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Colour Sound equips Above & Beyond Acoustic

Electronic music act Above and Beyond played two UK shows on their ‘Acoustic’ world tour at two Albert Halls - the ‘Royal’ Albert Hall (RAH) in central London and the Albert Hall Manchester, a more intimate space formally a Methodist church. Lighting and visuals for the tour were designed by Neil Marsh, while equipment and crew for these and a warm up in Utrecht were delivered by Colour Sound Experiment. Colour Sound invested in more Barco 30K projectors to service these shows.

The design contained two semi-circular projection surfaces hung on two fractional segments of 10 metre circular trusses (a half and a three-eighth curved section respectively). These also featured different height hangs of double-layered deco linen with a burgundy red Voile CS from Showtex on the reverse side. Neil Marsh wanted a rough surface, and the idea was to have ephemeral diorama-style video images flickering away creating atmosphere, rather than it being a virtual IMAG of the performance.

The two Barco 30K projectors were rigged on the gallery level of the RAH auditorium approximately 70 metres away. Six HD mini-cams were dotted around the stage and their inputs fed directly into the AI server also running and treating the playback video sources created for the show by Dylan Byrne.

The AI received timecode from a JoeCo playback machine operated by ‘Bid’ Sebastian Beresford, the percussion section of the band. It carried the extra string/horn parts and a timecode channel that was sent down the audio multi returns to FOH, triggering specific effects and cameras to run for certain parts of the music. It was a one-box-over-Ethernet solution for video control in this instance.

When it came to lighting, Marsh wanted a thread of continuity from the previous four Acoustic shows that were played in 2014. This came in the form of eight 2K Skypans on stands, positioned onstage in close proximity to the band. In the air above were three curved trusses maintaining the arc theme, with 22 x Robe BMFL Spots as the main profile luminaires.

They had some custom gobos made and fitted - inspired by David Lynch’s Red Room from Twin Peaks - which were used prominently for the song ‘Black Room Boy’ featuring band member Tony McGuinness singing. A single 4K Mole Beam positioned upstage right highlighted him during this song. Neil Marsh worked in a row of 12 Sunstrips along the front of the stage.

Sixteen Martin Sceptron LED battens were vertically K-clamped to mic stands and positioned wherever they would fit in amongst the band and musicians. They were run as DMX fixtures rather than video surfaces. The lighting was completed with some ETC Source Four PARs dotted around for general band illumination, and an arc of blinders on the back lip of the stage mimicking the curvature of the Skypans.

Marsh programmed and ran the show on a ChamSys MQ300 console with an MQ200 running as a spare, and was assisted by Dave Kyle who co-ordinated all the video elements. He was supported by a Colour Sound crew, chiefed by Simon Robertson and John ‘Afghan’ Lahiffe who looked after dimmers, with technicians Alex McCoy and Chris Foot.

For the Albert Hall Manchester, the rig was scaled down to around a third of the size and preceding both of these, the show at Utrecht’s Tivoli Vredenburg was staged in-the-round, so three different variations of the rig were seen in as many days.

www.coloursound.co.uk

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