TOTAL PRODUCTION INTERNATIONAL
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TOTAL PRODUCTION INTERNATIONAL
WWW.TPiMAGAZINE.COM DECEMBER 2014
ISSUE 184
LIVE EVENT DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY • DECEMBER 2014 • ISSUE 184
MTV EMAs
THE POP WORLD IS HONOURED IN GLORIOUS GLASWEGIAN PRODUCTION
HAPPY HOLIDAYS EVERYONE!
XTA’S APA-4E8 • ED SHEERAN • SIGNAL FESTIVAL • RICHARD MARTIN LIGHTING TURNS 30 ONEREPUBLIC • KATY B • TPi AWARDS SHORTLIST • DRAPING MARKET FOCUS • CHVRCHES
PRODUCTION PROFILE: Chvrches
CHVRCHES SCOTTISH BAND CHVRCHES’ HYPNOTIC TAKE ON 80S ELECTROPOP HAS KEPT CONGREGATIONS ACROSS EUROPE CAPTIVATED. KNOWN FOR THEIR DIY APPROACH TO MUSIC, BAND MEMBERS IAIN COOK, EX JOURNALIST LAUREN MAYBERRY AND SYNTH WIZARD MARTIN DOHERTY WORK CLOSELY WITH THEIR CREATIVE AND PRODUCTION TEAM TO CRAFT A DAZZLING, SHARPLY FOCUSED SHOW, WHICH PERFECTLY COMPLEMENTS THE GLACIAL SYNTH SOUND OF THE BAND. SARAH RUSHTON-READ JOINS THE CHVRCHES DEVOTED FLOCK OF FOLLOWERS AT LONDON’S BRIXTON ACADEMY . . . It’s hard to believe that in the last two years, besides a number of festival slots, popular act Chvrches has played surprisingly few official UK dates. This made the recent Brixton Academy appearance all the more special and presented the band with the ideal opportunity to once more captivate its UK audience. The experience is sparkling and immersive, both visually and aurally. Designed by Show / Lighting Designer Louis Oliver of Okulus, the look accentuates the band’s identity by cleverly alluding to the artwork of its recently released first album - The Bones of What You Believe. There is also a strong sense of unity that is undoubtedly aided by the close relationship the band members have with their small but highly motivated production / creative team, headed up by busy Production / Tour Manager Cara McDaniel. 64
McDaniel, whose touring back catalogue includes Emeli Sandé and Razorlight, has been taking care of Chvrches for just over a year: “I’m not sure how normal my touring strategy is,” she laughed. “It can be challenging to take care of both production and tour management concurrently. I do my best to ensure that all the people I work with take ownership of their jobs and have control over their role in the touring party. That generally means everyone has a voice and I am not micro-managing him or her. I really do enjoy working as part of a small unit and seeing the show grow.” And in McDaniel’s mind that small team includes the band. “I’m lucky that all of the artists I’ve worked with have been supremely approachable. Of course we still put the band on a pedestal because that’s where they belong but at the same time we have a positive and productive working relationship with them,
which really helps.” According to McDaniel, with a relatively small production / technical team, this approach has been crucial to the success of the tour: “At the start of this campaign the band was doing a lot of press and I would be with them. This meant I wouldn’t see the venue we were playing until around 4pm, when we’d all arrived for sound check. In terms of production and set up, I had to trust our small technical team wholesale to have everything in place and be ready to go for when we arrived.” McDaniel and her team are clearly extremely proud of this tour. “It really helps that the management team is supportive,” she added. “In fact the band’s Manager, Campbell McNeil, used to be the tour / production manager so he understands exactly what it takes!” It’s also very apparent that McDaniel is a firm believer that doing her homework and
PRODUCTION PROFILE: Chvrches
Opposite: Show and Lighting Designer, Louis Oliver has been working with the band since 2012. Below: Backline / Monitors Tech, Ben Bodoan; Singer Lauren Mayberry performed with a DPA d:facto microphone; This tour incorporated lasers from ER Productions.
having go-to, knowledgeable people she can rely on close at hand, while establishing strong relationships with helpful and reliable suppliers, is 90% of the job. “It always helps if you can work with people you know and trust. My husband runs a PA company so in terms of managing in ear monitor frequencies both he and Campbell are great fonts of knowledge. No two tours are ever the same, but when you’ve done a few you tend to know what works. I have checklists as long as my arm, it’s just a matter of systematically running through them. With things I’ve never done before, for example lasers, I double and triple check I have all the right health and safety paperwork and that I understand the issues that might arise.” In terms of suppliers, the tour relies on Britannia Row for sound and HSL for lighting. “Both are really organised companies and I appreciate the fact that when I call them I get a straight answer. For trucking we use Redburn Transfer - fantastic people. The rest of the team bring their own relationships as well - I hadn’t used HSL before but Louis wanted to use them and that’s his call. After all he’s the one that’s out there on the frontline and if something isn’t right he has to deal with it.” Designer Louis Oliver has been involved with the band since Autumn 2012 and treats his stage like a canvas. For him designing the show and lighting the band is more of an art project than a gig.
The show has evolved over time and today Oliver’s concept is based on album artwork by Amy Burrows. This sees various light up, ‘V’ shaped set piece used to focus attention onto the band. Oliver also uses these elements to affect the dynamics of the stage. All are outlined with a number of LED strips and collectively they form a stage wide lowresolution video screen. Oliver manipulates audience perspective and works with and in contrast to the tempo of the show, cleverly breaking musical phrases and synchronising with the multifarious layers of the songs. “We take this set everywhere with us now,” said Oliver. “Even in the smaller venues we will use the floor pieces in front of the synths and the central floor based piece at the back, it really strengthens the bands identity.” LS-Live built the pieces: “It’s definitely been a challenge getting these to work the way I wanted them to,” recalled Oliver. “The fabrication of the metal work and the build is fantastic but the LED strips were initially a struggle to pixel map, however it’s all sorted now.” VISUALS Oliver’s determination to get it right has certainly paid dividends. From the first note played the band and audience are immersed in an atmospheric, heavily backlit, acid environment. Filled with haze each song sees
layer upon layer of sharply focused light and lasers complement the sometimes fast moving, sometimes static lit pieces of set, all of which conspire to pull you into Chvrches’ world and much like the music, the look is sharply on-beat, multi-faceted and unearthly. Mirroring the set design and creating symmetry with fixtures in the air and floor is Oliver’s lighting package, which comprises 12 Robe Robin 600 LED Wash fixtures, 24 Robe Robin 100 Beams, 17 Phillips Nitro 510cs, 16 Martin MAC Auras and 19 Martin MAC IIIs. “Lighting has been built around the set pieces,” explained Oliver. “The content has been designed to draw your eyes in towards the act as opposed to being simply flashy, with no real thought or reason behind it. We certainly don’t want it to just be a light show with some people on stage playing instruments. There was always a danger that because the boys are hidden behind the synthesizers and midi controllers that the focus would be too heavily on Lauren. This is not something that the band or I wanted.” MA Lighting’s grandMA2 is Oliver’s choice of console: “I’m not afraid of other things, it’s just what I know best and it does what I want to do very quickly,” he explained. “Everything is cue stacked bar a few stabs here and there for effects. However it doesn’t necessarily have to be a strobe stab, it could be a different effect on the set. I prefer this because there is quite a lot going on in this show and its good to have a 65
PRODUCTION PROFILE: Chvrches
Below: LS-Live built set pieces which integrated pixel-mapped LED lighting strips. The look was accompanied by a lighting rig comprising Robe, Martin Professional and Philips fixtures.
couple of overrides for great impact.” Unusually Oliver chooses not to scan the audience with the lasers but rather keeps the focus on stage. At times they’re the only light source used: “In one of the new songs called Get Away I wanted to use very few lights,” Oliver explained. “There’s a slight glow from the washes but the rest is done with simple effects from the 7.4W lasers at the back, amplified with light a little bit during the chorus and breakdown.” In total, ER Productions supplied three of the new ARCTOS REGUS lasers systems as ER Productions’ Director, Ryan Hagan discussed: ”The ARCTOS REGUS are a recent addition to ER’s stock. They’re incredibly small and lightweight but have high output of 7.4W balanced. They use the new direct diode 520nm green. Similar systems prior to this used a V-FOLD cavity green, which at times came out of alignment and would then need the kind of attention generally unavailable on the road. These save on truck space and can be flown with the rest of the system if necessary.” ER Productions also supplied 24 of the new RGB BEAMBURST, an even smaller unit capable of single beam effects and audience safe diffraction exposure. “Our brief was to programme the show but avoid making it look 66
like an EDM spectacular! The end result was a slick and classy display and it really did add a special dimension to the show. What’s even more incredible is the ARCTOS lasers exposure never left the stage with all FX contained in and around the band.” AUDIO Also keeping the focus sharply on the band is FOH Engineer, Paul Gallagher. The band is not touring their own PA but Gallagher says that if they were they would definitely be touring the L-Acoustics K2, which luckily was exactly what Britannia Row supplied for Brixton! I like the curvature at the top and the fact that it’s not too breathy-sounding. It’s got a nice sweep, like a really expensive Hi-Fi.” This is important as one of the challenges for Gallagher is getting Lauren’s voice above the instruments whilst ensuring that the music still has lots of energy and punch. “Lauren has a great voice and it’s just making the most of it in the room,” he explained. “I’m using an Avid Venue console, which is pretty basic in terms of what it can do. However being able to use third party plug-ins, such as the Waves package, is crucial and I can get a lot more intricate with what I’m doing mix wise. From multiband compression to really specific EQ and parametric
EQ, the Venue opens up a lot more doors. Definitely for this kind of tour it’s been the desk of choice.” Gallagher chooses not to tour with outboard: “I am using an Apollo Twin interface by Universal Audio. I really like the space echo emulation and I’m running that from an Apple MacBook Pro,” he explained. “I’m also using the Roland CE1 plug-in, which I really enjoy using on Lauren’s voice for that 80s chorus sound.” Alongside such plug-ins Gallagher uses a TC Electronic VSS3 - an old reverb plug in from around 10 years ago. “I guess the algorithms are lifted out of the system 6000 and to me that sounds great.” The microphone of choice for Lauren is the DPA D:Facto, which Gallagher said “is very open and natural sounding in the high frequencies.” Although there is no monitor engineer to speak of there is Ben Bodoano. “I’m kind of everything rolled into one,” he laughed. “I am the midi, playback and backline technician. I was originally brought on board to take care of and set up the gear. Slowly over the course of the last 18 months I’ve built new systems and got the computers off the stage and into a rack on the side stage. The band still control the computers from the stage via an iPad controller I’ve built using the lemur app.”
PRODUCTION PROFILE: Chvrches
Below: LD Louis Oliver; Production / Tour Manager, Cara McDaniel.
All the kit, backline and set belong to the band. The move from onstage to off had to be completed in two parts: “I have two computers running Ableton, which function as the drums and also output the midi information to the various keyboards,” outlineed Bodoano. “Audio then comes back into Ableton so that the band members can set up their own monitor feeds. This mitigates the need for a monitor engineer or console. It’s all in the box ready to go!” What has delighted Bodoano is that the stage is now really neat, and with the band all on in-ears it’s relatively quiet too. “It’s all been pre-programmed by the band,” he explained. “It’s still the system they put into place before I was brought on board, but it has definitely evolved. When Chvrches started off their IEMs were just in mono and now everything is in stereo, which is obviously much better. In fact the band have it all under control; they might have a little tweak in sound check, notch something up here and there, but once the gig starts that’s generally it.” Most of the instruments are electronic, aside from two physical guitars for a couple of songs as Bodoano explained: “Kit includes Moog Voyager, Dave Smith Prophet ‘08 and Roland Juno 6 keyboards. Martin has a
machine pad where he plays samples and various drum parts. There are no amps on stage, instead the band use a GTR Processor by Fractual Audio called the Ax Fx, a top-ofthe-range guitar emulator, which the guitars feed into.” The GTR audio signal is then split with one feed going to Bodoano and the IEMs off stage, and another to FOH. To keep the vox clean the mics are also split to FOH before it goes through the computers. Everything about this show feels well considered and controlled. There is an primary intimacy, which the Chvrches trio share with their audience and with their production team. Sometimes anthemic and soaring and at other times fast paced and multifaceted, Chvrches dreamlike show is addictively stimulating and quietly intelligent on every level. TPi Photos: Sarah Rushton-Read http://thefifthestate.co.uk www.chvrch.es www.britanniarow.com www.redburn.co.uk www.ls-live.com www.hslgroup.com www.er-productions.com
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