airplay but the band has been around for decades and is currently touring Europe beneath an intelligent lighting rig that includes Elation Professional ACL 360 Bar effect lights and SixBar 1000 LED colour-changing battens.
Pioneers of the electro-industrial genre, Skinny Puppy, known for their theatrical and sometimes controversial live performances, enjoys a dedicated following and has charted in both North America and Europe. They have just completed the European leg of their Down the Sociopath tour.
Lighting has been designed and is under the direction of Eric Price (Thrice, Underoath, Bayside), who, although working with the group for the first time, has meshed with the band to create a design that complements the band’s complex and layered sound.
“For the Skinny Puppy design, everythi

Iberia - For Ricky Martin’s monitor engineer, Steve May, DiGiCo consoles hold two big advantages: their I/O capacity - which means he never worries about running out of inputs or outputs - and the ability to switch seamlessly between consoles in the range. Both have made life easier as he and Front of House engineer Chris ‘Privet’ Hedge travel round Spain and Portugal on the current leg of Ricky Martin’s tour.
The tour has taken in many of the major cities in Spain, including Madrid, Granada, Valencia, Seville, Barcelona, as well as the Portuguese capital of Lisbon, and finishes in Bilbao. Three rental companies are supplying equipment, with PRG Spain and Llusovi each handling six shows and Fluge two. The equipment inventory varies from company to company and although Steve specifies an SD7, depending on availability, he has used both this and an SD5 as his monitor

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