The grisly-masked heavy metal rockers are out on an 18-month world tour in support of their first album release in six years, .5: The Gray Chapter, which debuted in October at number one on the Billboard 200 album chart. The tour sees the band playing dates in the US, Japan (at Knotfest Japan), Europe and Australia with more legs expected to be added.
Slipknot plays an aggressive style of music with energetic live shows that have been described as 'choreographed chaos'. Production designer for the tour is Trevor Ahlstrand, who was looking for a combination beam and profile fixture that could keep up with the hard driving show. "I wanted a fixture that was both a good profile and beam and found it in the SBX," he states of the powerful hybrid fixture that also includes a frost system for wash effects. "It has great gobos and effects as a profile with amazing output."
Trevor has the 3-in-1 SBX luminaire placed on shelves hanging off the rear of the set which allows them to shoot through the band to the downstage edge, as well as create aerial beam looks while accenting the width of the set.
"All of the parameters of the SBX are incredibly fast including the pan and tilt," he states. "I really love some of the effects I can get by layering parameters. Being able to layer the gobos from the beam and spot modes, rotating them opposite with the eight-facet prism, and zooming all the way out gave me a really unique, almost animated projection look out of the fixture. The ability to zoom while in beam mode was something new for me when programming in beam mode and gave me many more options especially combined with the linear or circular prisms. It definitely delivered exactly what I was looking for and more when trying to find a combination fixture and was the perfect fixture to add that extra layer of excitement to the show."
Scattered throughout the rig and used to accent the truss and its asymmetrical structure are Elation warm white Cuepix Blinders, which are also used to accent certain parts of the music as well as light the crowd when the band interacts with them directly. The Elation lighting gear has been supplied to the tour by production company Christie Lites.
Located just upstage above the drummer is the set's visual centrepiece, a portal of video created using EPT9IP video panels with 9mm pixel pitch that create a special 'infinity effect'.
Trevor explains: "I have a box that's about 12' wide and 8' tall that has double-sided glass on the front and a mirror on the back. When the video is being played back it bounces off the mirrors to make an infinity or tunneling effect. The best part is that every seat in the house gets a slightly different perspective and it's not always the same thing playing on all sides of the screens."
(Jim Evans)
