mixedID - AchtBrücken 2018

Who

electronicID

When and where

30.04.2018, Klaus von Bismarck Saal, WDR Funkhaus

Program

Journal - Sarah Nemtsov

Mycel - Benjamin Grau

Two Variations on Public Space - Julian Siffert

Sugar, Math and Whips - Alexander Schubert

Light Artist - Dawid Liftinger

Setup

This concert was set-up as a big piece without any breaks or applause between the pieces. All the ensemble pieces were connected by sound/light performances from the visual artist Dawid Liftinger, who also "played" the light in some of the pieces as well.

Sound Design

The main challenge of this concert was to make a design to accommodate very different sounding pieces with diverse acoustic requirements under one design. electronicID always plays intermedial music, including live-electronics, playbacks and live synthesis sounds. Great care has to be taken in order to integrate and mix the sound from the acoustic instruments, the amplification and the electronic sound, so that they sound "in the same room".

Realisation

The Klaus von Bismarck Saal in WDR has a superb acoustic, though being actually build for radio transmissions of classical music, it was a little too reverberant for our purpose, mostly because some of the pieces were very loud. To gain more control over the overall reflections I asked for a thick curtain to be hanged behind the musicians covering the organ. This also provided a darker background for the stage lights.

The installed sound system in the hall (from the firm d&b) consists of two Q7 Speakers (left and right) and a center Line-Array consisting of six T10 and one T10-Sub. I extended the system with two B4 Sub-woofers and six E8 as Near-Fields. The podium was closed for the evening, so the center array was lowered by approximately one meter. Because of the stage's width, the two Q7 speakers hang very far from each other, so the employment of the Near-Field speakers was crucial to achieve a realistic sense of direction, mostly for the first six or seven rows.

The concert was mixed in a Yamaha QL5 console and communicated with two RIO32 Stageboxes via Dante. Also the both the main and the backup computers were sending and receiving audio over the Dante network. Both computers communicated with each other via OSC to keep them in sync, so that in case of a failure of the main computer, the second one would be exactly at the same cue as the first one.