Kicking off with twenty dates in America at the start their Sorceress world tour, Swedish band Opeth brought their show to Europe in November, opting for a single show at Wembley Arena for their UK audience.
Magnus Boyd has been lighting Opeth for the last eighteen months: “During the tour,” he says, “we have done two special extended sets at Radio City and Belasco in LA, featuring songs from the Deliverance and Damnation albums before performing a third at Wembley Arena. The final extended set will be at the Sydney Opera House in February. These are impressive spaces that really deserve a large production.”
Boyd’s lighting and visual design featured 40 Ayrton DreamPanel™-Twin fixtures rented from S-Group, a French rental company. DreamPanel-Twin is a hybrid fixture, capable of full continuous pan and tilt, which presents a specialised MagicPanel™ with 8 x 8 RGBW 45-mm optic array on one side, and an 6-mm pitch RGB 64 x 64 pixel video display on the other. On the Sorceress tour, the 40 units are rigged in four double columns as a backdrop to the band and form a focal point of the lighting set.
“Myself and Petter Nilssen had a brainstorm and decided to use the Ayrton DreamPanel™-Twins,” says Boyd. “The DreamPanels were chosen to replace a relatively well used three-part video wall setup. Almost every song in the set includes their use but as they are so versatile, we were able to change looks continuously, starting out with content relating to the songs and progressing into more abstract material that would include fixture movement.
For the encore, all hell breaks loose with some beautiful abstract video, rotation and full use of the beam side of the DreamPanel-Twin. The content was created from a mix of video designers with Sorceress artwork by Travis Smith animated by Scott Rudd, abstract artwork created by Pekka Stokke at LJOS AS, and some content created by myself with footage from Jonas Åkerlund.”
High Wycombe based rental company, Siyan Limited, were chosen to deliver Boyd’s Wembley and European lighting requirements. Project manager, Tom Grant, comments: “I thought they were an impressive fixture with some very unique features,” concluded Grant, “…as you would expect from Ayrton! Magnus has used them very creatively and they are THE feature in his design.”
As we go to press, Opeth is currently engaged in a tour of Australasia, but will take their backdrop of DreamPanel-Twin fixtures with them on the forthcoming dates in South and North America from March, before concluding with dates at a number of European festivals in June.
More information on :
- Ayrton DreamPanel™-Twin fixtures and the full portfolio of Ayrton LED lighting at Ayrton website
- Siyan Limited can be contacted at Siyan website
