Headliner Magazine Issue 49

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SUP P

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NITY MU M HEADLINER MAGAZINE

49 As you’ll have noticed from a quick glance at our cover and a brief perusal of our contents pages, this edition of Headliner is a particularly eclectic one. Of course, it’s not unusual for us to hear from a vast range of new and well established talent, but this issue is positively brimming with interviews and features from across the full spectrum of the music and pro audio markets.

In a broad-ranging interview, our cover star Leona Lewis reflects on a formidable career in music and opens up on her current tour, while the legendary Midge Ure joins us for a deep dive into everything from Live Aid and Ultravox, to some of his lesser known solo records and a special show at the Royal Albert Hall to mark his 70th birthday.

not only on creating music, but taking control of their distribution and career paths is something that is becoming increasingly vital for new artists. The responsibilities resting on artists’ shoulders are perhaps heavier than ever, but for those who can navigate them successfully, there are also plenty of rewards and opportunities.

While these interviews provide some truly unique insights into the careers and lives of those who have long since made their names in music, what has been equally enlightening is our spotlight on those just coming to the surface.

Meanwhile, one of the most pertinent messages to stick with me personally in putting this issue together came from legendary mixer Jean-Marie Horvat. As he says in our interview in this edition, he has ‘broken every rule in the book’, and in doing so has carved out a career that includes mixing credits for everyone from Michael Jackson and Destiny’s Child to The Weeknd and Justin Timberlake.

In an exciting new partnership between Headliner Spaces and TikTok distribution platform SoundOn, the inaugural SoundOn Sessions showcase was recently held at The Pioneer Club in St. Albans. This brilliant event featured a number of performances from MOBO UnSung’s Class of 2023, and to hear from these rising stars was not only deeply intriguing, but incredibly inspirational. The focus

So while there are always going to be guiding principles in music, art and creativity will forever be subjective. And in an industry that can sometimes feel harder to navigate than ever before, the ability to trust one’s instincts might just be a more valuable commodity than ever.

Daniel Gumble Head of Content HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

22/ ANDY BENSLEY

08 / ASHAINE WHITE

28 / LD SYSTEMS LIVE SESSIONS

14/ LEONA LEWIS 44 / MIDGE URE

32 / ROMAN SICK 38 / SOUND ON SESSIONS

54 / JONGNIC BONTEMPS

50 / INVICTUS GAMES

70 / MARYJO

64 / HERE LIES LOVE 58 / JEAN-MARIE HORVAT

80 / JAZZIE B 76 / SIGNAL HOUSE STUDIOS 86 / BERNARD SEIDLER

100 / BTS AT RYCOTE

92 / IMMERSIVE AUDIO 96 / THE TUBE AMP DOCTOR

106 / EVERYTHING AUDIO

118 / BASTIAN GERNER 112 / SKY VAN HOFF

128 / ICONA POP

122 / FOO FIGHTERS

132/ LIGHTING

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ASHAINE WHITE

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

Right Here

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Image credit: Olivia Brissett

ASPIRING HEADLINER

RIGHT HERE

ASHAINE WHITE What comes to mind when you think of grunge-soul? Perhaps not an artist that looks like North London singer-songwriter Ashaine White, she suggests.

“I do find that people are used to something coming out of somebody that looks like me,” acknowledges Ashaine White (pronounced Ashay-nee) from her home in North London. “It’s my ends,” she says of where she grew up. “It’s what I represent. I class myself as a proper Londoner,” she grins.

With her new five-track EP, Ash, White is proud to challenge these stereotypes and is carving out a sound that is unmistakably her own.

Back to grunge-soul: White grew up inspired by legends of both opposing genres, citing Ella Fitzgerald, Nina

Simone, Jeff Buckley, Kurt Cobain and Radiohead as artists that made a lasting impression on her.

“A lot of amazing black musicians are making what people class as ‘UK black music’, and are doing it incredibly,” she points out. “I’m just trying to present myself as the most ‘me’ I can be; all my influences are what bleeds out of me. It’s hard to be in a situation where you’re being told that what you do doesn’t make sense because of the way I look, or the way I sing or the way the music sounds, so I’m really excited to have Ash out,” she enthuses, adding that the EP’s name HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

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ASHAINE WHITE

Right Here

that are being themselves, being authentic and putting out music that feels like them, whether it is R&B or stereotypically ‘black’ genres, or whether it is completely the opposite,” she nods. “As black people, with the black history that goes alongside music, we should have the opportunity to play within those genres and use every layer of ourselves as black people to create music. So that’s what I’m trying to do. It’s exciting to be a part of the community of black musicians that have come before me and help to push that message forward.”

A self proclaimed open book, White happily shares that she’s just finished a therapy session – something which she’s a big advocate of.

couldn’t be more her: “Ash is my nickname. It’s fully me,” she explains. “This is the type of music that comes out of me. I’m not thinking about what’s in the charts, I’m not thinking, ‘I want to make a song that sounds like this person’s song’. It’s more: we sit in a room, we make music and whatever comes out is what comes out.”

White is proud to be involved in PRS’ Power Up community, representing a wave of black musicians and artists making music that feels authentically them, rid of stereotyping and archaic industry expectations. Amongst the many things her EP represents, it’s a big fuck you to the stereotypes of what black music ‘should’ be.

“I am really excited to be a part of a wave of black musicians HEADLINER MAGAZINE

“I wouldn’t say I have any outward issues right now with how things are going,” she considers. “I’m not too much of an anxious person or anything like that. But I think of it like the gym for your mind, especially when you are an artist and the music that you make is quite close to your heart. Songwriting is, for me, a form of therapy – they go hand in hand.

It sounds very cliché, but a page of a notepad or your phone is kind of like a therapist – it’s something that you can get all your ideas out on and hopefully receive something back that helps you feel like you’ve figured it out a little bit more. I think it’s so important, especially for creative people. This career path has a lot of ups and downs and a lot of good news and bad news.”

Just last year, White was working full time in an admin role where she was booking shows for musicians, all the

while wishing she was in their place.

She knew it was time to take a risk, quitting her secure 9-5 in order to pursue her own music career. When being handed an eye watering bill for her car being serviced, wondering if she’d done the right thing, her phone pinged.

“An email popped up saying, ‘You’ve been nominated for an Ivor Novello Rising Star award,’” she recalls, shaking her head slightly at the memory. “I just closed the email straight away. I was like, ‘What is actually going on?’ Bearing in mind, I was self-managed, self-releasing, no label, no anything. It was just me.

There’s so many people pushing to be nominated. Why would it be me?

The universe told me, ‘This is the time that you do this for yourself and you go for it.’”

Ash explores love and friendship in its many forms. The EP represents White at her most authentic, seeing her write songs that feel honest and true to her experiences with a no-frills writing style. Written and composed

by White herself and produced by Gilberto Mallindine-Bettini, the fivetrack EP follows-up 2021’s Fairytales.

“I want my listeners to hear my lyrics as if the words came from my mouth in conversation, a conversation about life,” she says. “I never really go into a project with an idea of what I want all the songs to be about, I just let life show me what my songs are going to be about.”

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Image credit: Olivia Brissett

“I AM REALLY EXCITED TO BE A PART OF A WAVE OF BLACK MUSICIANS THAT ARE BEING THEMSELVES, BEING AUTHENTIC AND PUTTING OUT MUSIC THAT FEELS LIKE THEM.”

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ASHAINE WHITE

Right Here

Delicately resentful and intimate Lianne La Havas-esque track Right Here – “I get a lot of comparisons [to her] which I’m very grateful for, because she is an incredible vocalist and one of my favourite singers” – encapsulates the haunting aftermath of a toxic relationship, and was the first song written for the EP.

Thing is a song that is mine,” – while Damien Rice-esque Meant To Be is pure emotional, intoxicating bliss.

White has a confession:

“I feel like it’s hilarious, you can tell that I wrote it during covid,” she confesses. “Everything was quite isolated. It has this kind of…” she trails off, searching for the right word…“aggression towards holding something so close and so dear that was horrible, and you’re in a really bad situation, and I think that was so reflective of the mindset that I was in. At that time I was working, but I wanted to write songs. I was sitting in, playing my guitar and really enjoying those moments and discovering myself, so Right Here was like the birth of that, and it became about a breakup and about a tumultuous relationship.”

“Aesthetically, I’m a moody babe – you will see me in all-black, always.

But I do have a very soft and loving side.” She takes a deep breath: “I have been in a relationship for five years and we are grossly and madly in love. It’s so gross. It’s sickening!” she laughs. “A lot of the love songs on the EP like Favourite Thing and Meant To Be are about being sickeningly in love. Meant To Be is about being madly in love with this person that you didn’t expect to ever cross your path, but when they did, it was meant to be. It’s where you can’t imagine anything else but this and this feeling and this happiness, and even when we’ve got our house on the farm with our studio in the back garden and our two kids, I’ll still be annoying and asking you to go and get something that I forgot,” she imagines, smiling. “It is a love letter.”

The EP is equal parts light and shade; nostalgic and light Favourite Thing describes the early stages of love – “it’s the song that I’m like, ‘I need to beat this song’ every time I write a new one; I can’t believe Favourite

Whether it’s grunge or soul-lovers – or anything in between – White is happy for listeners to interpret her music as they wish: “I know that for the music industry, sometimes people need the artist to be defined

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

like, ‘You’re this type of genre, or you make this type of music,’ and I don’t really follow that ethos. I don’t think things need to be defined. As long as you’ve taken it in enough to think about what it feels like and what it means to you, I’ve done my job.

So I don’t get frustrated with it,” she shrugs amiably.

Since the Ivor Novello Rising Star nomination, White has seen her profile rise. Should fans expect a new EP or an album any time soon?

“I’m such an open book of a person,” she smiles, happy to tell all. “I’m excited about this stuff and want to let everyone know! I’m writing, writing, writing. Hopefully we’ll have a new project at the start of next year – a new EP, probably. An album is scary.

An album is your big one, you know?

So I want to keep working up to that.

But there’s definitely new music to come, and shows, so stay along for the ride.”

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LEONA LEWIS

Christmas Spirit

LEONA HEADLINER MAGAZINE

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CHRISTMAS SPIRIT Leona Lewis is ready for Christmas. The three-time Grammy Award and seven-time Brit Award nominee has just flown back to London from her home in Los Angeles to begin rehearsals for a UK tour, which will see the X Factor phenomenon perform a selection of Christmas classics and greatest hits while also celebrating the 10th anniversary of her acclaimed studio album, Christmas, With Love. She may be based out of the guard-gated Hidden Hills these days, but London always feels like coming home, Lewis shares.

“Oh my gosh, definitely!” she insists in her immediately identifiable (and unaffected) East London accent. Aside from one “gotten” that sneaks into the interview, no hint of an L.A twang is detectable – she still drops her Ts, pronouncing the word, ‘Bri-ish’.

“I don’t spend crazy amounts of time away from the UK, so hopefully it doesn’t slip,” she says sincerely.

“I’m back and forth quite a lot, and now I have the baby, [Lewis and her husband, professional dancer and choreographer, Dennis Jauch

welcomed a daughter into their lives in 2022], I come back for longer periods of time. This is always going to be home for me. It’s where I grew up; it’s where my family are.”

Now aged 38, Lewis may have embraced an L.A lifestyle, (recently opening plant-based, vegan coffee shops in Pasadena and Studio City), sold over 35 million records worldwide and broken numerous records, (her X Factor winner’s single was downloaded 50,000 times within

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Christmas Spirit

30 minutes, her first record was the best-selling debut album by a female artist in the 21st century – while its lead single, Bleeding Love was the best-selling single of 2007 – and she is the first British female solo artist to reach the top five with eight singles), but when she’s in the UK, it’s the simple things that make her happy.

the show’s then-highest ever audience, with 12.6 million people tuning in.

“I definitely miss a good roast dinner,” she answers straight away when asked what British cuisine she misses when in the US, instantly delighted to talk about food. “Going and getting a lovely roast dinner on a Sunday with my family; I miss that for sure. It’s just so warming and hearty. It’s the lead up to the big Christmas dinner. I cook it myself, but I like going out to a pub or to my local when I’m here.”

“When I went on the show, obviously, it was huge,” she says. “The year before, I was one of those people that got my takeaway on a Saturday night and sat in front of the TV with my friends and my family to watch the show. It was almost like a British cultural thing. I’ve always obviously wanted to have a career in music, it was something I was pursuing, and I was pursuing a lot of different avenues, and this, for me, was one of those avenues. It was the one that kicked off. I wanted to have a career in music, but I wasn’t prepared for the other side of fame and people recognising you,” she says.

Only three series into The X Factor, Simon Cowell had never crowned such a promising winner as Lewis, and it was clear that a post-show career would flourish, if handled correctly. Lewis broke records from the start: her winner’s single – a cover of Kelly Clarkson’s A Moment Like This broke a world record and became the coveted UK Christmas number one single that year, selling more than the entire Top 40 combined. For Lewis, the show was nothing but life changing, plucking her from obscurity and thrusting her into the face of the nation, who tuned in religiously every week. When Lewis won, it attracted

Spirit was released the following November and became the UK’’s fourth-fastest selling album of all time and is the best-selling debut album by a female artist in the 21st century. Lewis’s second album, Echo, also went to number one in the UK, followed by 2012’s Glassheart, which fared slightly less well at number three. At the suggestion of Cowell, Lewis’ next album was to be a Christmas album. Christmas, with Love was met with positive reviews, yet was Lewis’ lowest-charting album to date. Despite this, it was certified Gold by the BPI within four weeks of its release, and has since become the

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13th best selling Christmas album in the UK. Her first record away from Syco Music was 2015’s I Am, which debuted at number 12 on the UK Albums Chart. Lewis hasn’t released an album since (although a handful of singles followed), turning her attention to acting.

“I’m actually shooting a film that I wrote in January,” she says on the subject of embracing different opportunities. “I came into the music industry at quite a young age; my 20s were very much in the spotlight, and I was still finding myself and figuring out who I am. You have the peaks and the troughs,” she says of adjusting to post X Factor life and the immediate rush of attention and commercial success. “One moment everything is massive, then the next moment, there’s nothing. You have to be adaptable, I think, and just take the highs and the lows. That’s life, really. I’m just living it in a little bit of a different way.”

Lewis may have broken the digital download record in 2006, but the music industry has changed a lot since then, as has the way artists’ market themselves to stay relevant. Is Lewis on TikTok? “Do you know what? The only reason I’m on it is because of my goddaughter, who showed me how to use it,” she admits. “When I did The

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Photographer: Mike Rosenthal

COVER STORY

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LEONA LEWIS

Christmas Spirit

X Factor, there was MySpace and a bit of Facebook. Then there was Twitter, so I went through all of that.

You had to be tweeting all the time, and then there was Vine. There’s been so many iterations of social media throughout the years. I do wonder what it’s going to be like when my little one is 11,” she ponders.

“Where are we headed? Like with AI, part of me is terrified about it, but part of me is excited. I have very mixed emotions about it all.”

On the subject, head over to YouTube and listen to AI-Lewis sing covers of Beyoncé’s Halo (passable), Britney Spears’ Everytime (decent) and Rihanna’s We Found Love (abysmal).

One only has to look at the recent actors’ strike to sense the concern entertainers have about being replaced by AI. “Let me tell you something,” she says conspiritorially, “my dad has been sending me AIs of me singing. It’s so weird, because obviously some of it sounds like me, but I hear it and with some of the placements, I’m like, ‘I would never sing that in that way’. It’s really scary because it’s taking away…” she pauses, regroups.

“It’s cool when you hear it, but it’s scary because if it becomes better – I don’t think it’s there yet – but if it becomes better it can really take over the artist. It’s like, ‘Well, what are you going to need the artist for?’ or you’re gonna question, ‘Is it them, is it not?’ At the moment, it’s very unemotional. You can’t take that away – that we have a soul, we have emotion. AI technology doesn’t have that, it can’t replicate [it]. I’m a big believer in energy and feeling things, and I don’t think that you can get the same feeling and that same connection from something that’s AI. It can sound cool, but there’s something very off about it, clearly, because it’s a robot,” she laughs.

“Anything that requires personality or real creativity, I don’t think we can leave that down to AI.”

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

ONE MORE SLEEP Queen of Christmas, Mariah Carey, has officially declared “it’s time”, and in a nod to her own Christmas defrosting meme, began the inevitable slide into the festive period, and with it, her inescapable 1994 single, All I Want for Christmas Is You. “She is the absolute Christmas queen,” Lewis agrees. But does Mariah know her, asks Headliner? “I don’t know if she knows my song,” she admits, twigging the reference. “I don’t know if she’s heard it. It would be very cool if she had. Obviously I would love to do a duet with her at some point. Growing

up, that was the big tune. My mum would play her Christmas album all throughout the year, it was always on in the car,” she laughs, thinking back.

“Literally, that CD – just playing Mariah Carey’s Christmas album. It’s wild.”

The advent of music streaming has led to renewed success for Carey’s single, which annually, unstoppably, re-enters charts worldwide, and in 2013, Lewis released her very own modern festive classic, One More Sleep, which peaked at number three. The following year it limped into the charts again at number 80, and at number 83 the following year, and then disappeared into Christmas song purgatory. Things

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Photographer: Mike Rosenthal

COVER STORY

changed in 2017. Just like Ms Carey, the power of streaming and inclusion on Christmas playlists has seen the song soar into the top 20 again every year since. Today, it’s officially one of the most streamed Christmas singles in the UK. “Wow,” she says, genuinely taken aback to hear the song’s chart journey since its release. “I can’t believe that was 10 years ago. I remember releasing the album; it was something I was really proud of. We did this Motown-inspired, very soulful album and we wanted this fun Christmas song. I really wanted it to do well – of course, you always want your songs to do well – you want it to connect with people. I was happy with the release, but the year after that it started to die down. I was one of the first – not

the first artist to do a Christmas song, clearly not,” she corrects herself, “but a new Christmas song. Not a lot of artists were putting out Christmas records at that time, it was more really old Christmas songs that would come back. I was one of the first artists that started to put out new Christmas music. It was just before people started doing it again, so it died down a bit, and I remember being quite disappointed because I was really, really proud of the album. I also really wanted to perform it and I didn’t get a lot of opportunities [to do that] in the few years after that.

“But then it started naturally, on its own, coming back around. That’s what I love right now about music: that as artists we can have songs and share them, and it might not get to people

straight away, but it has the chance to keep living and maybe connect later on down the line. Some songs are just like that; they take a while to build momentum, and One More Sleep was one of those songs that just took a while to build momentum. Now, I hear it every year; I hear it when I’m shopping or when I’m in Boots,” she smiles. “It honestly makes me smile; it lights me up when I hear a song come on. It’s really beautiful that people have connected to it because I really poured my heart into that whole album and that whole process. It’s lovely that people enjoy it and that is part of a lot of people’s Christmases now. As an artist, that’s what you want: to be able to share music that helps people, heals people, that spreads love and that brings a bit of comfort.”

HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

LEONA LEWIS

Christmas Spirit

Photographer: Mike Rosenthal

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Lewis is currently preparing for her Christmas, With Love 2023 tour, which will include, naturally, One More Sleep.

“We’re in the full swing of arrangements and getting all of the production and the creatives together, so we’re in full swing, Christmas tour mode,” she nods. “I’m excited to be on tour. I was supposed to go on tour last year, but I got pregnant and I couldn’t as I had the baby, so we pushed it back to this year. I thought I might have to cancel it at one point, because I didn’t know if we could push it back or if we got all the venues again. I’ve wanted to do a Christmas tour for probably six years now, so the fact that it’s finally happening… I’m just really excited to get on stage, see the fans and share the Christmas music, because I haven’t really shared that live before.

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I definitely feel like there’s going to be some surprises,” she teases, choosing how much to reveal. “There’s going to be some different arrangements that people can expect. There’s going to be songs that people haven’t heard me sing live before, so it’s gonna be a really surprising show for people.”

It’s only a few more sleeps until the tour starts, and with that, Lewis leaves to head back into rehearsals, sharing that she will be home in the UK for the festive period, which she’s equally as excited about.

“I’ll be here with the baby and family, so it will be a nice Christmas at home with everyone, with a proper English roast. I make the best gravy as well,” she adds, which despite her staggering achievements in music, is the only thing she comes close to bragging about during the interview.

“I’m Guyanese and Welsh, so I mix the flavours. I use a lot of West Indian spices, but I use the traditional gravy that we have in Britain, but I put Caribbean spices into it,” she enthuses. “Let me tell you, everyone that tastes it says, ‘This is the best gravy I’ve ever tasted’. So I’m just sayin’,” she grins, setting the record straight on where she stands on having Christmas dinner at lunchtime vs. dinner time. “I like to have my roast pretty late, around three or four, and then we have a light tea. We build up the hunger, you know? So we can go in and go crazy,” she laughs.

Tickets for Leona’s Christmas, With Love 2023 UK tour are on sale now via www.gigsandtours.com and www. ticketmaster.co.uk.

LEONALEWISMUSIC.COM

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ANDY BENSLEY

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

Explaining the UNIO Audio Monitoring Platform

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EXPLAINING THE UNIO AUDIO MONITORING PLATFORM

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ANDY BENSLEY Andy Bensley, regional business development manager at Genelec, explains the different elements that make up the UNIO Audio Monitoring Platform – which brings together all the benefits of Genelec Smart Active Monitors, GLM 5.0 calibration software and Aural ID 2.0 technology – to create seamless integration between professional in-room loudspeakers and headphone monitoring services.

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ANDY BENSLEY

Explaining the UNIO Audio Monitoring Platform

What is the UNIO Audio Monitoring Platform?

UNIO is an idea that we came up with over the last four or five years, where we’ve begun to add additional services to complement and sit alongside our hardware. As a speaker manufacturer, our bread and butter is the in-room systems, whether that be compact nearfield monitors, right up to some of the largest systems that we manufacture and supply. Alongside that, we’ve had additional pieces of technology in software such as GLM for room optimisation and system optimisation for the loudspeakers.

More recently we’ve had Aural ID and GRADE reports, so UNIO is a means to bring all of these together so that customers can cherry pick which of these elements will be helpful for their way of working and what’s going to fit into their workflow moving forward.

Our plan is to expand those services as time goes on. Certainly in the next few months, we’re gonna see more elements added to the UNIO platform.

What are your most frequently asked questions about the UNIO Audio Monitoring Platform?

For me, it’s, ‘What’s coming up?’

Or, ‘How does Aural ID fit into this?’

Essentially, Aural ID is a host for our high resolution HRTF capture.

Anytime that you’ve used Apple air pods, for example, or different HRTF programmes where you’ll scan your ear with your phone, you’ll get a snapshot of the shape and dimensions of your ear. The premise of that is to improve the external localisation in an immersive context.

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For example, if you’re listening to immersive audio through a streaming service, what we’re doing with Aural ID is taking that idea to a much more precise level. We’re able to scan the entire torso, head and ears and come up with a render and a HRTF file that is incredibly precise, taking in so many more data points than just a photograph of the ear. The upshot of that is you’ve got this unique personal headphone experience that ultimately improves the experience of either listening in stereo, or in immersive formats.

What are the biggest challenges with headphone monitoring, and how does Aural ID address those?

When you’re listening to loudspeakers in the room, that stereo image is generally in front of you. On headphones, it’s to the extremes – to the side of your head – and it feels quite internal. The ultimate goal with Aural ID is to bridge that gap between headphone monitoring and your inroom system. There’s also an element of calibration that you can go through to neutralise the frequency response of the headphones, but also to be able to dial in the speaker positions, or the virtual speaker positions within the Aural ID application. The nice thing about that is if you are working in Dolby Atmos, for example, and you’re mixing in that format and you have an in-room system, there are specific things about that setup in terms of the locations of the speakers. You’re able to tweak that within Aural ID to get those positions to reflect what’s going on in the room. So if you take

the headphones off, the object should be in the same position. That’s the ultimate goal. Once you’ve got that dialled in, you’ve got your HRTF, so you will be able to do additional work away from your in-room system.

This all sounds quite softwarefocused for a loudspeaker manufacturer…?

We’re not trying to do ourselves out of business in terms of selling fewer speakers! [laughs] But what we are very passionate about is providing a reference. If people do have to work on headphones, then how can we get it to translate to our systems in-room? How can we bridge that experience? That’s the ultimate goal of this technology; to be able to bridge the gap between in-room and headphone monitoring. That’s one of the pillars of UNIO. Working with any DAW and audio interface system, the 9320A – with GLM – can handle an unlimited channel count for SAM Monitoring systems from stereo to immersive; why is this important for modern workflows?

A pain point that we’ve seen for many customers is, ‘How do you control the level of immersive systems?’ I think, especially in smaller rooms, it can be a real issue, because if you’re investing a certain amount of money in the in-room system, then you’ve got to invest another £2,000-£3,000 pounds in a monitor controller that can control everything within in the room, which can be quite a frustrating place to

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ANDY BENSLEY

Explaining the UNIO Audio Monitoring Platform

“WHAT’S IMPORTANT IS THE MARRIAGE BETWEEN THE LOUDSPEAKERS AND THE ROOM.”

park your money. One of the things that we are very passionate about with the reference controller is to give tactile control to our GLM systems – something that felt substantial and felt really grounded. With GLM and the Smart Active Monitoring Platform, it’s scalable up to 180 speakers if you want it to be, but also, if you’ve got the audio outputs from your converters and they’re feeding the system, as long as you’ve got enough outputs, you can continue to scale the system by adding speakers. When you connect the control element to the reference controller, you’ve got control over the entire system.

What was the thinking behind Smart Active Monitoring when it was launched in 2006 and what problems was it solving for the user?

It’s wild to think that GLM and our automated calibration system has been around that long because it was a bit of a dark art that people were very suspicious about back then. I remember speaking to acousticians and they were quite sniffy about the fact that there was an automated or an optimisation system built into the monitors. They were like, ‘Well, our rooms are great, we don’t need any assistance’. What we started to see was that people were starting to work in more compromised environments. Jump forward to the pandemic and there were lots of people working at home in the most compromised environments, so the importance of being able to optimise and help these systems in the rooms is really important. GLM was the start of increasing the precision, increasing the ease of use, (you didn’t have to have a third party microphone or software, you didn’t have to be able to interpret the data) – it did a lot of the heavy lifting. The beauty of it was that the DSP lived in the speaker – there wasn’t a central hub where you could run out of channels or run out of available loudspeakers.

Because you’ve got the DSP in the speaker, there isn’t a bottleneck in terms of scaling the system, so customers have been able to build on their systems over the years.

We’ve always said that we’re able to be format-agnostic, because there isn’t an immersive format that we can’t fit into, because we’re not limited by the number of outputs on a box, we can just scale the system.

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Can you explain how Smart Active Monitors and GLM software work together?

What’s important is the marriage between the loudspeakers and the room. The smart active monitors have DSP internally, which allows them to be optimised to the environment. The main means of optimisation will be level alignment – making sure that the audio is hitting the listening position at the same time as the other loudspeakers, and also being able to take a reference of the loudspeakers’ performance in the room and mitigating some of the room influence. If you put a loudspeaker against the wall or put it in a corner, you’ll typically see a boost in the low end and that can lead to issues in translation in the bass response. By being able to neutralise that you’ve got a much better chance of projects translating elsewhere. Essentially, the smart active monitors are the hardware side of things and the Genelec loudspeaker management software, GLM, is the interface which allows you to optimise the system. It’s a programme that will run on Mac or PC and it will guide you through a setup process.

What future developments can we expect to see from the UNIO platform?

As we start to move through the back end of the year, there’s going to be some significant announcements coming throughout October, November and definitely December, so it’s going to be a busy year. It’s our 45th anniversary this year and we’ve had the launch of our flagship system, the 8381A, which was a massive launch for us, we’ve had launches in the AV world with our 4435A and 4436A, plus the 9320A and then there’ll be other announcements further on the year. [Genelec expanded the UNIO platform after this interview, introducing the 9401A System Management Device for Audio-over-IP Networking in November.]

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BISHWAYA

LD Systems Live Sessions

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LDSYSTEMS LIVESESSIONS

BISHWAYA In this third LD Systems Live Session, powered by Headliner, UK rapper and songwriter, Bishwaya performed his original song Thank You at The Suet Yard, St. Albans - a brand new acoustic venue created to support aspiring and emerging talent, as well as the local community. Bishwaya performed with his band through an LD Systems MAUI G3 rig, and we caught up with him after the performance to find out how he’s been keeping busy of late…

What have you been up to these last few months?

I’ve mostly been working on my new project, and some other upcoming projects. Then I’ve also been writing for other people and some friends, and just working on myself.

How did you first get into music?

My dad used to write poetry when I was in primary school, and then when I went to secondary school, grime was

really popular. So I just transferred that into becoming a rapper, and then through that realised I was good at it.

I continued making music and then got picked up by different management.

Throughout that journey I learned how to sing and how to incorporate that more into my music; it’s just always been such a big part of my life.

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BISHWAYA

LD Systems Live Sessions

Out of all of your live performances, which has been your favourite?

the first time I had a full room of people there for me.

Probably one of my first headline shows – I think it was The Old Queens Head. That was a few years ago but it was really good, just because it was

Also me, Ayda Rose, Cam Bloomfield, Tommy Jules and Miss Jones went to my village in Ireland for two summers running to do a small festival there,

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which is really beautiful and scenic, and which is where my family’s from, so it was really special. But also some of the festivals I’ve done before with other people have been exciting.

There’s loads of them, so it’s hard to pick a top one!

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“YOU’VE GOT TO FIND LOVE FOR THE JOURNEY, NOT THE DESTINATION.”

What does it mean for you to be an independent artist in today’s industry?

How did you find performing through the LD Systems MAUI rig?

It means hard work. It means control. It means to be able to do it at your own pace with the people you want to and make real authentic music that you want to, not what someone else is telling you to make.

Using the LD Systems rig was great. It has a really clean sound, is easy to use, and I’d definitely recommend it to people.

The main challenge is motivating yourself to connect with people continuously, when you’re working on such a big project. Labels have a blueprint that you have to kind of make your own, which is great in some ways because it can speed up the process. But then you’ve got to find love for the journey, not the destination, which I think is part of the way that most good artists see it.

I’ve got my self-titled EP coming out and I’ll be releasing more songs over the next few months. Bishwaya came out on the 28th of September and then I’ve got a song called In My Head, and then I’ll release Thank You, which I just performed through the LD Systems rig. And then just loads of stuff around that - promoting it and working towards getting that out to as many people as possible.

The big advantage is having the freedom to be able to do what you want, when you want, and to be able to make what you want with who you want – it’s so important.

LD-SYSTEMS.COM ADAMHALL.COM INSTA: @BISHWAYA

What have you got in the pipeline?

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INSIDE SPHERE

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The Dawn of a New Era

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THE DAWN OF A NEW ERA

INSIDE SPHERE Last month, the long-awaited opening of ground-breaking Las Vegas venue Sphere got underway with a spectacular show from rock icons U2, setting a new benchmark for what is possible in the world of immersive entertainment. Roman Sick, CEO of HOLOPLOT, whose audio systems are installed throughout Sphere, tells Headliner the story of how his company stepped up to one of the most challenging projects in recent audio history, and why Sphere represents the dawn of a new era for AV innovation…

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INSIDE SPHERE

The Dawn of a New Era

Rarely throughout history has the opening of a venue caught the public imagination quite like Sphere. Located in Las Vegas, images of its exterior have been a viral sensation for months, such is its distinctive form factor. For those unfamiliar – there really can’t be many – the venue, as its name suggests, is a spherical structure with an outer surface that is made up of the world’s largest high resolution LED screen. As such, the venue has been displayed as everything from a giant pumpkin, a basketball, and the moon to a gargantuan eyeball blinking into the night sky. Likewise, the interior of Sphere can be visually transformed into virtually any conceivable aesthetic.

The deeply immersive look of the venue is mirrored equally on the audio side of things. In a move that turned heads across the entire pro audio and AV industries, relatively new Berlin-based audio technology company HOLOPLOT was awarded the contract to provide Sphere’s unique sound offering. In one of the most complex and innovative installations the market has ever seen, the Sphere system consists of approximately 1,600 permanently installed and 300 mobile HOLOPLOT X1 Matrix Array loudspeaker modules, containing a total of 167,000 individually amplified loudspeaker drivers.

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All hidden behind the interior LED screen, the system uses HOLOPLOT’s patented 3D Audio-Beamforming and Wave Field Synthesis technology to transform how audio can be controlled and is delivered in large-scale venues.

The system is designed to produce controlled, consistent, and clear audio for audiences of up to 19,000 people, providing each audience member with a personalised listening experience. Put simply, it’s like nothing seen, or indeed, heard, before.

Crucial to the success of the Sphere project was addressing the challenging acoustical environs of the spherical venue and the huge distances as mentioned above, as well as ensuring the loudspeakers were entirely hidden from view. This is where Holoplot’s unprecedented degrees of flexibility and fidelity came to the fore. Secreting a regular line array system behind the LED would simply not work, given the transmission loss, a curved array would suffer from due to the uncontrolled nature of wave propagation and the mechanical setup of a line array.

For the X1 system, the LED is not a challenge, given its straight hanging configuration (a HOLOPLOT array does not have a curvature, synonymous with a line array system) the steering of the wavefront happens mid-air, once the

audio transmission has passed through the LED. HOLOPLOT’s proprietary compensation algorithm further eliminates any audible losses.

Traditional loudspeaker technology in large-scale venues can produce audio quality that diminishes as the distance from the speakers increases. With HOLOPLOT, sound levels and quality remain consistent from point of origin to destination - at Sphere, we’re talking about a distance of 110m from the stage to the the last row of seats.

The last time Headliner spoke to HOLOPLOT CEO Roman Sick, he hailed the technology’s ability to, “enable people to achieve significantly better results wherever they want to use sound, because many of the negative effects of sound bouncing off objects, travelling in all directions and level attenuation is removed”.

He continued: “We offer sound designers, show producers and mixing engineers another layer of access to their creative content and experience creation. It’s not just sound reproduction anymore, it’s a new toolbox that allows you to paint creatively with sound output as opposed to just sound input.

That completely enables a new level of creativity that simply wasn’t there before.”

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INSIDE SPHERE

The Dawn of a New Era

So, after almost five years of planning, U2 took to the stage to give Sphere the kind of grand opening it deserved, making full use of the venue’s immersive features and HOLOPLOT’s unique capabilities. For everyone in attendance, it was a night they’ll never forget, but for Sick – a man with a vision and sense for market needs a vision and sense for market needs – it represented the biggest statement any pro audio newcomer could wish to send to an industry of long-established giants.

“It was mind-blowing,” Sick recalls, chatting to Headliner from his Berlin office a week after the main event. “It was a moving moment to see it all come together after so many years in the works. The Sphere experience as a whole was just next level. It was clear you were looking at a new canvas for art. And of course, we had heard our system in the venue before, so we knew what it would be like, but we hadn’t seen 19,000 people react to it. The reactions around us were just incredible.”

It’s a testament to the innovative nature of the HOLOPLOT system that many were quick to comment on the quality of the sound, when it would have been so easy to be blown away by the visual aspect of U2’s performance.

U2 guitarist The Edge hailed it as, “the world’s most advanced audio system”, while David Dibble, CEO, MSG Ventures, a division of Sphere Entertainment, said that HOLOPLOT technology will, “make Sphere unlike any venue, anywhere in the world, providing audio with unmatched clarity and precision to every guest, no matter where they are seated.

Creating this experience required us to go far beyond existing audio technology, and in HOLOPLOT we found a partner at the forefront HEADLINER MAGAZINE

of innovation to help achieve our vision and truly transform what is possible with audio”.

Unsurprisingly, the response from audience members was one of awe at witnessing a concert experience unlike any other.

“People went nuts,” Sick smiles, describing the reaction in the room. “In the beginning the whole venue looked like a solid concrete wall and then suddenly there is an opening at the top and a helicopter is seen flying over. Obviously, there isn’t an opening, but it felt so realistic, and the moment the wall started to shatter, and the visuals got going, people couldn’t believe it. I saw a lot of open mouths and big eyes. Seeing the faces and hearing that chatter of people around me was so rewarding and felt so great.

“When it ended it was an emotional moment. That’s when it felt like the work was completed. At the end of the show everyone was quite emotional and we all hugged. The team has put so much energy into it and the reactions were great.”

HOLOPLOT and Sick’s unlikely journey with Sphere can be traced back to 2017. At this stage, HOLOPLOT was still finding its feet, with little product to its name and virtually no reputation to speak of among pro audio circles. Sick’s plans, however, were vast in scope.

The company already had its

core fundamental technological capabilities and system layouts but didn’t yet have a product for live entertainment. Sick set about recruiting some of the most knowledgeable professionals in the business to drive the technology to the next level.

“We had folks from MSG reaching out to us when we were still a really small company,” he says.

“We hadn’t yet released a product into the market. They said they had a new project going on and thought we could be an interesting part of it. So, we met a week or two later at Prolight in Frankfurt.

We demonstrated some of our fundamental capabilities and on the trade show floor signed an NDA. We then saw some of the initial plans of the building. It wasn’t a sphere initially, but it was clearly a big vision concept that would be different to anything else out there. They asked if we think we can do it and I said yes [laughs].”

“A few weeks later we were presenting it in New York and having conversations, and in 2018 the project started to take off. It was very deep water for us at that point because we were in the middle of a billion-dollar project and didn’t have the experience yet on how to navigate it; especially as we didn’t have the product ready, which was a big stress point for all the other trades involved.

We had to learn and grow up extremely fast.

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“THIS WAS SUCCESS OR FAILURE. NO MIDDLE GROUND.”

“For a long time, we were the plan B in the project, as MSG was also pursuing a different, conventional solution.

We had to prove that we could be better than products from brands specialised in these applications with decades-long field-tested products, otherwise what’s the point of going with Holoplot? So we continuously had to hit certain milestones to show we were ready to perform at that level and that we provided something absolutely unique. It’s an extraordinary project and a lot had to come together on our end to make it work. For any brand it would have been a massive project, so we had to prove that we were ready for it- And then we won the contract.”

Despite proving time and again to MSG that HOLOPLOT was up to the task, Sick explains that there were several moments where he and his team felt that they had reached the end of the road in the years leading up to Sphere’s completion. However, as he reflects now, his team’s capacity to consistently overcome the seemingly impossible proved pivotal.

“We were supervised and investigated throughout by experts from the industry, as MSG certainly made sure their biggest project would get done properly,” he elaborates. “There were multiple stages of proving product performance at large-scale tests and product comparisons, and lots ofdata was gathered by us and then verified by independent experts to validate the capabilities of the product. MSG also brought in some renowned FOH engineers and artists to offer critical feedback and we had to tick all those boxes. I don’t think any sound system in development has been tested so transparently by leading experts in the market. We ticked every box two or three times, proving that we were ready.

“I always had confidence that we would deliver, but we certainly had breaking points where we encountered an issue or physics [laughs] where we thought if we don’t come up with a solution tomorrow, we might not make it.

But the team found a way and continued to evolve. It was amazing to witness and see that confidence and strength build with the team. It really changed the mindset of

what can be done. They bulldozered every challenge and those were the moments I was most impressed with.”

The pressure in pulling together a project of this scale would have been significant for even the most established and widely used loudspeaker manufacturers, but for a fledgling firm widely viewed as a disruptive newcomer, the implications of failure in full view of the industry’s gaze were catastrophic.

“I said to the team a couple of times that this is a binary outcome,” he states. “Success or failure, no middle ground. Everyone is looking at this project, everyone is looking at HOLOPLOT, and lots of questions are being asked about whether this can work. It was really important that this not only worked, but that it’s a nextlevel experience. That was the goal. It was not just a matter of sounding good it had to be a couple of levels up from that. And I’m absolutely convinced it is that.”

For now, Sick is unable to discuss the future in much detail. There’s plenty in the pipeline, but with NDAs and sign-offs pending, he remains tight-lipped. No doubt the opening of Sphere and the success it has brought will unlock many doors for HOLOPLOT in the coming months and years. As far as planting one’s flag in the sand goes, this one could hardly have been bigger.

“Sphere obviously is a very unique project of a very unique scale,” he concludes. “We have done other projects before ranging from experiential to live music and houses of worship, so the credibility of our ability to deliver great experiences within that whole spectrum is the important takeaway. In June of this year, we announced our more compact Matrix Array, X2, which makes our technology accessible for even more applications, specifically in the commercial, speechfocused applications There are many more avenues and news ahead of us, so stay tuned.”

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SOUNDON SESSIONS

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School’s Out!

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SCHOOL’S OUT!

SOUNDON SESSIONS Headliner Spaces and SoundOn’s first SoundOn Sessions event feels like a flag in the sand moment, as it marks the first event to be hosted by the partnership at The Pioneer Club in St. Albans – a venue steeped in history and now bringing in a greater richness of genres and diversity than ever before. The result of a brand new artist-focused partnership between SoundOn and Headliner Spaces, SoundOn Sessions are music showcases which will champion the most promising emerging talent on the market, hosted at one of the most exciting and historic grassroots venues in the UK. For those who may not be aware, SoundOn is an all-in-one platform for global music distribution and TikTok music marketing. It allows artists to distribute their music on TikTok and all major streaming services, such as Spotify, Apple Music, and more, while maintaining 100% ownership and receiving artist-friendly royalties without administration fees.

Furthermore, SoundOn offers unique promotion features that help artists promote their new releases with TikTok’s creator marketing, expanding their reach to a larger audience.

This debut SoundOn Session also gave a serious nod to the MOBO UnSung initiative - a relatively new talent competition, spearheaded by SoundOn and TikTok, which provides up-and-coming UK artists new musical opportunities.

The first SoundOn Sessions performer is Shack Santima, who graces the stage with something very unique: drill beats, overlaid with lyrics about his faith, Christianity and how these things have got him through the hard times and pain in his life. And if this sounds like an episode of Songs of Praise, it really isn’t. Husband Material is a strong crowd favourite, and Shack’s lyrical delivery holds the room with ease. Commenting on the value of events like SoundOn Sessions, Santima told Headliner: “MOBO UnSung has been great for providing us with insights and education on the business side of being an artist. There is so much you have to know and do beyond creating music, and they have given us some amazing knowledge on the industry side. And venues like this are just so important for artists making their way. You need these venues to build confidence as a performer and to keep improving your craft.”

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And if raw honesty is something the crowd are now craving more of, South London’s Kaniva has it in spades. Carrying on the theme of sharing just four tracks, it’s incredible how much he shares about his personal life and demons he’s faced, and in between songs the fact that he almost quit music entirely. Thank goodness he didn’t, as these lyrics about his struggles with fatherhood, pursuing his passion and his ups and downs growing up in South London captivate the crowd.

“Getting a MOBO award is one of my biggest dreams, so to be noticed by the people that run it was a big achievement,” he says. “Venues like the Pioneer Club are really important in terms of grassroots venues when you’re making music, because you’ve got to do these ones before you get to Glastonbury or Wireless. If I wasn’t doing these kinds of events, I wouldn’t have the experience. A lot of artists these days make great music, but they can’t perform – you need both. Everyone can listen to music in their ears but the live experience is a whole other way to engage with the fans.”

After this double rap helping, R&B/ pop with strong Carribean infusions has the floor. Which means Melica has arrived to do her thing. Like most of the artists tonight, she has the challenging task of performing HEADLINER MAGAZINE

on her own to the backing tracks of her music. Which is no problem, as Melica’s stage presence is something special, and she sounds like a total natural as she chats to the audience in between songs. She talks about how she’s looking to manifest big success in her career, and you’d be silly to bet against her achieving that in the near future.

“For anybody who’s signing up to turn their passion for music into a career to build a livelihood, it’s tough,” she says. “When you’re up you’re up, and when you’re down, you’re down, but it’s something that I’ve always been really passionate about, and the passion kept me going. If this is something you want to do, boy, you better make sure that this is something you’re passionate about. It feels amazing to be recognised by a platform of this magnitude that champions black music and black art.

Grassroots venues are so important because that’s where you really learn how to connect to audiences, how to build your stage presence, how to perform.”

NeONE The Wonderer is also a solitary figure on stage, but brings so many genres onto the stage with him that the room is packed out with his sound. His flow, with shades of Kendrick Lamar, sits atop beats that effortlessly blend hip-hop, jazz, reggae and dub. Tracks like RagJazz sound stunning, and here’s hoping one day he’s backed by a full band, especially a saxophonist who is on his level. His music gets a gentleman in a vest and his umbrella throwing such noticeable shapes that NeONE is compelled to fistbump him in between tracks. Like each of these artists, NeONE is one to watch.

“Events like SoundOn Sessions are incredibly important for artists because they allow them to grow and develop, and they inspire those who get to witness those in the crowd who are songwriters or musicians who want to do the same thing,” NeONE tells Headliner. “And MOBO UnSung’s talent development programme has been amazing. It has allowed me to get into bigger spaces and learn more about the industry through offering first-hand experience.”

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Speaking of band backing, Bea Anderson arrives on stage with two guitarists, a keys player and a drummer, and it’s the very least her songs and vocals deserve. She’s the last SoundOn Sessions artist of the evening, and sees this portion of the evening out beautifully with her airy and wistful vibrato carrying over her soulful songs.

“I feel so honoured to be recognised by the MOBOs at this stage of my career,” she tells Headliner. “When you’re doing independent artistry, you can feel so alone – you don’t really have a team, you’re doing so many things by yourself. It was the perfect time to have some form of infrastructure that could be the next stepping stone

to what’s next in my career, and I honestly feel like this is the opportunity for that. Performing as an artist is so important by giving you the opportunity to perfect your craft in terms of your live ability. I think recording is great, especially in this digital era where everyone’s online, but what happens when you’re in person? How can you perfect that unless you’re given opportunities to perform?”

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“SOUNDON IS AN IDEAL WAY OF MOVING FORWARD AND TAKING THE POWER BACK INTO THE ARTIST’S HANDS.”

On TikTok, she shares that it’s also become an essential part of her music campaigns: “It’s really important to understand how music is being consumed. You can’t get away with releasing music now and not [use TikTok]. I’ve also had the phenomenal opportunity of using SoundOn for the live version of my lead single, which is great,” she adds.

If it wasn’t party time already, Ayo Beatz makes absolutely sure it is as he arrives in celebratory mood. His chain is emblazoned with Ayo Beatz to ensure nobody doubts this is him in the flesh, while he bounces around the stage with abandon. And as the huge rhythms of tracks like Habits get everyone moving, are these the first reloads the Pioneer Club has witnessed?

Commenting on the vital role of grassroots venues, Beatz highlights their importance not just for emerging talent themselves, but for more established acts such as himself to see new talent coming through the pipeline. “Venues like this are very important for people like me to see the new talent coming through,” he tells Headliner. “The up and coming spaces can be difficult to navigate when it comes to finding new artists, so

something like this is quite fresh, and there is also the charity aspect of the Pioneer Club which is amazing to me.”

He also commented on the power of TikTok and its SoundOn platform. “I haven’t used SoundOn yet, but I plan to with future releases. I’ve just come out of a major label and I think SoundOn is an ideal way of moving forward and taking the power back into the artist’s hands. And obviously TikTok has been a big influence and has had a huge impact. For me it has had the power to move me up 20 places in the charts.

What it’s doing is giving everybody the chance to be involved in a record as well, by making their own videos and things like that. It’s changing the way the game is.”

The SoundOn Sessions class of 2023’s performances packed a punch thanks to The Pioneer’s sound system, which comprises eight JBL SRX910 line arrays, four SRX928S ground-stacked subs and four JBL PRX908 floor monitors.

Two PRX915 DJ monitors also reside at the venue, along with a Soundcraft Ui24 mixer. Meanwhile, two JBL PRX912s are positioned on the VIP balcony as delays.

JBL’s presence at The Pioneer Club also extends beyond the main performance space and into its bar and mini performance area – The Suet Yard, a social, DJ and performance space that sits alongside the main venue area, complete with a bar powered

by Signature Brew and a JBL-powered PA system that can accommodate everything from DJ sets and stripped back and acoustic sessions for up to 200 people. The full PA system consists of an assortment of speakers from JBL’s PRX Series, including PRX915XLF subwoofers, PRX908 and IRX108BT loudspeakers, as well as a Soundcraft Ui24R mixer.

A comprehensive Martin Lighting rig works to spotlight the artists and sets the mood on stage and throughout the venue, which includes compact beam moving heads, bright single-lens LED moving heads, bright single-lens LED PAR cans, bright single-lens colour LED PAR can light fixtures, ultra-bright quad LED blinder fixtures and a JEM ZR35 fog machine.

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MIDGE URE

A Life In Music

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To celebrate his 70th birthday, on October 4 Midge Ure headlined the Royal Albert Hall, performing material from across his career, including a full runout of Ultravox’s legendary Vienna album for the very last time. Headliner caught up with him before the show for a look back at his career, the moments that have perhaps slipped the spotlight, and what the future holds…

“People say I’m a Zelig-like figure; you look through history and you’ll see my head sticking up somewhere,” Midge Ure laughs part way through our interview. It’s an analogy that bears scrutiny, given the unique status he has held in music over the past 40 years. With Ultravox and the runaway success of their hit single Vienna in 1980, Ure gave voice to one of the most memorable songs of the decade, while his work with Bob Geldof in coorganising Band Aid, Live Aid, and Live 8, as well as co-writing and producing Do They Know It’s Christmas? established him as one of the most influential figures in popular culture.

Yet in spite of his direct involvement in

these juggernaut moments, he still cuts a relatively anonymous figure.

As soon as Headliner connects with Ure via Zoom from somewhere on the Algarve, he’s joking about the weather and conveying contentment simply at being alive. “As long as I wake up in the morning, I’m doing OK,” he smiles.

It’s this kind of friendly disposition and kindly uncle demeanour that has perhaps contributed to his ability to move so seamlessly between projects and bands down the years. There is no rock star ego on show, no reluctance to discuss those big, career-defining moments. And by maintaining such an easy going, everyman persona, it

becomes far more difficult to apply the kind of rock star, celebrity spokesperson labels that befell his Live Aid co-creator.

To celebrate his 70th birthday, Ure performed a one-off show at the Royal Albert Hall on October 4, playing material from across his vast catalogue of work, including, for the very last time, the full Vienna album. But despite the gig being mere weeks away at the time of our conversation, he’s still working out what exactly the set list on the night is going to be.

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A Life In Music

“The speculation about what’s going to happen is infinitely bigger than what is going to happen,” he chuckles.

“Because with social media people are saying, ‘are you going to do the stuff with the orchestra’? and I’m like, ‘no’, and then it’s, ‘ah, you’re getting Ultravox back together’! ‘No’. So, the fantasy element of it is brilliant to watch but you have to sit down and think realistically. We want to keep tickets at a reasonable price; if we are to do one tenth of what people are expecting, the tickets would have to be 10 times the price, so I’m trying to be sensible about it and tap into various points in my life song-wise that I think were interesting.

Not necessarily success-wise. It’s easy to do a greatest hits thing, but there are so many moments that fell between the cracks in the floorboards that nobody got a chance to see or hear, but they deserve a little nod of respect.

Not that I’m going to play an entire set that nobody’s ever heard. I’m going to cherry pick what I think as a songwriter my highlights were, and that includes a lot of the hits. And I thought just a couple of weeks ago that Ultravox never had the opportunity to play the Royal Albert Hall. Then I thought, Vienna is only 44 minutes long, so let’s do it in that beautiful environment; the kind of environment it deserves to be played in.”

It’s an album Ure still feels great affection for. Some artists can have a hard time navigating their relationship with such defining works from decades gone by. For Ure and Vienna, this is not the case.

“You can’t not feel affectionate towards it because it changed everything,” he states. “I’d just joined a band that was broken. They’d lost a singer and guitar player, they’d just been dropped by their record label, and I joined a band that most people would run a mile from. Everyone thought they were finished. But I joined because of the music, the sound they made. When we played together it was just spectacular, and it was like a Hollywood movie, against all odds. We go in there and HEADLINER MAGAZINE

create something together for the first time and that was the Vienna album.

“And thanks to luck, tenacity, stoicism, and this dogged attitude we had, we managed to get Vienna released as a single,” he continues. “It was the third track from the album released as a single and fighting the label not to edit it and have it released in its full glory changed everything. The album went from being heard by 30,000 people to three million or whatever. You can’t look at that and not be grateful… [he pauses] It brings its own problems. The main one being that the label wanted Vienna part two, part three, part four.

And we weren’t willing to do that, so it was an interesting five or six years of my life negotiating all this and finding new interesting ways of doing things.

It felt like when I joined the band that the musical shackles had been cast off. We could do anything - we had the synths, the rock stuff, we could do whatever we wanted because we didn’t fit any category.”

While the Vienna album was already drawing significant attention, it wasn’t until the release of the title track as a single that Ure and Ultravox fully understood the impact the record was going to have on the rest of their lives.

In similar fashion to Queen’s Bohemian

Rhapsody the previous decade, a song that was considered at almost every juncture not to be single material went on to become one of the most successful releases of the ’80s.

“We spent three weeks making the album, and you’d play some of the rough mixes and Vienna was one that you would play over and over because we knew there was something special about it,” he recalls. “But we never dreamed it would be a single. It’s too long. It went against everything that made a single at the time. Nobody could have thought it would resonate with people the way it did. But sometimes when you stick your neck out amazing things happen. And I’d love to say its success was all down to us, but it was far from it. It’s 99% luck getting it played on the radio. And we didn’t make the video until it was No.2 in the charts. The label didn’t think there was any point in making a video for it.

We had to go and make it without their say so. We went off and started making it and they hadn’t even given us the budget. We told them this video will be seen all around the world.”

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MIDGE URE

A Life In Music

“I STILL LOVE IT. I’M STILL AS ENTHUSED AS I WAS WHEN I GOT MY FIRST GUITAR AT 10.”

Perhaps inevitably, the unprecedented success of both the Vienna album and single would go on to cast a shadow over aspects of Ure’s work that stretches forth to the present day. And though he is far from resentful of the fact, he accepts it has resulted in what he believes to be some of his best work being overlooked on occasion.

“I could make a collection of records of the ones that got away,” he says philosophically. “Most artists are the same. When you leave a successful band, your brain says at least a quarter of the following of Ultravox will come along with me, but it doesn’t work that way.

I remember seeing Mick Jagger doing a solo tour playing the Dominion Theatre and it wasn’t full.

If it had a billboard outside that said the Rolling Stones it would have been filled for years. It’s perception.

So when you leave a successful band like Ultravox it’s like starting HEADLINER MAGAZINE

over again. And all of a sudden everything is me, not we, and it takes a while to find your direction.

Royal Albert Hall show is far from a farewell concert and that he still has much left that he wants to achieve.

“A lot of what I was doing then was seen by the media and some of the fans as being too self-indulgent or too serious. And a lot of what I was doing with the first two or three solo records was perceived as something I shouldn’t be doing, but it was me finding my own feet.

So, it would be nice to have people see that, as a lot of people don’t get to see what for me are some of the best records I’ve made. And bear in mind, when I was making some of these solo albums my life had changed a massive amount.

I’d been to Ethiopia with the first shipment of goods out there. I’d see what was going on and you come back a slightly different person.”

“I’ve been working on a new album for about eight years, and it’ll be finished when its finished,” he says with a smile. “I’m also looking at more touring. I still love it. I’m still as enthused as I was when I got my first guitar at 10. That will never go away.

The ability to do it might, but that hasn’t happened yet. So as long as that continues, I will.”

As we shift our focus back to the present day, Ure is emphatic in his assurance that his 70th birthday

With that, he bids us a warm farewell. When that new album will see the light of day, and what form it may take, is anyone’s guess. But with no intention of hanging up his guitar or his mic any time soon, there’s still plenty of time for that unassuming, Zelig-like figure to once again leave his mark on the horizons of history.

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INVICTUS GAMES

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INVICTUS GAMES The Invictus Games is an international multi-sport event first held in 2014 for wounded, injured and sick servicemen and women, both serving and veterans. After having been postponed once, the sixth edition of the games – held at the Merkur Spiel-Arena in the western German city of Düsseldorf – went ahead in September, and Riedel Communications was on hand to implement an array of cutting-edge live production technologies to bring the event to life.

Under the motto ‘A Home For Respect,’ the city, together with the German Armed Forces, welcomed around 500 competitors from 21 nations as well as around 1,000 family members and friends to compete in 10 disciplines.

This year’s edition of the games was a very special event for Riedel Communications, being the first time that all of its core technology offerings – from media

infrastructures over communications to live video production solutions – were combined and operated in unison. During the games, Riedel worked with International Sports Broadcasting (ISB), a well known host broadcaster in the sports market, to satisfy all the necessary production requirements.

ISB needed a way to ingest all their incoming feeds to a central storage, where everybody involved would

have internal access to production, quality control, post production and editing. One essential requirement was for the local sports presentation team committee to have access to all live content, so they could then cut their own programme and play this out on the in-stadium monitors.

The answer was found in Riedel’s Simplylive Production Suite, which managed to address all the above requirements in one easy-to-use ecosystem.

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INVICTUS GAMES

All In One

“THE FLEXIBILITY OF THE ALL IN ONE SYSTEM ALLOWS THE NETWORK TO BE SCALED ON-SITE AT THE CLICK OF A MOUSE.”

“It was a very interesting and fairly complex workflow,” Harry Kapros, business director EMEA, live production at Riedel Communications, tells Headliner.

“On the ingest side, ISB was using a main and a backup server system to do a baseband ingest of all the different video content, such as Sport Sessions, highlights, melt reels, ceremonies and press conferences.

ISB had a very experienced archive team that was scheduling and managing all the incoming feeds, properly clipping them according to production needs and putting them in the right position, naming them correctly, and storing everything in a central shared storage. This was then made available within the different production teams to be used in post-production, for making highlights, promos and other production content. As is tradition, ISB also produced a summary of the Games, which is a beautiful video montage of everything that happened there.”

Except for the ingest functionality, this dual Simplylive Production Suite offering was also used as a playout solution to play content live on air. On top of this, Riedel put together a group of four additional video servers that were HEADLINER MAGAZINE

able to offer video mixing, audio mixing, ingest, playout, slomo and graphics functionalities for Sports Presentation, while having access to the ISB shared production storage for live content.

Riedel’s comprehensive experience providing comms for large-scale events gave the Host Broadcaster a lot of confidence when it came to the production of the Games, allowing them to let aside the technical aspect and focus on the creative.

“The main advantage of our system is that you can use the same piece

of hardware to combine different functions that are being processed at the same time,” explains Kapros.

“What is important nowadays is that people consume so much content and always want more; what we can address with Simplylive Production Suite in general is a complete ecosystem for different kinds of events. Of course, we work on tier one events, but there’s also so much content in tier two and tier three events which was not possible to get on the air with good broadcast quality before.

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“The most important thing to consider for events such as the Invictus Games is data, so it was clear from the beginning that we would run a big fibre network with our MediorNet and DIVA technologies.

“Communication is of course also key, so radios were needed for almost everyone who was involved. We supplied a comprehensive Bolero wireless intercom system so that, for example, RF cameras working in close proximity could communicate from one venue to another, as well as to the different OB trucks. We often use tetra-based radio systems to ensure complete coverage for all talk groups, of which the Invictus Games had a huge amount. The flexibility of the all in one system allows the network to be scaled on-site at the click of a mouse.”

“With our all-in-one solution we can help to create a multitude of content, whether that be via on prem, cloud or hybrid production. For us, it doesn’t matter where the actual software is running, because we can tackle all the different technologies seamlessly in the same way.”

On the Managed Technology side, Riedel implemented a DIVA network for transporting all data, intercom, video and audio to all stakeholders, as Felix Demandt, Senior Project Manager at Riedel, explains:

Another interesting feature of Riedel’s offering in this case was a smart motion detection line that was implemented around the venue using CCTV cameras, allowing organisers to see who was moving in and out of the venue at all times, even during the night.

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deliver all our services via one system that is all interconnected.”

“Depending on the size of the event, making sure you can offer everything in a very short period of time, where a lot of people who may not have worked together are involved, is absolutely key,” adds Kapros. “We were working with some very experienced people during the games; we had our pre-meetings and everyone was aligned from the start, so I think everything went very smoothly as expected.

“It was one of those events where we were just happy to see happy faces. We ticked all the boxes really successfully, and we’re very much looking forward to working on the next edition of the Invictus Games. I’ve already had a chat with ISB about the next event, so I guess we did something very well!”

RIEDEL.NET INVICTUSGAMES FOUNDATION.ORG

“If someone is asking to hear a programme feed from SDI video that we are getting from a broadcast or an intercom, it is not a problem for us, because we can take the audio out of the video feed and send it to the headset of the intercom,” says Demandt. “I think this is one of the biggest benefits, because we can HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

JONGNIC BONTEMPS

Scoring Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

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It’s the return of everyone’s favourite film franchise that sees cars and lorries transforming into brutal robot fighting machines, which returns with its seventh entry in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. And the man tasked with filling previous composer Steve Jablonsky’s shoes to take the series forward is Jongnic Bontemps. He talks to Headliner about his big pivot from the world of Silicon Valley tech startups to going after his music dream, and being the first black composer to score a film of this scale and budget.

Born in Brooklyn, Bontemps learned the piano amidst an upbringing surrounded by jazz and gospel music.

After studying music at Yale University, he initially stopped pursuing music and instead immersed himself in Silicon Valley, working as a software developer and entrepreneur. One thing that has helped Bontemps no end is his rich musical heritage, both from his parents and growing up in Brooklyn in the ‘70s. “My father is Haitian and my mother is Jamaican, they met in Brooklyn,” he says. “So I have these two cultural connections with such a rich history of music. And growing up in New York in the ‘80s and ‘90s, that was the time and place when hip-hop was exploding. My dad bought an upright piano for the house and I loved learning it, but I remember seeing my piano teachers, who would teach in the day and do gigs in the evening, struggling financially, so I didn’t really see music as a viable career option then.”

Getting into the world of software development was, instead, a case of right time, right place. Bontemps recalls seeing a newspaper advert saying, “computer programmers wanted, no experience necessary.

And I thought, ‘I like computers. I have no experience. They’re talking to me!’ They just needed warm bodies back then. So I did that for about 15 years. Once I was in Silicon Valley, a company I was an early member

of was bought out by HP. Music had really been pushed into the rearview mirror at this point. But when this happened I was wondering, do I want to stay at HP? Or go to another startup? Or do something completely different? This was when I’d randomly picked up GarageBand on my Apple computer, which I’d been playing around with. I shared some of the music I made with a friend, who said it sounded like film music. My mind was blown! I realised that there is music in film, and people get paid to do that. In video games also. I had the hubris to think I could do it! [laughs]” Bontemps worked on a massive amount of student film projects while at USC, also making some invaluable friendships with young filmmakers.

But upon graduating, he struggled to find work as a composer’s assistant, as he was already in his mid-thirties and most assistants tend to be in

their very early twenties. He also had a very valid concern of trying to make it as a black composer, when the vast majority of film composers are white men.

“When I moved to LA for USC, I got to meet Chris Beck, who is my filmscoring hero and became my mentor.

I said to him, ‘I wanna be the black you!’ He pointed out I was much older than everyone else trying to make it in the industry, but he said I have a youthful demeanour and energy. I think what he meant was black don’t crack! [laughs] He told me not to advertise my age. I also got some amazing advice from the composer Theodore Shapiro.

He asked me, ‘Do you want to be the next Hans Zimmer soundalike?’ And I thought, of course, I don’t, so I decided to lean into being the guy who could pull in influences from R&B, hip-hop and jazz, which really made me stand out from the crowd.”

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Scoring Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

“I KNEW THIS HAD TO BE A TRANSFORMERS SCORE AND NOT A HIP-HOP SCORE, SO I JUST WANTED TO ADD TOUCHES OF THAT ERA INTO THE ORCHESTRAL MUSIC.”

Bontemps’ hard work and infectiously positive attitude paid off with chances to contribute music to films such as Creed II, and his hugely popular music for the game Redfall.

The chance to pitch music for the latest Transformers came via a friend he’d made at USC, who put him forward amongst many others. He had to spend a staggering amount of money to put a demo and pitch video together, with lots of footage from previous Transformers films to prove he was up to the task, and as months went by and he began losing all hope, he got the life-changing phone call.

“It’s beyond a dream come true,” he says. “I had the Optimus Prime toy as a kid, I used to watch the cartoon and sing the theme song all the time. I used to pretend to be Optimus Prime on the playground. Also, the film starts in Brooklyn in ‘94 — that’s an amazing era of hip-hop that I literally grew up in. I knew this had to be a Transformers score and not a hip-hop score, so I just wanted to add touches of that era into the orchestral music.

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So I’d add bits of the Roland TR 808 into the mix and parts of what I call the Brooklyn bounce and groove.”

For a film that is about the classic Transformers characters like Optimus Prime and Bumblebee teaming up with a group of giant mechanical animals called the Maximals, it is pretty astonishing how many details made this film such a perfect match for Bontemps, going way beyond the fact he was such a fan in his childhood. “It’s the first time in this film franchise that we have a lead character who is of Puerto Rican descent, and also the fact it was set in Brooklyn, which I’m so familiar with,” he says. “What I wanted was for people to see themselves in the film and hear themselves in the music. So it had to be authentic to the entire movie, not just my culture. So when the film takes the characters to Peru, I made sure to do a deep dive into Peruvian music to understand as much as I possibly could, and collaborated with people who have that as their culture.”

With regards to taking over from composer Steve Jablonsky, Bontemps was, “Totally afraid and in awe of the musical heritage!

Because that music not only means so much to me, but to so many other people, for a lot of people it became part of their childhood. So it was a case of studying the previous scores, really understanding the language and the harmony, the instrumentation and textures.”

Now that the actor’s and writer’s strike in Hollywood has reached a conclusion, it will be so exciting to see what Bontemps puts his incredible energy and talent to next.

In the meantime, if you’re in need of a big slice of escapism, stick on Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.

BONTEMPSMUSIC.COM

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JEAN-MARIE HORVAT

Chaos Is The Best Recipe

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“I’ve been doing a lot of Coco Jones stuff and I’ve been working with a new kid called London Cheshire with [producer] Barry Hankerson. And I’ve been doing some other rock projects I can’t talk about just yet.”

From second one of our time together - a couple of hours that feel like minutes – Horvat’s natural skills as a raconteur are immediately apparent. His rich New York accent and the cadence of his speech make him an engaging and entertaining storyteller, while the candid and colourful language he employs in conversation is frequently hilarious.

As he goes on to explain, many of the most pivotal moments of his career have been the result of a series of happy accidents or a flatout refusal to follow the established order. So, when did his life in music first begin?

Five-times Grammy nominated, multi-platinum mixer, writer and producer Jean-Marie Horvat has worked with some of the biggest names in music, from Destiny’s Child and Beyoncé, to Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake and The Weeknd. Headliner joins him for a chat about his journey from growing up in the projects of New York to garnering a glittering studio career, as well as the pivotal role Augspurger® Monitors have played in shaping his craft…

We’re barely five minutes into our Zoom call when it becomes clear that it would take not hours or days, but weeks to fully dissect the life and career of Jean-Marie Horvat.

Impressive as his CV may be, it barely scrapes the veneer of the story that lies beneath. If any mixer’s life story warrants a feature length screenplay, it’s his.

For the past 30 years he has been applying his signature touch to a vast array of definitive records for

the likes of, in addition the names mentioned above, Jessie J, Chris Brown, Ty Dolla $ign, J Lo, Rae Sremmurd, Robin Thicke, and more.

Yet, despite his reputation as one of the most sought-after mixers of hiphop and R&B, his roots lie very much in rock. This, he informs us before we dig into his career in earnest, is something he is relishing returning to at present.

“Recently I’ve been going back to where I started,” he says. “I went on to work in hip-hop and R&B for most of my career, but I love doing indie stuff. I’ve been getting back into rock because I didn’t like where hip-hop is heading - more the trap stuff - because everything sounds redundant. I’m a musician first and a technician last, so I’ve been revisiting how I got involved in music - that was the bedroom and the house for me. Everybody says you have to be in a controlled environment, but chaos is the greatest recipe of an amazing song. The imperfections make it perfect.

“I can tell you right now,” he interjects mid-question. “I was six or seven and I was watching Sesame Street and Stevie Wonder came on and did Superstition. And seeing KISS for the first time. I remember seeing them, and Toto, and my brother was a major contributor to my musical taste. I remember him bringing home KISS’s Alive for me. And I started delving into his music and got into Steely Dan and the Eagles.

“Then what got me into playing guitar was Ace Frehley. My brother bought me an acoustic guitar and I was just mimicking him at the start.

And going to record stores and being a fanboy is what got me into music at the start.

“But I also grew up in the projects, so the streets were another form of education for me. I was listening to a lot of R&B and soul, and that combination is what led me to work with Teddy Riley.”

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Chaos Is The Best Recipe

During those formative teenage years, Horvat could hardly have predicted that he would soon be working alongside one of the most influential producers of the era. As well as co-founding and fronting the band Blackstreet, Riley is also credited with creating new jack swing, a genre of music blending hip-hop, soul and R&B. With Riley, Horvat would go on to achieve major success with some of the biggest artists on the planet, among them, Michael Jackson and his 1991 album Dangerous.

However, with his parents eager for their young son to, “get a real job”, a career of any kind in music wasn’t on the cards. Still, with no thought for anything else, a course at the legendary Institute of Audio Research allowed him to open doors that would soon set in motion several sliding doors moments that would shape the rest of his life.

“I was doing a lot of odd jobs, and to pay for college I became an investigator for Hudson County, so I was a cop first,” he recalls. “But after a while I just didn’t want to do it no more, and I told my guitar teacher and he said why don’t I become a producer? So, I went to school at the Institute of Audio Research.

“I also took an internship at Sigma Sound Studios, and I remember I was wearing this Hawaiian shirt, and

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the lady hiring said, I’m hiring you just because of that shirt! I got hired that day and she asked if I could work that night, I said yes. That was 1990. I was doing the phones and on my first night I met Ziggy Marley, then Steve Thompson and Michael Barbiero - the legendary duo that did Appetite for Destruction and Master of Puppets. Then Raquel Welch comes in... after that I never got starstruck again!”

Not content with merely answering the phones and keen to get to grips with the studio environment first-hand, after a couple of weeks Horvat decided to take matters into his own hands.

“I was very boisterous and anyone who knows me knows I don’t give a rat’s ass about anything, I just love to live,” he says with glee. “I’d heard about this guy called Tony Maserati [producer and engineer, Mary J. Blige, Notorious B.I.G] who would become my mentor, and one day I said, ‘if his name is Tony Maserati then I’m Johnny Ferrari…’ not knowing that he was right down the way. He was like, ‘hey, you’re really funny!’ He took a liking to me. In October that year he didn’t like his assistant so he took me in instead, and said don’t touch anything. And I touched everything just to bust balls!”

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It was through his work with Maserati that he came into contact with Riley. The encounter would prove life changing.

“About two weeks later I’m playing guitar while serving as an assistant on a session, just three months into my career, and I meet Teddy Riley,” he picks up the story. “I knew who he was, but I didn’t know he was Teddy Riley.

He was playing the Hammond, I’m playing guitar, and I’m like, ‘you’re a bad motherfucker, man,’ and Tony goes, ‘don’t you know who the hell that is?’ I say yeah, some guy named Teddy. He says, ‘you dumbass, that’s Teddy Riley!’.

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“So Teddy took a liking to me, but what I didn’t know was that he thought I was an engineer. I was doing a practice session and Teddy comes in and says they want me in one of the studios, when I was just a runner. Teddy hits play and I’m like, ‘oh shit I’m in trouble’. He says, ‘you hear those drums? That’s how I want my drums to sound’.

And walks out. I had no idea what was going on. I’d just started a few months ago when I didn’t even know what an SSL board was, and now I’m engineering the Let’s Chill session from the New Jack Swing soundtrack. I was so nervous, but I did OK.”

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“A LOT OF PEOPLE GO BY RULES… I BROKE EVERY GODDAMN ONE OF THEM.”

Though his accidental stint as an engineer for Riley proved successful, nothing could have prepared him for what came next.

“Soon after, Teddy left and I didn’t see him for a while,” he says. “I hear through the grapevine that he’s got the new Michael Jackson record and moved to California. Then we move into May 1991, a year to the day that I started working there, and the studio manager calls me to say Teddy is coming back and he wants you to engineer a session. I’m scared. Then all of a sudden Teddy’s tech comes in and goes, ‘you JeanMarie?’ I say, ‘yeah’. He says, ‘you like working here?’ I say, ‘yeah’. He goes, ‘you know why I’m here, right? Teddy wants me to pick you up and wants you to work for him’. That’s how my career started.”

The element of chance that brought Horvat into the orbit of the likes of Maserati, Riley, and Jackson, almost transpired to drop him altogether.

After arriving in California from New York, news quickly filters through that his services will not be required on the sessions that would spawn Dangerous.

“I wasn’t supposed to be on that record,” he states with a smile.

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they didn’t need any more engineers, and that I’d be Teddy’s tech. I came in the next day and what I’d usually do is make a slave reel. As I’m doing it René Moore comes in and asks who I am. I say I’m Teddy’s guy and I’m doing a slave reel and mixing it.

He says, ‘let me hear it’. I hit play and he goes running out. I’m like, shit!

Now I’m going to get fired.

He comes back in, Thom Russo comes in, and Michael came in afterwards, and the song was Jam. I thought I was in trouble, but I see Teddy is smiling. Russo goes, ‘let me hear the mix’. I say it isn’t the mix but he wants to hear it. He hears the bass and goes, ‘oh my God’.

The next thing I know, they say, give him all the tapes! To a musician who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing! That’s how I got on it. It was the most amazing experience I had.

We were a bunch of renegades, and the music industry was actually interesting. There were so many great artists being individuals.”

While there has evidently been a lot of being in the right place at the right time in Horvat’s career, surely there is more than just blind luck in how he got off the ground?

“I think I hear music and monitor things very definitely,” he ponders.

“I have a heavy hand, I don’t give a

flying fuck what the meters are telling me. I believe in different perceptions.

I am a student of tones. I was doing the Ty Dolla $ign albums and I said I want my drums to hit like Dre but I want the music to feel like Pink Floyd.

A lot of people go by rules… I broke every goddamn one of them.”

It was during this time that Horvat came into contact with Augspurger® Monitors and its owner Dave Malekpour. Hailed for their highend clarity and powerful bass, Augspurger® Monitors have become the go-to brand for some of the biggest acts on earth. From Dr Dre to Jay-Z and a great many more, the fingerprint the brand has left on hiphop and R&B is indelible.

“I come to L.A. and I hear these speakers and I’m like, what in god’s name is this,” he says. “From then I couldn’t work in a studio that didn’t have them. They played a major part in how I work. They are an amazing tool. As a musician it’s about what you feel. And those Augspurger® Monitors give you what you feel and I’m blessed to have a pair. My relationship with Dave Malekpour has been great for over 30 years. His redesign of that brand is probably the best I’ve ever heard.

“I built a studio and needed a big pair of monitors,” he continues. “So Dave visits me and says he wasn’t sure he had anything for me because I was working in such a small room.

Anyway, right before NAMM that year, he said, ‘come to NAMM, I have a surprise for you’. He had made me a pair of baby Augspurgers®! They were Solo 8s with two 18” subs, and when I tell you those motherfuckers hit, boy! I had everybody jealous of my room. Everything in that room was focused, hitting hard. The Solo 8 is a magic weapon. He made my perfect speaker.”

MIXER

To this day, Horvat remains an Augspurger® Monitors disciple, and will consider nothing less. As he puts it, “there is nothing else like them”. And they’ve served him well, shaping his towering body of work and all the accolades that have followed. Conscious that we are about to wrap up, he’s keen to pay tribute to Malekpour not only as an audio expert, but as a person who can relate to artists and audio professionals like no other.

“He’s from the east coast, and he’s a no bullshit type of person, which a lot of the hip-hop clients really like,” he closes. “But he’s also a great businessman. And he cares about what you like and he doesn’t stop perfecting.

That’s what professionals love. But I’m also a street kid and he knows how to relate to street people because of

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where he grew up. And he’s a musician. People love him because he cares. He comes up with great concepts and that’s how he created this monitoring system. And he helped me out when times were tough. He’s a wonderful human being.”

With a host of projects underway that he can’t yet discuss, we eventually call time on our conversation.

Wherever he focuses his attention next, be it in rock, hiphop, or elsewhere, there will be no shortage of stories to tell. To quote the man himself, chaos is the best recipe.

And with a life story and CV like his, who would have it any other way?

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IMMERSIVE THEATRE

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

Here Lies Love

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IMMERSIVE THEATRE A decade after its debut at The Public Theater’s LuEsther Hall offBroadway in New York City, David Byrne’s Here Lies Love is back in the Big Apple and is the first Broadway event to feature L-Acoustics’s L-ISA immersive technology. Sound designer Cody Spencer spoke to Headliner about collaborating with the Talking Heads icon on the show, and how his work with L-ISA is changing the landscape for immersive theatre as we know it…

Created by Byrne and featuring music from Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, Here Lies Love is a musical that tells the story of Filipino politician Imelda Marcos, from her rise to prominence to her eventual downfall in the Philippines.

Instead of laying out on a stage before the audience, the theatre is essentially rendered a bona fide disco, with the main floor space serving as a dancefloor, with actors and audience members mingling as the story is told through music and karaoke. Achieved using more than 220 L-Acoustics loudspeakers supplied by certified partner PRG, and making extensive use of L-ISA technology, the resulting extravaganza places its audience right at the heart of the drama. Those who prefer to sit can do so via various galleries and mezzanine seating areas.

“David Byrne read long ago about Imelda Marcos and how she was in love with disco, and it was such a big part of her life, so when he came up with this idea, he wanted the audience to feel like they were at a disco, not just watching a show,” Spencer tells Headliner. “So, the main floor is a dancefloor where the audience and the actors interact, while there are also mezzanines and galleries looking down. The show is 90 minutes long and is told through karaoke and disco music, telling the story of the Marcos family.

“In my role I am a co-designer with M.L. Dogg, and typically I deal with the sound system, the cast, the mics, and he is the content person, dealing with the sound effects and playbacks,” he

continues. “And this is such a massive show, with lots of playback and a lot of sound effects and layers and textures. The system we designed is very complex; it has to be in order to accomplish everything we want to accomplish. This is not a traditional show, it’s much more complicated with the audience and the actors all in the same place. Anywhere there could be an audience member there could be an actor, and anywhere there could be an actor there could be an audience member. It’s a very difficult system to put together and tune and make work without massive feedback. This design has to cover the actors and audience all at the same time, but we’ve figured it out and have a great sounding show that is replicated night after night.”

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Here Lies Love

So how did Spencer and Dogg set about bringing the concept of the show to life?

“It all started with Soundvision, which is L-Acoustics’ proprietary prediction software,” Spencer explains. “So, I spent months making sure every single speaker was covering exactly where I needed it and nowhere else.

We did that for months before we got to the theatre, and when we got to the theatre, we realised that things had moved, and lights were in the way. So we spent a lot of time being really precise on what every speaker is doing and knowing that every speaker has a purpose. There is no bleed from one speaker to another. That was the first step, so we knew exactly what the system was doing.

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“The hard part of the show is when you’re down on the floor and the action is happening all around you, so how do you know where to look?

The first part is making sure the audience knows where to look. And we need to make sure the actors can hear the other actors amongst the audience, so there is a lot of playing with acoustics to make sure the audience is receiving what it needs, and the actors have to hear each other, so there are a lot of little monitors hidden around the set to push vocals to the different areas for the cast. I’ve never tuned a system so much in my life.

“With this setup there are six different zones – the dancefloor, VIP area, front mezz, rear mezz, the galleries on the side and the mix position. So if we make a change to one we have

to verify that all the other five don’t have any issues as a result.”

The Broadway Theatre’s current L-ISA installation features over 220 speakers in a full surround configuration. The fully immersive dance floor area is covered by 14 L-Acoustics A Series arrays: three hangs of one A15 Focus over two A15 Wide are flown above the two short ends of the rectangular floor space, while four hangs of two A10 Wide line each of the long sides of the floor.

Runway fill is supplied by two centrally flown arrays of A10 Wide, with a pair of X8 providing additional fill when the axis of the runway is rotated 90 degrees. A ring of 16 compact 5XT dot the perimeter of the actor walkways surrounding the dancefloor to provide additional localised fill.

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In the traditional theatre audience seating area upstairs, three more A Series arrays—each comprised of four A15 or A10—hang over the first mezzanine in an LCR arrangement while three arrays of seven Kara II cover the larger rear mezzanine.

A variety of X12, X8, and X4i enclosures provide fill for other locations, including the gallery seating areas, while two dozen KS21 subs distributed around the room anchor the system’s club-like low end. A total of 50 LA4X amplified controllers, all fed via Milan AVB, drive the system. The AVB feed comes from a MADI output converted from the show’s DiGiCo Quantum 7T mixing console.

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IMMERSIVE THEATRE

Here Lies Love

“THE EASE OF USE IS WHAT SEPARATES L-ISA FROM THE COMPETITION.”

“L-ISA spatial audio gives us the tools we need to quickly and efficiently program a 360-degree experience that conveys the excitement and nuance of each musical moment in the show,” Spencer says. “Whether you’re standing on the floor or you’re sitting up in the mezzanine, you’re really feeling like you’re encompassed and you’re part of the show.”

Spencer’s relationship with L-ISA extends back almost a decade, being one of the very first professionals outside of L-Acoustics to experience the technology and be exposed to its capabilities.

“Scott Sugden from L-Acoustics is one of my best friends,” he continues, “and back in 2014 he said I should go to France and see this new thing they were working on. I went to France to see company founder Christian Heil HEADLINER MAGAZINE

and I got to see the first version of L-ISA. I spoke to them then about Here Lies Love and how we could use this technology for the show.

We had long conversations about what the potential was in the theatre world. And today we are using it on Broadway.”

Having been hands-on with other competing spatial audio products, Spencer insists that L-ISA is currently ahead of the game.

“The ease of use is what separates L-ISA from the competition,” he asserts. “It’s so easy to use. Having used competing products, I would take L-ISA every day. You can jump around so much more quickly and easily, and the more people see it the more creative things are going to come out of it.”

As AV technology continues to evolve, Spencer is excited for the future of the theatre experience.

For audiences and audio professionals alike, the limits on what can be achieved are not being pushed outward but being eroded altogether.

“There are a lot of things changing the theatre market,” he says. “In addition to this kind of audio technology, we are seeing more trackers being used for lighting and different technologies are stacking up to make immersive productions more viable. I have some directors I’ve shown L-ISA to and they are already looking to try new things with it.

“I am so excited for people to experience the sound of this show; I am confident this is just the beginning of L-ISA on Broadway.”

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MARYJO

Life After American Idol

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

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Image credit: Jena Yannone

EMERGING HEADLINER

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LIFE AFTER AMERICAN IDOL

MARYJO If maryjo looks familiar to you, it’s because you recognise her from season 19 of American Idol where she got three yeses from the judges after her emotional performance of You Broke Me First by Tate McRae. Mary Jo Young sailed through to the next round and reached the top 24 in the competition. In this Emerging Headliner interview powered by JBL, she explains how she’s been carving out her post-Idol identity, which also includes a slight rebrand of her artist name, which is now simply: maryjo.

“Honestly, I have no idea,” she admits, bursting into laughter when asked why she dropped her surname.

Relatable and honest and with an endearing tendency to blurt out what’s on her mind, the singersongwriter hailing from Cleveland jokes that she needs media training.

“I’m also wondering why I made maryjo lowercase? It’s like when you get a tattoo and you like it, but you don’t know if you’re gonna regret it later. But now it’s like, ‘Well, whatever.

Let’s just see how it goes.’ Obviously,

I felt strongly about it in the moment, so there must be something positive behind it,” she smiles.

In her Idol audition video, maryjo admits she has never sung in front of her mother, prompting the judges to coax her into the audition room to hear her daughter’s gift. Despite boasting a seriously impressive TikTok following at the time, maryjo never performed in front of people.

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MARYJO

Life After American Idol

she worry that fans will only show her love on the app? “Honestly, yeah. I worry about that because I started on TikTok and even though being on TikTok is amazing, I always want to be taken seriously as a musician,” she says. “I think they have been taking me seriously as a musician though, and Idol also helped with that. A lot of the fans have been going to Spotify to listen. My goal is to just be a musician, not categorise on every app, so it’s just trying to break that wall down.”

“That was genuine,” she says of the unscripted moment where her mother watches her sing. “When I was little, I always imagined that I would be doing this, I just didn’t know how. I would ask for a guitar and a piano for my birthday and I would hide in my room and sing. So I bet she’s heard me do little things and just pretended like she hasn’t. But I’d never sang for her, so that was my first time actually standing in front of her and singing.

With TikTok, I could post videos and hide it from people that I knew, so that I could find out from strangers if I was good – and that boosted my confidence. Once I met my managers, it was like taking a baby bird and throwing it out of its nest.”

On the subject of her TikTok account, maryjo’s videos have seen her accumulate more than 1.3M loyal followers, which she says has been a huge help in terms of steering her content.

“They’ve kind of felt like friends,” she says, “because you can tell when they like videos so I know what to post.

Sometimes it’s hard to know what your fans like; it’s not just about what you like if you want to keep growing.” maryjo is certainly a master at making TikTok work for her, but is also aware of the bubble the app exists in. Does HEADLINER MAGAZINE

maryjo has a powerful voice made for heart-melting piano ballads, nurtured by listening to the likes of Kelly Clarkson, Rascal Flatts and Adele while she was growing up. Idol is undoubtedly a phenomenal platform for any artist to launch their career from, but with its format being based around covering other artists’ songs, it can be a challenge post-show for singers to find their feet. maryjo has a pragmatic outlook to her post-show releases: “When you’re an artist, it’s not just about your technique or being a singer,” she considers. “You have to take on this whole job. A lot of people think it’s just recording a song, when really you’re a whole package or a product. I wanted to get across that I was. I don’t think it’s been hard to transition; it’s been more fun. You have the platform, and then you see what your fans that follow you like and what you like, and then you combine it all into one.” maryjo wasted no time after Idol, swiftly landing a deal with Atlantic Records and introducing her own sound with her debut single, Love Fools – a stripped-back ballad featuring the piano work of two-time Academy of Country Music Award-winner Gordon Mote. It wasn’t all plain sailing though: when she first went into sessions and was trying to explore her sound, everything was coming out “cookiecutter pop,” she says. “Finally I had to stop and say, ‘This isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing’. I took a step

back and asked myself why I was trying for something that didn’t feel right, and because of that we honed in on a sound that feels like me: something I can put so much emotion into when I’m singing, so that I can give the audience something real to connect to.

“I was thinking about the kind of artist I wanted to be,” she continues. “I was looking at all of the pop singers that I actually enjoy singing along to and feel a connection to, and these are big songs. You can hear the emotion, but they’re fun to sing. They’re all slow.

Then it just clicked and the sessions after that completely changed. I had a completely different mindset on where I wanted to go.”

Produced by Logan Maggio and co-written by maryjo with Maggio, Beau Bailey and Knox Morris, her immediately compelling (thanks to a powerful, singalong hook just three words in) recent track, Traffic was written about being in a long term relationship and feeling that things aren’t moving forward.

“At first, it was kind of hard to sing – the ‘love’ part,” she clarifies, “but I’ve been with my vocal coach and we’ve got it down now. When we wrote it we were sitting in Logan’s studio and we were writing a completely different song.

Knox looks out the window and he sees a bunch of construction workers, and he sees a traffic cone. He’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, guys, I just got the craziest idea!’

And he’s like: ‘Traffic,’” she pauses.

“Then he explained the comparison between it and saying you love somebody, but you’re not falling more in love, but you’re not falling out of love and it’s kind of boring. We just started going and we got the song like that.”

And the reaction online so far? “It’s honestly been really good and positive.

I don’t think I’ve got any hate yet! But if I do, so be it,” she shrugs. “If you can’t take opinions, you probably shouldn’t be in this industry or be an artist.

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Image credit: Mitch Holson

EMERGING HEADLINER

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MARYJO

Life After American Idol

“MY JBL PA IS MY LITTLE TRAVEL BUDDY. IT COMPLETES THE SONG.”

Her social media followers have been anticipating the release of maryjo’s brand new single, DON’T CALL ME since she’s been teasing it of late. maryjo reveals it’s written by the same team that she wrote Traffic and Love Fools with.

Anyone seeing maryjo on stage recently will spot her JBL EON ONE compact portable PA that she’s recently started using, which has been a game-changer for hearing every note of her tracks in preparation for her upcoming shows.

“We were like, ‘We’ve been writing a lot of ballads so let’s do something fun’. I have the saying where I’m always like – I mean, a lot of people say this – but it’s, ‘I’m Mary Jo, but you can call me tonight,” she says in a mock pick-up voice. “So I was like, ‘How could we twist that?’ We sat down and came up with, ‘You can call me a psycho. You can call me a liar. You can call me an arsonist, I should set you on fire…don’t call me tonight’. It’s funny because I’m actually a really chill person,” she insists. “I mean, I’m crazy, personality-wise, but in relationships, I’d say I’m pretty chill. I wanted a fun, crazy song that seemed out of the box. It was really fun to make a song where I was mad.

It’s like those stages of grief when you go through a breakup: you have Love Fools where it’s toxic, Traffic where you’re out of love and DON’T CALL ME where you’re mad.”

“I actually brought it to Nashville with me,” she enthuses, “and I’m gonna bring it to L.A. It’s so nice because when I listen to my songs or when I show people my songs, I usually just put my AirPods in, and it’s annoying because I want them to have the full experience of the song. Now when I get to play it on the JBL PA, everyone’s there in the moment and they’re listening to the song. You can hear all the mix and the full experience, plus it was so easy to set up,” she points out.

“I didn’t even have to ask my mum for help,” she grins. “The sound quality is beautiful too; it’s perfect. And it’s definitely not too heavy, so you can easily bring it around. It’s perfect. It’s my little travel buddy. It completes the song, if you will.”

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

With a few single releases under her belt and a staggering social following, surely the next step in her career is

to release an EP, or perhaps even an album? “Honestly, both,” she reveals, deciding how much she wants to share. “We have a crazy amount of songs. We didn’t know we were gonna have this many songs done by now, so we’re just gonna keep ‘em coming.

I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that, but I already did….”

Is there anything she’d love to write about in a song, but hasn’t got round to it yet? “Maybe Austin Butler? He’s pretty hot,” she deadpans before collapsing into laughter, then pulling herself together to answer: “I like to write what anyone can relate to,” she says. “I like to write stories, not just little songs. My whole goal is bringing out songs that have stories behind them.”

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SIGNAL HOUSE STUDIOS

A Different Way of Working

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SIGNAL HOUSE STUDIOS HEADLINER MAGAZINE

STUDIO

Signal House Studios started life as a shed at the end of Tim Kramer’s parents’ garden, to the stunning studio complex on the grounds of the beautiful Symondshyde Farm.

Kramer chats to Headliner about the studio’s amazing journey, his time in the band Drones, and his Adam Audio speakers, Neve outboard gear, and plugins that keep the place purring so wonderfully.

Kramer and Signal House Studios have seen some incredible artists and bands head through both the old and new sets of doors — including The Zipheads, Drones, Midwich Cuckoos, Heart Of A Coward and more. As you can imagine, since moving the studio from its back garden location to this absolutely premium complex, the number of bookings and stock of the artists has gone up quite a bit. Located between St Albans and Hatfield in Hertfordshire, Kramer is still able to lure London musicians on the short train ride to the studio.

Speaking from his wonderful new space, Kramer agrees that being slightly out into the countryside offers that sense of a creative retreat that many artists feel they

need to fully dive into a project. That said, it’s only a 10-minute drive or taxi ride from both St Albans and Hatfield’s main train stations, so it’s still convenient to get to.

“It is a good way to clear your head,” he says. “A lot of artists, especially living in major cities, when they’re making a record or recording some music, they’d like to have a clear headspace. For bands coming from London. I think this studio offers a different way of working. You can really hone in on the music. You’re not distracted by the hustle and bustle of the city, and constant distractions from emails and phones.”

SHS really has come some way, originally establishing itself in “an annexe room at the back of my mum and dad’s garden,” he says.

“It used to be my mum’s studio, she works in art and is a sculptor.

But throughout my teenage years I gradually took over that space. It’s where I found my feet, working from there for about seven years.”

There was also a point where Kramer’s life could have veered much more into the band and touring life. Drones, the London

“THIS STUDIO OFFERS A DIFFERENT WAY OF WORKING. YOU CAN REALLY HONE IN ON THE MUSIC.”

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punk outfit fronted by Lois McDougall, gave Kramer a busy second life as their bassist, also recording and producing their last record. With extensive coverage from publications like Kerrang! and The Metro, writing an original track for DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, and chalking up regular appearances at Download Festival and 2000 Trees, Drones really did stand at the precipice at one point.

“We played some major festivals and were often touring Europe,” he says. “So many networking opportunities came my way from playing actively in a band. The downside was that it was difficult to run the studio as a full-time business while being in a touring band. When the band split up about a year and a half ago, I knew then that I’d be taking on this bigger premises — so I was sad about it at the time, but then I was able to put all my energy into running this place and growing the business.”

Kramer has built up an astonishing collection of gear over the years, which really outgrew the smaller space he was in previously. He talks lovingly about his mouth watering assembly of items, starting with his Adam Audio speakers.

“I have a great relationship with Adam Audio,” he says. “I’ve had three sets of their speakers now.

I’ve always loved the ribbon tweeters and the sense of air you get with adding the speakers and the soundstage. I got my first pair while I was at university years ago, the A7X [now discontinued]. Then, coming out of uni, I had a pair of the older version of the S3Vs, which had a lot more midrange detail.

“I got those secondhand and they eventually started getting on a bit.

I sent them to Adam Audio to be serviced, and in the meantime I got chatty with one of their sales reps, who mentioned to me they were HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

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SIGNAL HOUSE STUDIOS

A Different Way of Working

“I LOVE THEIR TAPE EMULATORS AS WELL: THE KRAMER MASTER TAPE AND THE J37 TAPE SATURATION ARE SUCH AN EASY WAY OF ADDING SOME HARMONIC RICHNESS TO TRACKS.”

about to release the updated version of those speakers. I ended up getting those — I love the new features, like the custom EQ curves, and being able to control the volume and everything digitally. I remember the first time I played my favourite records from them, it was like the band were playing in front of me. I fell in love with them.”

A new investment since moving studio for Kramer has been Neve preamps, which he now uses in virtually every session. “I’ve got a pair of Neve 1073s,” he says. “They’re just the industry standard for fat-sounding preamps, and my go-to for drums. I love using them on snares — they overload really nicely if you want to push them hard. They sound so thick and they convey transients beautifully. I would get more of them if I could!

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“I always use them for bass and guitar too. I’ll often have an artist bring in a software synth part, and I like to run it back through the Neve preamps to get them sounding more analogue and harmonically rich, and just add a bit of flavour to them.”

Another name which is absolutely key to Signal House Studios is Universal Audio.

“I run the main hub of the studio through UAD Apollo converters and preamps,” he explains. “When I’m recording guitar guide tracks, I find their guitar simulator plugins so handy. The API 2500 Compressor is really nice as well, and I love using the Helios EQ. The beauty of the UAD stuff is you can live-track it without worrying about any monitoring latency — you can load stuff up on the mix console and process it on the way in. I got my first Apollo in 2016, so

I’ve been using UAD for about seven years. I basically have an ecosystem of their hardware and plugins, and it all works so nicely together.”

And with Waves, Kramer loves using the SSL plugins, “which are very useful,” he points out. “I really like the CLA effects as well, they are great for quickly applying some processing on the fly. It gets things a bit more mix-ready. I love their tape emulators as well: the Kramer Master Tape and the J37 Tape Saturation are such an easy way of adding some harmonic richness to tracks.”

With Kramer currently working on four different albums simultaneously, it will be fascinating to see how Signal House Studios grows from here. The signals are all looking very positive indeed.

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JAZZIE B

Keeping It Funki

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KEEPING IT FUNKI

JAZZIEB Trevor Beresford Romeo OBE, otherwise better known as Jazzie B – DJ, music producer and founder of soul music collective, Soul II Soul – speaks to Headliner about how he makes his music and the soundsystem culture that established Soul II Soul as a household name in the late ‘80s.

Soul II Soul, a group that emerged from the vibrant UK soundsystem culture, epitomises determination, resourcefulness, and an unwavering passion for music. Their journey began in London, a multicultural melting pot where diverse backgrounds converged, celebrating shared experiences and influences. In the mid ‘80s, against the backdrop of the underground warehouse scene, Soul II Soul’s creative expression flourished.

South London, which was the largest and most successful privately owned club in the city at the time. Camden in North West London however is where Jazzie established his stomping ground, and where the early days of the sound system began to unfold.

Born out of Caribbean popular culture, a sound system consists of a group of DJs, engineers and MCs playing ska, rocksteady or reggae music.

In the late ‘70s, Jazzie B and his peers often frequented The Fridge in Brixton, HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

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JAZZIE B

Keeping It Funki

“SOME SOUND SYSTEMS WERE PROBABLY MUCH MORE EXCITING TO LOOK AT THAN THEY WERE TO LISTEN TO; THEY WERE WORKS OF ART.”

“It was a DIY kind of culture, as it were,” Jazzie begins. “That’s what the sound systems were about; a collective of people getting together to build their solid instruments, as I like to call them.”

With their innovative sound system, Jazzie B and Soul II Soul transformed ordinary house parties into extraordinary and immersive experiences through unconventional speakers, pyrotechnics, banners, and strobes. The unique Funki Dred style they embraced attracted a devoted following of music enthusiasts, spreading their fame far and wide.

“Back in the day as a working class West Indian kid, you could never afford all the gear…” Jazzie recalls. “A lot of people making early sound systems would have been carpenters and suchlike. It was a hobby that music lovers with full time jobs would do at the weekend. I guess it got good to us when there was a sense that some money could be earned out of it. Some of the sound systems back in the day were probably much more exciting to look at than they were to listen to; they were works of art.”

After wetting his feet in the sound system world, Jazzie found himself working as a sound engineer and tape op, subsequently rubbing shoulders with the likes of Hans Zimmer, producer and DJ Howie B, and Portuguese percussionist Luís Jardim, amongst many other greats.

Jazzie had soon gathered enough resources to turn the HEADLINER MAGAZINE

sound system culture into an entrepreneurial business, and became part of producing a sound that helped change the direction of black British music and youth culture forever.

Recognising their undeniable talent and infectious sound, Virgin Records signed Jazzie and his Funki Dreds in 1988 after witnessing the captivation of the dance floor by their original dubplates, particularly their underground hit Fairplay.

“We surrounded ourselves with people who were better than us in all aspects, and it allowed us to elevate to another level,” he recalls. “Inside the nucleus however, which was always important to me, was the sound system, which became a way of us testing sonically what the music was doing. Hence, Club Classics Vol. One” [Soul II Soul’s 1989 debut album].

Soul II Soul’s fresh, infectious, and distinctly British sound resonated with people from all walks of life, transcending boundaries with its soulful embrace. With chart-topping hits like Keep On Movin’ and Back To Life, Soul II Soul became household names, solidifying their iconic status. They evolved from a sound system DJ collective into a 25-piece band, captivating audiences on exhilarating live arena tours across the globe while staying true to their roots.

ARTIST

“We were in the early stages of moving away from punk, with our eyes being opened and barriers broken down,” Jazzie tells Headliner. “We were able to embrace all of those elements of hip-hop, which at the time we called electro. As a young person, you’re always trying to find your tribe, and we had this punky hip-hop style with an energy that appealed to the next generation of voices.

“When we went into these spaces the energy was incredible, because we had no inhibitions. We were all brought together by the music and the idea that expressing yourself meant you were part of something bigger – your tribe.”

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In 1990, Soul II Soul went international; Jazzie B took 100 people on the road for around three months and the rest is solid gold music history. Soul II Soul’s impact crossed borders, selling over 10 million albums in more than 35 territories, while Jazzie’s versatile production contributions graced over 35 million albums across 100 territories through collaborations with James Brown, Sinead O’Connor, Nas, Destiny’s Child and more. They commanded stages in over 20 countries, receiving numerous accolades including two Grammy Awards, three Soul Train Awards, and honours from the NAACP.

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JAZZIE B

Keeping It Funki

However, none of it would have been possible without the help and support from others, as Jazzie explains: “Writing the record, producing the record, mastering the record; all of those elements happened because we had pirate radio, we had the sound system, and we had people in our musical community who would either give you a nod or inspire you to force that envelope. During that time it was the only thing on my mind; forcing every limiter, every compressor and every bit of oxide tape. These great engineers were able to translate the sonics from the

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sound systems, which were created from whatever was going on in our heads. I’ve seen the transition from analogue to digital; what I’ve learned is that it’s not just about the show, but the energy that the audience receives from the show.

innovative spirit and consistent artistic output continues to inspire future generations. They remain a formidable force in the music industry, touring globally, including a recent sold-out tour in Australia and New Zealand.

“My record acts as my acoustic, and now I find myself on the end of the whole thing where the reproduction is a bit more interesting – getting the sonics and the crunches and that sound. One day I’ll be using a Funktion-One system and the next I might change it for an L-Acoustics system. That’s what I do more of now, and I like that process, because it’s arguably taking it back to that simplicity. These days, when I’ve done a performance, I do sit back and look at my music in a bit more of a jazz form in terms of the instrumentation.

I’m running Ableton but I still use all my old analogue stuff, everything from vocoders to a lot of the old synth sounds, and the process for me is working. We’re locked in our groove.”

“All the seeds were sown from 1990 when I took 100 people on the road.

Now here we are, doing another show with another experience with another generation, albeit with about 20 people with me this time. My guys are playing every week now and are well oiled,” Jazzie says with a smile as we round up the interview.

“Covid made us all realise that life is a moment. The key of existence and what we live for is the magic of sound. Music is like our food, and there’s times when we enjoy different kinds of foods and the emotion it provides. I still feel that, and to me, that’s what it’s all about.”

As Soul II Soul celebrates their remarkable journey, their

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THE DREAM UPGRADE

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CONVERSION IS KEY

THE DREAM UPGRADE Swiss engineer and location sound recordist Bernard Seidler has upgraded his recording setup, parting ways with his beloved Prism Sound ADA-8XR converters to make way for a new Dream ADA-128 modular conversion system. Headliner finds out more…

“When I buy a product, I want it to last,” Seidler begins. “I’m not interested in buying something that’s broken or defective after a few months. Quality is very important to me from a construction and an audio point of view.

“Parting with my ADA-8XRs will be painful because they still work perfectly well, but after many years of loyal service it was time to look at today’s converters and take advantage of developments in that field. I wanted

to stick with Prism Sound because I’ve always appreciated the audio and build quality of its products. My new ADA-128 is really perfect and I think the same care has been taken with its construction as with the ADA-8XR.” Based near Geneva, Seidler initially followed his father into the construction industry but a love of music and a fascination with recording led him to pursue a different career.

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Conversion Is Key

“I was nine when I made my first recording – capturing bird song in the forest near my home using a friend’s portable Philips cassette recorder,” he laughs. “When I was older, I saved up enough money to buy my first tape recorder - a NAGRA IV-S with the adaptor for large reels - and a pair of Neumann KM84 microphones that are still in my vintage collection. I loved rock music but I couldn’t record rock concerts with this setup, so I settled for recording choir concerts and small classical ensembles in churches where the acoustics were better suited to equipment I had.”

Eventually, Seidler got a job at a local radio station and spent three years doing everything from soldering XLR plugs and making tables for the studios to recording

and mixing commercials, vocal groups and local brass bands.

Then he moved into television, tackling sound recording for news magazines before finally setting up his own sound recording company and working as a sound engineer for TV documentaries, music festivals and feature films.

He also found time to study sound engineering at SAE in Paris and this opened up other opportunities, most notably a 20-year working relationship with Argentinian conductor Roberto Sawicki who leads the Geneva-based l’orchestre de Lancy-Genève chamber orchestra, as well as collaborations on operas at the Grand Théâtre de Genève for radio and TV, and opera recordings in Montpelier, Nantes and Athens for ARTE.

“AT THE HEART OF MY SETUP IS PRISM SOUND CONVERSION; IT’S A VITAL PART OF MY SYSTEM.”

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These days, Seidler mainly works in broadcast, recording audio for Télévision Suisse Romande (RTS) and for small production companies. His projects range from news to more elaborate magazine programmes and documentaries such as the programme on the life of renowned Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz, which he recorded for Troubadour Films, and more recently a documentary on an innovative palliative care centre run by volunteers. He also still records the l’orchestre de Lancy-Genève, capturing two or three concerts a year for release on CD and for the orchestra’s website.

“For me, these projects are like research laboratories because they allow me to test new microphones, new preamplifiers or different recording techniques,” he says.

“My recording setup these days is designed to be portable so it can be easily transported to different venues. I have a Pro Tools HDX recorder and a selection of microphones and various preamps from Manley, Millennia and Summit, but at the heart of my setup is Prism Sound conversion – everything passes through it. I don’t have a mixing console so if I need to record, the converter acts both as an AD interface to Pro Tools or other applications on my computer and as a DA to listen to the recording or mix.

Without it, I couldn’t do anything. It’s a vital part of my system.”

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“SO FAR, EVERYTHING I’VE HEARD FROM THIS UNIT HAS FLATTERED MY EARS.”

Seidler says he is very impressed by the design of his new ADA-128 and that it is quiet enough to have it in the same room without being disturbed.

“It is incredibly flexible, too,” he adds. “With 16 cards and four host cards I have many different options, plus its simplicity is another bonus – the straightforward user interface includes access via a web browser, which I really like. But the most essential elements are its reliability and its sound quality, which is beyond reproach. I’m still putting it through its paces but I can see that the same care has been taken with its construction as with the ADA-8XRs that I’ve replaced.

So far, everything I’ve heard from this unit has flattered my ears.”

Designed as both a modular conversion system and a high-performance, networkable audio distribution and processing system, Prism Sound’s Dream ADA-128 offers up to 128 channels of 32-bit A/D and D/A conversion at sample rates of up to 768kHz. Its flexible 2RU mainframe can be fitted with up to 16 analogue and digital IO modules (each of which nominally provides eight input or output ports, or both). Up to four host modules provide bidirectional multi-channel connections to host computers, workstations, networks etc, with the ADA-128 providing free routing between all of these inputs and outputs under detailed user control, as well as a wide range of processing functions.

Aimed at audio professionals across many different disciplines, including music recording, Atmos mixing, post production, broadcast and installation, the ADA128 is proving to be a cost-effective solution for people who require a high channel count. To put this into perspective, 128 channels of ADA-8XR conversion would HEADLINER MAGAZINE

cost approximately £25,000 more and take up a lot more space in a rack.

As Seidler points out, space saving matters if you are using a portable recording setup. His 32-input/16-output ADA-128 has allowed him to replace all of his ADA8XRs and save on the purchase of racks and space for transport, not to mention a lot of effort in terms of loading and unloading.

“What’s more, with the DANTE, MADI and soon to be released Mic/Line interfaces, I’ll only need one rack and a few accessories when I’m on the move,” he says.

“The DANTE and MADI interfaces will also allow me to integrate with other systems in the future, which I couldn’t do with the ADA-8XRs.” With no immediate music recording projects in the pipeline, Seidler is planning to use his Prism Sound Dream ADA-128 to digitise the extensive vinyl collection he has been building since he was in his teens.

“I’m enjoying getting to grips with the ADA-128 and seeing what it can do,” he concludes. “I owned ADA-8XRs for almost 20 years and they always worked perfectly despite being regularly moved around. The company’s products are reliable, long-lasting tools and I have no doubt that my new Dream ADA-128 will stand me in good stead for at least another 20 years.”

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FABULOUS HISTORY

Stimulating the Senses

Image credit: NWC Corporation

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SC Media Canada recently supplied a comprehensive CODA Audio system for an ambitious immersive reboot of a theatre show watched by millions: La Fabuleuse Histoire d’un Royaume. Headliner finds out more…

La Fabuleuse Histoire d’un Royaume (The Fabulous History of a Kingdom) is billed as a show that stimulates every sense. Held annually at the 2,300-seat Théâtre du Palais in the Quebec City of Saguenay, it is, on the face of it, a community theatre show, although its production values reflect a rather more ambitious and distinctly professional approach.

A cast of 150 volunteer actors play multiple roles within a scenic deployment that features horses, fire, water, cannon-shots and more besides. During the course of its 35-year run charting the birth of Saguenay, La Fabuleuse has played to 1.3 million spectators - a quite staggering record for an all-French production outside Canada’s major metropolitan centres.

Last year the show made a grand return after a two-year pandemicenforced break, scaling new heights with the introduction of an immersive sound system delivered by leading event suppliers, LSM Ambiocréateurs. Founder and president of LSM, Serge Lachance, began his involvement with La Fabuleuse more than a decade ago when the company became the show’s technical equipment supplier, and for the last seven years has been its sound designer and FOH engineer.

The technical growth of the production has been a continuing process across the years, and with music and dialogue completely re-recorded for the 2022 run (the original recordings dated back 30 years), the production team,

headed by Jimmy Doucet, wished to elevate it further. With a soundtrack now comprising 196 tracks, the possibility of using an immersive system was irresistible. Serge Lachance chose a CODA Audio system as the backbone of the project, as he explains:

“It was something of a happy accident for the team. CODA wasn’t my first choice for the production, largely because I was unfamiliar with the brand, but supply chain issues wreaked havoc with the original plans. While other companies were nervous about delivery, CODA was the company who came to the table and could deliver.”

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“THE CODA OPTION OFFERED SOLID RIGGING AND CONSTRUCTION AND THEY COULD DELIVER A COMPLETE PACKAGE THAT WORKED.”

After hearing many good things about the brand and learning that CODA rigs had been used on tours with Corey Hart and others, Lachance decided to give the company a chance: “For the size of the boxes there was a lot of output,” he continues. “The CODA option offered solid rigging and construction and they had their control system together. They could deliver a complete package that worked. The efficiency of the subs is amazing - we only had four sub modules for this big theatre - they really move a lot of air.”

Image credit: NWC Corporation

Installed with on-site support from Arif Nathu and Bradley Fox of

CODA Audio distributor SC Media Canada, the system at the Théâtre du Palais comprises five sets of four CODA Audio APS cabinets for the wavefront, with five SCV-F bass enclosures suspended behind each set. 18 CODA Audio HOPS8 cover the rear and side of the bleachers, with a further 12 HOPS8 for the rear and side coverage of the floor. The front stage proximity loudspeakers are six HOPS5, and four SCP series subwoofers for added bass complete the system. The system of 67 pieces is driven by 14 LINUS14 DSP amplifiers.

The immersive redesign of La Fabuleuse Histoire d’un Royaume proved to be an immensely

challenging project logistically and technically, but the results have more than justified the team’s faith, rewarding audiences with an incredibly dynamic visual and aural experience.

CODA Audio’s global sales and marketing director, David Webster, sums up: “We’re very proud to have a CODA system at the heart of this spectacular production and applaud the work of SC Media’s expert team in supporting the project. The supply chain challenges that plagued other manufacturers during (and since) the pandemic were alleviated by the fact that we manufacture every component of CODA systems ourselves, so we were not dependent on anyone else. This ensured that the system was delivered on time.

“Whilst this was a crucial part of the project’s success, it’s ultimately the power and intelligibility of our systems that is most important. For an immersive production of this magnitude and complexity, every element of the show is carefully designed to enhance the audience experience - CODA Audio ensures that it achieves its ambitions.”

CODAAUDIO.COM

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THE CELESTION INTERVIEW

Andreas Hecke, Founder of Tube Amp Doctor

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GUITAR AMPS

Established in 1993 as a guitar amp repair shop in Worms, Germany, the Tube Amp Doctor has grown to be a world-leading company providing electron tubes as well as many other parts for both musical instrument and home hi-fi applications. If nobody else has it, chances are, they do. Needless to say, the guitar amp world is one that Celestion holds dear. In this Celestion interview, Tube Amp Doctor’s (TAD) Andreas Hecke reflects on his start in the industry, founding TAD and what keeps the company innovative.

What is your favourite album of all time and why?

Paul Butterfield Live. I love blues combined with jazz. Paul was the first guy recording and touring with a mixed-race band in the mid 1960s.

Starting 1967 he added a jazz horn section and in 1970 reached the peak with this live recording.

What is the thing that made you want to be part of the musical equipment industry? How did you get your start in the business, and with this company?

Nobody was able to fix my 1955 Fender Bassman amp properly. So, that caused me to want to learn how to fix amps myself. It turned out that finding the correct parts here in Germany was an issue back in the late 1980s.

I sourced them from U.S. companies and imported them. It quickly turned out that there was a certain demand for proper parts, so I started to make a business out of this. The idea was to finance my studying at the University of Mannheim. The business grew quickly.

How did your background influence the job you do now and the company overall?

My background was multifaceted.

I was always interested in technical stuff — electronics, writing software

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for PCs — but I was also interested in economics. I became a qualified bank clerk and then started studying business economics with a focus on marketing. At the same time, I grabbed every bit and piece of information about vacuum tube (valve) guitar amplifiers, schematics, layouts, and how to troubleshoot them. All this time I was playing in several bands. Taken all together, this finally qualified me to connect the areas of finance, I.T., sales and marketing, repair and service and managing a team of people who are as enthusiastic about tubes and amplifiers as I am.

You and your company are legendary in the industry. In your view, what is the main reason for that?

One point is the fact I did understand and connect the different key people in the company. But this is helpful in general in any kind of business. Specific to TAD, it’s the love and passion for the

“I GRABBED EVERY BIT AND PIECE OF INFORMATION ABOUT VACUUM TUBE (VALVE) GUITAR AMPLIFIERS, SCHEMATICS, LAYOUTS, AND HOW TO TROUBLESHOOT THEM.”

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THE CELESTION INTERVIEW

Andreas Hecke, Founder of Tube Amp Doctor

“NOBODY WAS ABLE TO FIX MY 1955 FENDER BASSMAN AMP PROPERLY. SO, THAT CAUSED ME TO WANT TO LEARN HOW TO FIX AMPS MYSELF!”

product. We talk to the R&D engineers of guitar amplifiers and learn about their requirements. Then we use this knowledge to trigger improvements at the production sites for the tubes themselves. We were running a repair shop for many years and collected the experience of the worst-case scenarios, since we mostly received amps that had an issue. We offered the experience we collected in years of fixing tube amplifiers to R&D engineers at amp manufacturers and we used it to improve quality at our tube production partners as well as our own TAD tube testing. It’s sort of a perfect circle — which seems unique in our business. This all created an immense knowledge base about electron tubes in guitar and audio amplifiers. Paired with fun in what we do and reliability in business, this seems to have formed a key that has opened many doors.

Which product do you consider your company’s most innovative?

We are working with historic technology — innovations are strictly forbidden! [laughs.] More seriously, in 2021 we started the TAD REDBASE tube series with a new manufacturing HEADLINER MAGAZINE

partner. Many micro-innovations have been realised to improve tube production processes. Today we have the literally failure-free TAD 6L6GCM, 6L6WGC, 6V6GT, EL34, EL84, KT88 and GZ34 REDBASE tubes in ongoing production. More classic tube types including a 6550A, 12BH7, 12AT7/ECC81 and 12AX7/ECC83 are now very close to being ready for volume production.

What do you think has been or is the single most important technological achievement in our industry?

For us, it would be the introduction of the vacuum tube of course!

More specifically, its use in audio amplification. That has created a challenge, however, which is finding production partners for vacuum tubes — something mainstream business and government consider a sunset industry. For example, the largest tube factory in China recently closed.

They wanted to relocate but were not granted a new licence. This is because no official there would want to risk their career on that wager.

What is the accomplishment that you are most proud of?

Setting up a company and a brand known in our business worldwide. And that many of our team have worked with us for a long time — 10, 15, 20, and even 25 years! That shows me we’re doing something right.

Tell us a little about your company culture and your philosophy in leading the team.

We have a very flat structure. All is under one roof and on one floor. Just before Covid made different working conditions necessary, all our sales and marketing were in one office room, including myself. I was in the middle of my team. We’re flat in more than a physical sense. Out of necessity we have a few managers such as for the warehouse. But in terms of sales, marketing, purchasing and so on, every employee is pretty much on the same level. If someone has a problem, they can put it on the table — they can come directly to me. Everyone is working on their own responsibility, and if someone is unclear about something, we can straighten it out with just a short conversation.

GUITAR AMPS

How is your company poised for the future?

We have a new partner starting production for us, a smaller manufacturer in China. They had done some tube products before, but not for guitar amplifiers. They’re now making some extremely good tubes.

The biggest player is going to be the 12AX7, which should go into mass production in the next few weeks. We also have a new 6550 power tube for things like Leslie speakers. It looks

to be pretty good for sound and reliability. I feel lucky because many companies in the music industry that make guitar amps and recording equipment are now postponing production schedules because they cannot get a reliable supply of tubes.

If you’re a large, diverse company you’ll be able to pivot to other things and not go bankrupt. But so many companies handcraft highquality amps exclusively. If they can’t produce anything for a year, they’ll be in trouble.

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What music do you enjoy listening to these days?

The Irish singer-songwriter Glen Hansard. He is one out of two or three singers I can describe as really affecting me with his voice. Listen to a live recording of When Your Mind’s Made Up or Leave! and I bet you’ll know what I mean!

CELESTION.COM TUBEAMPDOCTOR.COM

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RYCOTE: BEHIND THE SCENES On October 19, Rycote, developer of wind protection solutions for production sound, welcomed Headliner to its midlands HQ for an inside look at its production processes and to meet some of the team responsible for making it one of the most recognisable names in its field…

As one of the audio market’s leading manufacturers of wind protection products for the full spectrum of sound recordists, Rycote is a brand that many exponents operating in the sector will be very familiar with. From entry-level vloggers and influencers, through to the very top end of what

it describes as its ‘no compromise’ consumers, it offers solutions to meet all manner of applications. Its reach, however, is set to expand further still; its capabilities and product range to encompass even more customerdriven demands.

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along with a comprehensive behindthe-scenes look at its manufacturing processes, and the opportunity to meet some of its key executives, is the focus of the company’s press day.

Located in the town of Ashby-dela-Zouch, Rycote resides within the Videndum building. It is here that Rycote has doubled down on its commitment to high-quality British manufacturing and innovation, producing all of its products on site.

Indeed, during the course of our visit, we even get to try our hand at building one of our very own Rycote Classic Softies. But firstly, we are given a welcome address and a detailed introduction to Rycote and its journey with Videndum so far.

This acceleration was kickstarted five years ago in 2018, when the company was acquired by Videndum, a global provider of hardware and software solutions to the content creation market, with, until relatively recently, a core focus on the visual side of the industry.

Today, however, it is making significant inroads to the audio sector. Rycote, along with microphone accessories brand Joby and the recently acquired US microphone manufacturer Audix, is forming a three-pronged approach aimed at complementing its video and cine offering. This expansion, HEADLINER MAGAZINE

Upon arrival, we are met warmly by staff from across the business, who are milling about and greeting members of the media. After taking full advantage of the hot drinks and biscuits on offer, we begin our visit with an enlightening introduction to the brand via a series of talks from senior executives from across the Rycote and Videndum ecosystem.

Strong emphasis is placed on the handmade construction of Rycote products right here on UK soil. Context is given to the brand’s place within the Videndum stable, as we learn of group’s history in providing solutions for visual content creators and its long-

term ambitions to offer its customers an equally plentiful audio portfolio.

We hear from Bjorn RennemoHenriksen, channel senior director for audio at Videndum, who is heading up that three-brand strategy with Joby, Audix and Rycote, about how content creators are paying greater attention to audio quality that ever before. Chris Carr, chief sales and marketing officer for the division, discusses the history of Videndum and its plans to significantly expand the Rycote brand over the next couple of decades, emphasising its unwavering dedication to innovation, R&D, and British manufacturing.

Informative as this portion of the day is, it is the subsequent tour of the manufacturing facility that demonstrates much of what has just been described. Here, we find traditional, handmade methods combine with some of the most cutting-edge technology the industry has to offer.

We see machines cutting vast sheets of fabric into shape. Seamstresses carefully stitch fabric that will eventually form Rycote Classic Softies. At this point, we are told that we will be offered the chance to create a Softie built by our own hand. We are introduced to Dan, a production expert who instructs us on how to build our own protective

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microphone shell. What takes Dan about three minutes to build takes most of the journalists about 10 times that, as we attempt to glue [somewhat messily] various parts and pieces together.

Next, we are given a demonstration on how to apply the soft, fluffy exterior to the Softie. Again, what looks simple when conducted by a pro appears significantly less so when attempted by the uninitiated.

From sewing machines and gluing parts together by hand, we move onto the most advanced technological end of the manufacturing spectrum.

Thought to be the only one of its kind in the UK, we are given first-hand experience of Rycote’s brand new hemi-anechoic chamber complete with a wind tunnel for testing its products across a full range of conditions.

As the day winds down and we break for generous spread of hot and cold drinks and sweet and savoury snacks, Headliner manages to pin down Rennemo-Henriksen and Carr for an exclusive chat over coffee in one of the site’s meeting rooms. Evidently, their passion for Rycote runs deep, as they elaborate on both their long-term plans for the brand, as well as the consumer trends shaping their strategy.

“There is no great video without great audio,” Carr asserts. “Rycote is a brand we very much love. And we truly believe we can become a one stop shop for all of our customers’ needs.

We’ve been talking with engineers and ambassadors to understand what other products they might need, and we’ve brought in a lot more audio talent, so we have a growing wealth of international expertise to push our audio offering further and further.

For Rennemo-Henriksen, the acquisition of Rycote by Videndum is just the start of a long and exciting journey. “For Rycote to be taken into Videndum is a brilliant opportunity to accelerate the Rycote brand,” he adds with palpable enthusiasm. “We are HEADLINER MAGAZINE

looking into other adjacencies of the same users with Rycote entering the microphone world. We are capable of serving everything from the influencer/ vlogger sector, the independent production studios, where quality becomes even more important, and then the top level of no compromise consumers. Rycote stands to embark on a phenomenal journey over the next five, 10, 15 years and beyond.”

“The key is to keep expanding the range,” adds Carr. “We want our sound recordists to be able to capture things they haven’t been able to before, and to do so as efficiently as possible. The closer we get to the end consumer will drive that expansion. We will drive that with investment, but it will very much be consumer led. We have increased this brand substantially since acquisition, and we will continue to do that. We are very ambitious in this area.”

According to the pair, consumer demand for high quality audio solutions has never been higher.

“Four or five years ago, as YouTube was expanding and people were monetising that platform, it was the uniqueness of the content that grew the audience base for content creators,” Carr explains. “As that’s become more competitive, we find people are looking at quality in both audio and video being the differentiating factor. There was a moment where having a funny

joke or video went viral, but now, to stand out from the crowd, people are looking for improved audio and video to make that difference.”

“People are becoming more aware of audio quality,” notes RennemoHenriksen. “You want to stand out with your content. For me to spend five seconds of my time with something it needs to stand out - if the audio isn’t good I’m gone immediately. We have seen a spill over from the more professional content creators, because the younger creators are seeking inspiration, and what they realise is that the audio production is a big part of it. Whether that’s background music, noise, or dialogue.”

With that, time is called on our day together and we gather to collect the Softies we made earlier. A nice souvenir and a small reminder of the craft that goes inti each and every product that passes through these doors and out into the world. As has been demonstrated today, the content creation boom is still rapidly expanding, and so too is the requirement for best possible audio.

While Rycote may well be an established force in its field, it appears that a new era for the brand is only just beginning.

RYCOTE.COM

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IMMERSIVE AUDIO, INSTALL, AI TRENDS & INNOVATION

ANDY FLINT Andy Flint, senior vice president of global product development for Harman Professional talks about his career at Harman, the challenges facing the industry, immersive audio, and key topics and trends.

What are the current challenges facing the overall industry?

That is a big question. If you think about how our business is organised, it’s pretty broad and I would say compared to most that we compete with, the portfolio is much broader and much deeper.

We tend to segment, so from the customer perspective you have what we call retail, touring or production, and then install – so those are the three categories that we manage and each one has its challenges. I would say the biggest challenge that we’re working through, and I think the industry is working through, is on the install side of the business.

That’s everything from a small

coffee shop to big stadiums and large public transit facilities, and trying to put together audio, video and control into a cohesive system.

Today, it’s piecemeal across a bunch of different companies, brands and different technologies. One of the really interesting things that we’re trying to solve internally, and I think everyone in the industry externally is trying to solve, is how do we make these big systems easier? Not only to configure and control, but to deploy.

So, it’s the whole value chain of, “How do you do a large system that encompasses everything on one converged network?” It’s a pretty interesting challenge.

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Immersive Audio, Install, AI trends & Innovation

What are the challenges or benefits concerning the role of AI in technology that the company is keeping tabs on at the moment?

As a technology person and someone who’s in charge of making sure that we’re investing in the latest and greatest technology. We’re cautious at the moment. From an engineering perspective we’re already looking into leveraging AI tools, not only for the customers’ benefit, but also internally. There’s certainly a ton of benefits on development in terms of software where you can use ChatGPT to help write some code. In its most basic form, that’s something that everybody can say: there’s probably a lot of efficiencies around code writing and leveraging AI for that. I tend to think of AI through the lens of what the customer is asking for.

There’s probably not one single customer that I meet with on a global basis that says, ‘I need AI!’ AI is not a feature. So, I think it’s more, “How do we leverage these tools to benefit the customer through things like, can we build a system quickly for them?”

Let’s take a stadium, for example,

we typically take weeks upon weeks, if not months of programming to design and control one of these systems; perhaps you can use AI to get you there quicker. That’s probably the one challenge I see from an industry perspective: how does it not turn into a parlor trick or a gimmick?

How do we use it to solve problems in the industry?

What are some key topics and trends in the field?

The biggest trend that our industry has been trying to push is immersive.

On the audio side, certainly we saw it from a cinema perspective, and from a recording and broadcast perspective you’re seeing a lot of new content generated from a recording perspective in terms of immersive.

But really, when I say immersive, I’m talking about the live real-time immersive. Some of our competitors are making investments there; we’re making some big investments as well in this area. Something’s coming and we’re close. It’s a really unique problem to solve, because you have to do it in real time. A lot of times

THE BIGGEST TREND THAT OUR INDUSTRY HAS BEEN TRYING TO PUSH IS IMMERSIVE.

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when we think about immersive from a consumer perspective or even from a cinema perspective, you’re playing back content that’s already been mixed and is immersive, so when you start talking about live immersive at some of these bigger shows or big entertainment venues, you’re doing it in real time, which requires some unique algorithms and interesting software to make it all work in real time. You can see where the industry wants to go, which is these big entertainment spaces, these big venues, or even something as small as a coffee shop or a gym, and being able to do something that’s more immersive, interesting and more entertaining. It is definitely something that the industry wants to do – it’s a challenge to go and solve that in a practical way.

What are some key things you’ve learned from your career at Harman so far?

This year I’m going into my 20th year with Harman. The biggest thing that I’ve learned through all of it is that this industry, and our business in particular, is a product business.

It starts with getting the product right. I’ve seen a lot of times where you’ve got a mediocre product and amazing marketing, and it doesn’t really go anywhere, or you’ve got an amazing product and mediocre marketing, and it does great despite everything else around it.

Obviously, the ideal is that you get the marketing, sales and the product all working together. But getting the product right is really key. Speaking from a product perspective, the more that you get outside of the core of what one of these brands are and the core of what we do, the harder it becomes. You see it in business a lot: the more that you drift away from the core of what you do, what your specialty is and what you’re known for, the more difficult it becomes.

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What is the most fulfilling project you have worked on?

It would be hard to not pick one of the opportunities that I had when I moved to Los Angeles 10 years ago to work with the JBL Professional brand. One of the first projects I got to do was the redo of the JBL EON. The EON has played such a major role in live sound; it was the first portable powered product in the industry. Then to get to do the next generation…. It really revived the JBL Professional brand. The EON600 was really exciting to work on – it’s such a challenge from a cost perspective and packing all the technology into it, being one of the first products at that price point to have an app and Bluetooth. It was a great challenge, but it was also a really cool reward to be part of such a historical product in the industry.

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ANDY FLINT

Immersive Audio, Install, AI trends & Innovation

What is it that allows Harman to be innovative as a manufacturer?

The intent and driving force behind what we do is that we do like to innovate; we spend a significant amount of money on engineering per year. The number that we spend on engineering is typically more than a lot of the brands that we compete with in the industry. I always remind everybody, if we’re talking about loudspeakers, we’re still developing our own transducers, we’re still developing our own horns and acoustic designs, we’re still developing patents every year. The same thing with amplifiers – we’re doing the amplifier design – and on the BSS side, we’re doing all the DSP and the algorithm work. You see that play out across the entire portfolio, whether we’re talking about lighting, video or control at AMX – we are actually developing real products ourselves, and we take it very seriously that we’re progressing the industry each time that we do a new product. If you look at all the brands, most of them are 40, 50, even 70 or 80 years old, and that’s been the driving force behind why they’re still relevant and successful in the market.

It’s that bend towards technology and making sure that we’re adding to the industry as we go forward.

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What are you working on now at Harman and what kind of use cases are you solving?

Do you have any advice for the industry?

I think the biggest thing that we at The biggest initiative across the Harman have, at least over the past organisation right now is our next few years, learned to focus on is what generation, installed AV system. Very we’re good at. It’s too easy to just put challenging! The ability to combine your brand on something or go use audio and video and control into one a development partner regardless of system on consolidated networks and where they are in the world, and not having a similar security platform really add any value. across all of it. Doing digital audio and digital video is very challenging.

For us at Harman and for those that What we’re about to bring to market are the industry darlings that get over the next 12 months will be held up as the ones that continue impressive; all the feedback has been to add value and innovate – just really great from the customer side continue doing it. This industry is – we take it very seriously in terms of really exciting. At the end of the day, getting input and having those checks it’s all about entertainment, helping throughout the process. That’s the people feel good and providing an biggest thing that we’re working on. experience. My biggest advice would It’s exciting. It’s certainly challenging. be to continue to innovate, continue It’s hundreds of engineers at one to add value. That’s where you’ll see time globally, across multiple the brands that win and lose over the different sites, doing everything next five to 10 years; it will be the ones from hardware design to software that continue to invest and innovate in development. What we bring to the the industry that win. market over the next 12 months is JBLPRO.COM going to help the industry take a big step forward.

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SKY VAN HOFF

Rocking with Rammstein

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SKY VANHOFF Cologne-based producer, engineer, guitarist and composer Sky Van Hoff has ticked many dreams off his bucket list already. In particular, the fact he was recently on tour with and continues to collaborate with Rammstein, the first ever metal band he listened to. Van Hoff chats to Headliner about how he went from touring in grubby vans as a guitarist to choosing the studio life, how he learned the whole studio process himself, and how he would struggle to do it all without Waves plugins.

How did you get into music as a young lad, and in particular the heavy side of rock music that’s been a big part of your career?

Growing up, my mum was always listening to David Bowie and Led Zeppelin. Even a bit of Nirvana would be heard in the house occasionally.

And then one guy brought a guitar into school and I was just stoked about it.

So I went home and said I wanted a guitar. I can’t remember exactly how I got into metal, but a friend somehow showed me Rammstein, and also I was given a mixtape with Van Halen, Metallica – stuff like that.

Then one thing leads to another, and suddenly you’re a touring guitarist in a signed band?

Yeah, I went from covering Guns N’ Roses with friends, to starting an original band, and then somehow I joined Machinemade God, who were signed to Century Media (a metal label home to the likes of Arch Enemy and Lacuna Coil). I was only 17 and the guys in the band were all around 25 years old. So I was this really young guy who was always touring. But when we went into the studio to record an album, it was my first time doing that and I found it amazing.

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“RAMMSTEIN WERE THE FIRST HEAVY BAND I EVER LISTENED TO, AND NOW I’VE BEEN WORKING WITH THEM FOR YEARS.”

This must be when you began your transition from touring musician to someone who dwells in the studio?

Yes, straight away I just loved the process of recording with Pro Tools.

When it came to our second album, I did pre-production for it on my own.

This led to me producing another record when I was 20, and then I got loads more requests to produce around the scene in Germany. Even though I really didn’t know how to engineer. I would have to get people to help me set up a studio so I could record and edit back then.

Did you do any kind of training or learning or was it straight in at the deep end?

I learned everything just by doing it.

I think YouTube did exist back then, but if it did, you couldn’t find a tutorial for absolutely any part of music production like you can now. To figure out how to mic a drum kit, I had to Google pictures! I just about knew how to record guitars, getting things in phase, etc. I knew how I wanted things to sound, so I was always driving towards that.

One of your main collaborators are legendary German rockers Rammstein. How did that happen for you?

I have to credit the Kemper Profiler Amp. It’s a digital amp that emulates the sound of a traditional amp so well! Just yesterday, I had a conversation with a hardware builder, and even he believed it had to be an analogue amp. I was so happy with the guitar sound I was achieving, and Richard from Rammstein ended up trying it out with me — he’s always wanting to try every new thing when it comes to guitar.

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I was very early with trying the Kemper amp, one of the first. We did some tests with it for their live shows together, and he ended up using it. On tour, it has to be the biggest production out there. The band never tells us when the flames or explosions on the stage are coming, so the tech crew are all getting jumpscares constantly throughout the set and running to the other side of the stage! It is crazy; they were the first heavy band I ever listened to, and now I’ve been working with them for years.

In the safer realm of the studio, I know you’re a very big Waves user on all your projects. Can you remember when you first started using their plugins?

I started using Waves as soon as I could afford to! Before that, I was just using the basic plugins in Pro Tools.

They’re such a pleasure to use still, all these years later.

I’m even doing presets for them now, which feels like being inducted into a hall of fame!

When you open up Pro Tools, which Waves plugins do you tend to reach for first?

I love the Scheps Omni Channel. And I do think the CLA-76 is the best compressor in the world. I always use H-Delay, Smack Attack. I do some crazy shit with Vitamin. Also the PuigTec, the Vocal Rider. I use almost everything they do, to be honest! The Tony Maserati Collection is a big one for me.

They are so edgy sounding, which I like. When I’ve worked on solo singles from Till Lindemann (Rammstein’s frontman), I always use the CLA-76 on the vocals, Vitamin on the drums and the Trans-X Transient Shaper on the snare. Also the API-2500 on the toms and snare. The Scheps Omni Channel gets used on the overheads and room. I’ve made really nice presets for that one! I’ve busted out 52 presets on that one, which has really helped my workflow. I recommend it so much.

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Are there any less famous Waves plugins you love using that you don’t see other producers using that often?

I don’t know if the Trans-X Transient Shaper is all that famous. It does wonders for me, especially live. It goes so well with the snare and also the drummer’s performance, but adds that transience. The drummer will seem super relaxed playing with it, because the snare sounds so incredible with it that you almost can’t believe it’s real.

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

How’s the rest of the year looking for you?

I’m going to take some time off, because if I don’t, I’m going to have to shave my head and live in a monastery. Or go and disappear into the jungle! It’s been a crazy few years now with Rammstein, and I really need a break!

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BASTIAN GERNER

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From Hip-Hop to Foley

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BASTIAN GERNER Foley artist and audio expert Bastian Gerner tells Headliner about his path from hip-hop to sound post production and the creative tools he can’t do without.

With a lifelong passion for hip-hop and all things audio, Bastian Gerner’s career has taken an illustrious journey full of intriguing twists and turns. From the age of 15, his love of ‘90s era rap drew inspired him not only to write and perform his own music, but to delve into the art of how exactly the music he loved was recorded.

“I was asking myself the question of how this music is being put on the CD,” he recalls, speaking to Headliner via Zoom from his studio in Dusseldorf.

“That was the initial moment of thinking about audio and production. Then I bought a record player and started buying vinyl and I learned how to DJ. Eventually I became a rapper, which I still do today. This was about 25 years ago. I knew early on there was only two things I wanted to do professionally - be a rapper or be a sound engineer.”

His mind firmly set on the career he wanted to pursue, Gerner set about assembling a team and a studio that would help him begin to fulfil those ambitions.

“At the age of 18 I had moved out of my parents’ house and had my own studio and gathered a crew around me with many musicians who put their gear into my space,” he continues. “I had a Mac and Logic so was able to record.

I realised at the age of 20, because I never got into production myself, that sitting on my Logic editing vocals was something I could do well, and if there was a job where I could edit sound that would be cool.

“It took a couple of years interning at studios as a mix engineer and then working on the side as an event technician. I found the opportunity to look into film sound and that was the turning point to prioritise this over my music. I interned again in Berlin in post production and ending up in a great place doing an apprenticeship for two and a half years. I learned everything I wanted to know about sound editing.”

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Though still making music in his spare time, Gerner was now fully committed to honing his skills in post production and sound design. Before long, he was rising through the ranks.

“I landed my first job as an intermediate sound designer in a post production facility that was linked to the Bavaria Film Studios in Munich,” he says. “That was the field where I could apply all of my talent, so that was a dream job. I could accelerate and progress very quickly. I then moved into becoming a Foley artist and was doing film after film or episode after episode for about three years. Then I was given the chance to start working at Ubisoft as a Foley artist. It gave me the opportunity to work on international projects, which was great. One of the projects I’m really proud of working on is Assassins Creed: Nexus.

Crucial to Gerner’s success is his audio toolkit. Throughout his career he has accumulated an array of pieces that are pivotal to his studio processes.

“The mics I use are the MKH 416 from Sennheiser and the Shure SM7B for a more low-end approach,” he says, highlighting some of his key pieces of kit. “And I use a Sanken CUX-100K, especially for games, so recording with a high frequency mic is essential.”

He also points towards his Merging Technologies Anubis as a central part of his setup.

“I have Merging as my complete infrastructure for I/O and monitoring,” he elaborates. “Anubis is an amazing tool. It’s a piece of art. It’s so small, it’s on my desk, I can handle it right next to me. I can control my complete monitoring, even in a Dolby Atmos situation with an additional set for stereo speakers. I also have my measurement of all the channels and delay compensation in this little box.

There is so much going on in there.

“The preamps are also really good quality. I decided to go with Merging HEADLINER MAGAZINE

because I wanted their ADDA converters. And that’s why I chose the Neumann monitors - 310s in the front (LCR), KH 80s for surround and top and a KH 870 Sub. I chose them because I worked with them a lot and they are always very reliable. I chose them as they have no AD converter inside. I opted against other speakers because I knew the signal will be converted again in the speaker and I can’t do anything about it. You might not hear it, but I just wanted the sound of the Merging converters on my speakers without anything in between.”

Having made the move from engineering musical recording to the world of post production and foley, does Gerner note any commonalities between the two disciplines.

“If you want to work in sound post production for film and linear media there is a whole craft behind it which you cannot know if you are a mixer or engineer in music,” he explains. “You have to understand what’s going on technically and how to get a certain sound, but to edit dialogue and create sound effects, that’s something I could never have done just from being in music.

“I remember my first session of dialogue editing just sitting there and not knowing what to do. The next day I asked specific questions and that’s how I got started.

Also, for game audio there is a whole other world because you are not linear, and you are dependent on systems that playback the sounds according to the game. That’s a unique process. On the other hand, the similarities are that if you want to be a pro either in music or post production and want to work with clients you have to have the technical aspects in your pocket.

You have to be able to operate on that level without thinking about it and focusing on the client and the tastes they have if you want to get to the top level.”

So what does the future hold for Gerner?

“In addition to working on film and documentaries again, I’m very excited about coaching,” he beams. “I do a Foley coaching course now (The Foley Teacher) with students and entry level professionals who want to get into sound design and post production. I want to help enable professionals to record more of their own sounds within their own editing suites and record their own foley.

That is something I really enjoy and my mission here is to enable people to do that and show that foley is being used more and more. It’s such a cool thing to be able to help people and bring Foley to more people. That’s my mission and what I enjoy the most.”

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FOO FIGHTERS

Rock Steady

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FOO FIGHTERS Foo Fighters are one of the biggest bands in modern rock, which in turn translates to some spectacularly large arena shows. All of this pressure presents no fears to monitor engineer Ian Beveridge and RF technician Eiran Simpson, who keep the band’s ears happy with systems built around the Lectrosonics M2 Duet system, as Headliner discovers…

That’s not to say the pair have never experienced any technical hiccups during Foo Fighters’ live shows.

“Foo Fighters were playing Manchester Cricket Grounds, which is a huge venue, something like 60,000 capacity,” recalls Beveridge. “We were headlining, the previous band finished, and we were doing a set change. It was typical British weather – lots of rain – and all this water had pooled in the roof above the left wing of the stage. The roof collapsed and maybe 50 gallons of water hit the monitor console, which was a Yamaha PM5D at the time.

“The resulting digital noise was the loudest, most obnoxious thing I’ve ever heard — so bad that everyone’s fight-or-flight reflex kicked in. This was 10 minutes before the band was supposed to go on,” he shudders.

“Dave Poynter, the monitor tech, was aware that the previous band had the same console, God love him. We borrowed their console, wired it up channel for channel, loaded a file into it and the band went onstage!”

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Simpson adds that thanks to the full-spectrum capability offered by the digital nature of the M2 system, he has one less headache: “Because they’re wideband, the transmitters and receivers are especially suited to high-RF environments and extensive touring. They cover the full legal range of possible frequencies around the world, which is important as demand for wireless range increases while available spectrum decreases.”

“Every band member has a tech, and every tech has a mix, fed from stereo subgroups on the monitor console,” Beveridge elaborates. “I get every tech to have a duplicate of their band member’s mix, which is Y-split from the same stereo pair but into a separate transmitter-receiver chain.

“If the artist has any trouble, the tech can just hand over their belt pack.

Plus, it’s just plain good that techs are hearing exactly what the artists hear.

A lot of techs want to hear just their artist’s voice or instrument, just the guitar, whatever, then a tiny bit of the rest of the band. But if you’re hearing what the artist is hearing, it’s much easier to ascertain, for example, if someone has gone out of tune — and who that is.”

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Credit: Sony Music Entertainment via Sky Arts

Given the size of the venues the Foo Fighters play, range is a paramount concern, or rather would be if the M2 system wasn’t so tenacious.

“With just the one antenna and M2C coupler covering the band, we did a pre-production show at Shoreline Amphitheatre in California,” says Beveridge. “The transmitters ran on just 10 milliwatts [output power]. Eiran could walk to the very back fence of the venue, and the system still worked perfectly. I prefer this because systems that rely on excessive output power tend to raise the noise floor.”

Since Lectrosonics is chiefly known for dialogue work in film and TV production, Beveridge and Simpson addressed the brand’s audio quality for mixing heavy rock music, especially the dense mix that Foo Fighters dish out.

With the M2 system, there’s a lowpass filter that cuts in to save the artist’s ears. “So, it’ll work perfectly unless there’s a real RF problem, at which point the listener’s pack will just go silent,” explains Beveridge.

“The Lectros sound better than anything else, and I’m not just talking about frequency response,” Beveridge stresses. “The big thing about mixing a band with three distorted guitars is, you need to position them spatially.

If I pan two in the middle of any mix, unless they’re tonally completely different, it’s going to sound like one big guitar.

In terms of range on stage, the team are only needing to use a minimal setup: “Right now, we just need one M2C combiner and one antenna to cover the band,” Beveridge continues.

“I find that if we have clean channels, we only need to run the M2Ts at 10 milliwatts. I prefer this because outputting at higher power levels can raise the noise floor no matter what wireless gear you’re using.”

“The M2 system provides a wider stereo picture to work within than any other wireless I’ve ever used.

Unlike other IEMs, there’s also no residual sound in the opposite earpiece when you’ve panned something hard to one side or the other. It also means that when you add a bit of reverb or harmonizer to a vocal, it sounds big. That is a godsend for a mixing engineer.”

“To do so, you do need to pay attention to antenna placement, both to get a good line-of-sight with the band and to minimise reflections from things like the giant video wall, which can cause problems,” points out Simpson. “The antenna goes about three metres in the air. That said, we have experimented with higher power output and got surprisingly good results!

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“WITH THE LECTRO PACKS, THERE’S JUST NO FATIGUE.”

“Foo Fighters do at least a two-hour show every night,” he adds. “And when you wear in-ears for that long, after taking them out you usually need some time to re-adjust to natural sounds. But with the Lectro packs, there’s just no fatigue like that. You can take them out and immediately have a conversation. There’s just no sonic aggression there at all. I also agree with Ian about the stereo imaging. We have a busy in-ear mix so it’s nice to have such a big box to work within.”

In an RF-saturated environment like the large stadiums Foo Fighters play, the Lectrosonics equipment needs to find and hold onto clean frequencies: “Range is especially dependent on the cleanliness of the carrier frequency in HEADLINER MAGAZINE

a digital system,” nods Beveridge.

“Also, on a digital system, the actual carrier is wider,” adds Simpson. “If you look at it on a scanner, there’s not a distinct peak at the middle of the frequency band. It’s about 200 kHz wide, and Lectrosonics recommends at least 400 kHz of spacing between channels. But we’ve had a couple of nightmare gigs where there’s digital TV signal everywhere — Sao Paulo, Brazil is maybe the worst — and I’ve managed to get them working with as little as 325 kHz between them.

“I should also mention that because they’re wideband, the transmitters and receivers are especially suited to high-RF environments and extensive touring, because they cover the full

legal range of possible frequencies around the world.”

The band agrees with their engineers’ assessment on Lectrosonics: “Chris Shiflett, the guitarist, specifically commented on how they sounded amazing during production rehearsals,” smiles Simpson. “Even to the point of saying he would never go back to what we were using before.”

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ICONA POP

Dance Therapy

Image credit: Lily Lytton

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ICONA POP It’s been a decade since powerhouse Swedes Icona Pop released their debut album, This Is Icona Pop. But Aino Jawo and Caroline Hjelt have just released their hugely anticipated follow-up, their sophomore record Club Romantech. The multi-platinum duo were catapulted into success with their Charli XCX-featuring single I Love It in 2013, taking them from underground DJ sets to the top of the charts. The dance-pop duo talk to Headliner about meeting in Stockholm, the creation process behind the new record while they were both pregnant in the studio, and the critical messages behind these new bangers.

Jawo and Hjelt attended the same Stockholm music school, but they fittingly met at a party in their city in 2009, forming a close bond and subsequently their musical partnership. They began DJing as a duo across Europe while writing songs together, before the first Icona Pop single debuted in the form of Manners, in 2010, receiving big praise from the UK press.

In their pivotal year of 2012, Icona Pop were working with Swedish producer Patrik Berger (who has helped craft hits with everyone from Robyn to Taylor Swift), who presented them with an early version of I Love It with Charli XCX. Seeing huge potential in the song

that the British singer had decided to pass on, Jawo and Hjelt had the idea to take the “cute” sounding demo and give it a rougher, punkier edge.

And the rest is history; riding the heady wave of 2010s EDM, Icona Pop and Charli XCX’s combined attitudeladen chorus, “I crashed my car into the bridge/I don’t care, I love it” immediately connected with people across the world, with 10 million sales and one billion global streams to date. The release of their debut album prompted Pitchfork to remark “Like most great party music, the Swedish duo’s euphoria is mixed with a twinge of apocalypse.”

They’re based in Stockholm again after the pandemic saw them both decide to leave Los Angeles and return to Sweden. They readily concede that their second full-length LP has been a long wait.

“I’m impressed that we still have fans,” Jawo says, as they share a knowing laugh which reveals how close they are. “But when the pandemic hit, we couldn’t go on tour, both of us were pregnant and stuck in Sweden. We realised we had enough music to release two albums.”

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Hjelt adds that, “At that time we were so addicted to touring, travelling and doing new things. So we really needed that pause. When we started writing again, we realised that this is where the magic happens. It was very healthy for us, and we’ve already started our next album so we promise it won’t be another ten-year wait!”

Image credit: Yoye Lapogian

“WE MEET IN THE PARK ON SATURDAYS WITH OUR CHILDREN AND A COFFEE, AND THE NEXT WEEKEND WE MIGHT BE PLAYING AT A NIGHTCLUB IN IBIZA AT 3AM.”

You’ll almost certainly have heard musicians metaphorically describing the process of making and releasing an album as ‘conception’ and ‘giving birth’. In contrast, Icona Pop were going through this both figuratively and literally as the duo were attending their studio sessions pregnant.

“You’re more in touch with your emotions,” Jawo says. “It’s a new episode in your life, we even talked about if we would continue to do music afterwards. Of course, we both decided to keep going. But I think it made the whole thing more alive.”

Hjelt went through it as well, adding “We wondered if we would be able to tour again afterwards, everything felt so uncertain. It meant that we just had to focus on what we were doing in that moment. We started to dream of being back at the club with our friends, and that was how the idea for Club Romantech came about. It was such a moment of freedom for us because we also started our own label.”

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What a way to announce your return to the feted world of album releases with Club Romantech’s opening two tracks; Fall In Love forcibly grabs the listener with its dark electronica as the duo sing ‘Fall in la-la-la-love’ repeatedly in the bassiest voices they can.

Sophomore track Desire, a collaboration with Joel Corry, carries on this guttural opening to the album, with Jawo and Hjelt again almost turning their voices into sub-bass synths in the chorus as the excellent production swirls around them.

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It’s an album with a sound that’s markedly more akin to Fabric at two o’clock in the morning, rather than the poppier-EDM stylings when we first found Icona Pop over a decade ago.

Stockholm At Night couldn’t be better evidence of this.

On this song that revisits the messy nights back when they were both such active clubbers, Jawo says, “Now, we always meet each other in the park on Saturdays with our children and a coffee. And then, the next weekend we might be playing at a nightclub in Ibiza at three a.m. I think that’s the luxury for us, that we keep getting to do this.”

“We’re club kids from the beginning,” Hjelt adds. “And we’ve always said the

best songs are the ones you can both dance and cry to. I think we’ll continue making this type of music for as long as we do this because that’s what we are. Dance music is so important for us — it helps us release our emotions and feel what we’re feeling even more. The feeling that, even if you’ve had a really hard day, just go to the club and dance it out. That’s the best therapy! That’s what we wanted to give our fans with this album.”

with the more electronic sound of our new record. The feedback has been amazing. We have the best fans which makes us so happy.”

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Ending on their surreal feeling of being back in album promotion mode after all this time, Hjelt says, “We’re going away on a US tour next until December, and then we’ll keep working on our third album. We’ve been working on a new live set that goes hand in hand HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

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LIGHTING

Created back in 2011, the Coca-Cola Music Experience (CCME) set out to become the first Gen-Z focused music festival, creating a strong link between the brand and teens through their passion for music. 12 years later it has fulfilled that aim, as the recent two-day festival, which was held at the Caja Mágica (Magic Box) in Madrid, proved. Taking place in front of 23,000 people, it was accompanied by a simultaneous live stream and more than 300 lighting fixtures from GLP, including the company’s new impression X5 Wash.

Situated in the Manzanares Linear Park, the multi-functional space was designed to embrace all the scenic, technical and artistic elements expected of a TV gala and a music festival. Entrusted with the lighting design was the in-demand, locally based LD and programmer, CaCo García, who has wide experience in

lighting large-format one-off events such as this.

He selected a vast armoury of more than 300 GLP fixtures, which were supplied by PRG. These comprised 120 JDC1, 50 impression X4 Bar 10 and 72 impression X4 Bar 20. However, it was the newer impression X5 Wash – of which 60 fixtures were deployed – that he singled out for special praise.

“Since GLP is a benchmark for quality and good performance in all its equipment, the combination of different fixtures deployed more than covered all our needs. Devices such as the X4 Bar 10 or 20 and the JDC1 offered us infinite possibilities,” he remarks. “But I should give special mention to the impression X5 Wash for its power, optical system and light quality. The X5s have ergonomics that facilitate full integration into lighting and set designs.”

Features of GLP’s latest next generation wash light template include 19 powerful 40W RGBL LEDs, which deliver enormous power, while the light source was designed to offer an expanded and more comprehensive colour gamut, incorporating the new iQ.Gamut algorithm.

This enabled board operator Miguel Hidalgo, aboard his grandMA desk, to give full rein to a dynamic, ever-changing lightshow, as CaCo explains: “With 10 hours’ duration on each day, it was important to be able to offer variants and alternatives for each performance. The overall design itself was marked by round shapes and the transmission of energy, in all its different variants, while creating an immersive experience for the entire audience.”

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He said this was achieved by programming pixelmappable fixtures like the impression X4 Bars and JDC1 “in their optimum DMX working modes in order to provide many programming possibilities. Consequently this enabled us to project an almost infinite number of lighting variables.”

It certainly provided the perfect scenic backdrop for the 30 acts, who were introduced by Spanish radio DJ and TV personality Tony Aguilar. These included leading Spanish and international artists, including Ozuna, Quevedo, Lali, La La Love You, Yungblud, Nil Moliner, María Becerra, Ava Max, Maikel Delacalle, Dylan, Luc Loren, Paula Koops and Ters. All succeeded in energising HEADLINER MAGAZINE

the daily audience of 25,000 revellers with their highoctane performances.

Others involved in the technical team included Óscar Fernández (festival director and production manager), Juan Manuel Lázaro (video operator), Francis Viñolo (artistic director), Cristina Agulló (scenography) and Alex Aparicio (technical and band coordination).

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