A key member of Los Angeles’ leading lighting design collective, Seven Design
Works, Tobias Rylander has been making extensive use of GLP’s award-winning X4
Bar 20 LED battens to illuminate various touring lighting sets, generating giant
colour fields and sweeps from the innovative fixtures.
Such has been the growth in Manchester indie band, The 1975’s fan-base following
the chart-topping album I Like It When You Sleep, that production has had to scale
up from the originally booked theatre-sized venues to full-size arenas.
Introduced to the X4 Bars at local Los Angeles based rental company, Volt Lites
Rylander quickly recognized that these multi-functional lights would generate a wall
of colour but at the same time their compact form factor would leave the source
hidden.
Fortunately the band had been recording in LA — just half an hour from Rylander’s
house — which enabled intense discussions to take place prior to the tour. They
discussed everything from artwork colour themes to the impact of social media.
“We bounced material back and forth and when they talked about visual artists such
as James Turrell as influences, it suggested big fields of colour interspersed with
monochrome and pulsating, random strobing. It made perfect sense to use the X4
Bars.’
To achieve this, VER supplied 28 X4 Bar 20’s on the first leg, increasing inventory
threefold to a mighty 84 of the battens for the larger arena shows, which continue
into the new year.
For the big UK dates, he and his programmer Darren Purves have added 56 of the
X4 Bar 20s under a graduated floor, as a pool of lighting which comes to life when
lead singer Matty Healy steps into the circle. The Bars also feature as additional lip
fills in the downstage area.
Aside from the X4 Bar 20s’ form factor, enabling the sources to be hidden, the
production designer is equally effusive about the feature-set. “The FX are extremely
easy to program — and unlike a lot of fixtures they deliver a true white and have a
good dimmer curve. Also, they colour mix very well and very smoothly — and it’s
so nice to be able to program a gradient with a wall of light constantly changing
colour. With their long throw distance their range will easily fill a whole
proscenium.’
And with so much video content up against them — particularly with plans to install
eight imag screens in a constellation at London’s O2 Arena — the X4 Bar 20s need
to fight their corner. “When you are up against 16,000 sq ft of 9mm pixel LED
screen where we are using the video purely as light, the X4 Bar has shown not only
that it is sufficiently powerful, but that it complements the video very well.
“I never get tired of using the X4 Bars — they are a real workhorse for me right
now.’
