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Ayrton Magic Blade-R makes UK/European debut with Enter Shikari

Lighting Designer Steve Bewley is the first to tour the UK and Europe with Ayrton Magic Blade-R fixtures, using over 100 units for British rock band Enter Shikari in support of their new album 'The Mindsweep'. Bewley has truss-mounted eighty-four Magic Blade-R fixtures behind the band in a curved wall which splits horizontally to adapt his design to fit any size of venue.

“My initial concept was to create a kind of ‘fence’ housing an LED framework in emulation of a brain and the neuropaths within it to emphasise the idea of The Mindsweep,” says Bewley. “The LED strip needed more to bring it to life, so I supplemented it with Magic Blades.” Ayrton’s Magic Blade-R is a fixture which aligns seven individually controllable 15W RGBW LED emitters, each with a tight 4.5° beam, and provides continuous double rotation on the pan and tilt axes.

“For the first part of the year we used around 44 Magic Blades on a 3.8 m high rolling framework which fitted the UK Academy venues,” says Bewley. “We then added another 40 units on a flown truss to double the ‘fence’ to a height of 8m for this summer’s larger UK and European festivals like Download, Glastonbury and Rock Werchter.”

Bewley chose to use the pan/tilt and continuous pan/tilt features of Magic Blade-R fixtures copiously in his design, supplemented by a variety of static looks: “I opted to use the Magic Blades in many visually interesting positions and patterns, and employed the dimmer chase to emulate the music. The combination of Magic Blade’s movement, colour, on-board macros and desk effects mean I can create something truly different, weird and unique that people haven’t seen before. That is exactly what I want to discover in a new fixture.”

Twenty-four more Magic Blade-R units line the stage’s downstage edge to form a wall of light ‘like one big Magic Blade’ between the band and the audience. “This groundrow acts like a huge curtain of light in the ambient haze and I use it to create big looks across the front,” says Bewley. “The band plays with this, sticking their heads through the curtain of light, interacting with the crowd and with the light itself.”

Bewley programmed the show using different layers and groups of Magic Blade-R fixtures. “We now have two or three different shows programmed to suit different sized venues. We use Magic Blade’s RDM function to automatically address everything during set up which is fantastically time-saving time, and have a show which is fast and easy to adapt wherever we go.”

Ayrton’sMagicBlade-R fixtures were supplied by for the UK and European tour by Neg Earth.

photos: Justine Trickett

www.ayrton.eu

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