Alternative Medicine: Alt-J At London's O2 Arena

Photo by Jeremy Letcherman

Alt-J is the quintessence of alternative, even progressive, rock, having been described as haunting, weird, eccentric, and even “WTF” rock. Having won the UK’s prestigious Barclaycard Mercury Prize in 2012 for its debut album, An Awesome Wave, the band has experienced a pretty quick rise to stardom. Rolling Stone, in reviewing the band’s sophomore effort, This Is All Yours, says the band forges “seemingly incompatible elements into spry, surprisingly catchy rock: acoustic instruments meet electronic textures; double-time tempos crash into lurching, Timbaland-style beats; and weird folk harmonies give way to punishing distortion,” (rollingstone.com, “How Alt-J Sold a Million Records and Made Miley a Fan,” November 27, 2014).

Jeremy Lechterman, production designer/show director/lighting programmer for the band’s first tour, was called back to design the band’s latest outing, kicking off with a special production at The O2 Arena in London late-January. He’s also making good use of his design firm, FragmentNine, which specializes in concert design and custom media server rentals. The team includes Jackson Gallagher as associate designer and media specialist, Dan Efros for lead content creation, and business manager Lisa Wisely. Grant McDonald and Robert Figueria also worked on content for Alt-J.

Photo by Jeremy Letcherman

Lechterman notes that he was already working with the band’s management on ideas for a second tour before the new album was finished, knowing what sort of vibe he wanted to express. “We wanted to maintain our shrouded, slightly off-kilter, slightly inaccessible atmosphere from the previous tour but also wanted to elevate the design to a show that you ‘experience,’ not just watch,” the designer says. “Knowing we were going into much larger venues than the last run, we had to compensate and give ourselves room to grow. We also wanted to elevate the band themselves as sculptural elements, without necessarily requiring extra cooperation on stage. The band is not terribly animated during the performance; they take a serious and dedicated approach to the performance, which can, at times, feel disconnected. One of our goals was to dissuade any feelings they might be taking it easy.”   Working at the venerable O2 Arena brought its own set of issues, and this particular show was designed basically as a one-off and then slightly tweaked for the tour to follow. “Our biggest challenge was time on The O2 show,” says Lechterman. “Three days of production rehearsals and then the biggest show of the band’s career— there was no margin for ‘we’ll figure it out during the first days of the tour.’ Everything had to be perfect. We ended up making some concessions to simplify the rigging or the automation to make sure we could get the rig up in time for sound check.”

Photo by Jeremy Letcherman

The full tour has the same lighting rig and most of the same media system but cuts the automation, curved screen, and I-Mag/camera package. The main rig at The O2 comprised 9' to 10' finger trusses on Kinesys hoists with Vector Control, hung over the band as a sort of roof, each truss with six Ayrton MagicPanel-602 units, two Clay Paky Sharpy fixtures, and a Martin Professional Atomic 3000 strobe. Aside from the automation, most of the fixtures remain for the run of the tour. Martin Professional MAC Vipers are hung on upstage trusses, Lechterman says, “way out to the sides and on the floor to provide lots of gobo work, effects, and space.”  For The O2 show, XL Video supplied PixLED F12 panels arranged in five strips so that every other row of panels was missing. Using Tait touring frames, the strips were curved on faceted pipes hung from the lighting trusses, creating a 60' screen. The tour uses 68 Martin EC-10 arranged in vertical strips. Showtec Sunstrips line the gaps of the video wall, and rows of Robe CycFX units create two semi-circular arcs on the stage floor around the band.

“The CycFXs are also used on booms as sidelight,” adds Lechterman. “I have more Sharpys embedded in the video wall and on the toplight truss, accompanied by four Robe BMFLs directly over each band member, creating that angelic look.”

Media for The O2 show was driven via PRG Mbox Studio media servers for the main screen and the I-Mag. “All the camera work was, in some way, subject to effects—black-and-white, super high-contrast, pixelated,” says Lechterman. An MA Lighting grandMA 2 handled all the cueing and control. Eight cameras—two at FOH, two in the pit, and four on stage—were switched through a Grass Valley Kayak digital production switcher, routed into capture cards at FOH on the Mbox units via fiber, and then to DVI fiber from FOH to screen processors.

Alt-J At The O2

Photo by Jeremy LetchermanPhoto by Jeremy LetchermanPhoto by Jeremy Letcherman

The tour runs MA Lighting MA-Net between the consoles, NPUs, and media servers. “Art-Net fed into the servers at O2 as well, and then came back into the MAs where the Art-Net merge happened for the pixel map for the LEDs,” says Lechterman. “Then Art-Net and MA-Net were sent to stage for the NPUs and additional DMX output to stage.” Lechterman says the main goal is to make the show look as immersive as possible “but where one element is trying to be sympathetic to the other. For example, a texture on the video wall is trying to be simulated on the MagicPanels, or colors driven by the lighting are reflected in the wall. Often Jackson or I would have an idea, and the other would then try to follow along with the other element. Technically, they are triggered off the same console all in one show file, syncing to timecode together when necessary, and the LEDs in the rig are pixel-mapped through the Mbox. There are songs when both the MagicPanel fingers and the video wall play the exact same content, bringing the 2D wall into 3D space.” All the video content was created for the tour and specifically for the screens. “Often we went with abstract geometric or organic shapes and waves, trying to be as subversive, but appropriate, to the swelling nature of the music as possible,” says Lechterman. All the camera work was live and was cut into the show on the fly.  The Kinesys moving truss system for The O2 show was programmed by David Jolly and supplied by HSL. “David had a timer screen coming from a MA onPC system triggered by the master console, which started a time at the beginning of each song,” says Lechterman. Jolly took his own cues for the show. In terms of gear he currently values, Lechterman says, “Mbox Studio is a dream in terms of its versatility and ability to make a lot of last-minute creative decisions with the video. At O2, we almost always had all the effects operating on each layer, either for cropping/scaling or for actual image effects. The MagicPanels are, of course, fantastic in their versatility as a volumetric light but also as a display surface.” Lechterman did a week of pre-programming prior to the tour in a temporary studio in Brooklyn, using MA Lighting MA 3D software, and another week at HSL using Cast

“The big O2 show was two weeks at HSL with ‘wyg,” says Lechterman, adding that Tim Fawkes created the wysiwyg drawings and integrated the video screens and automation. “The biggest challenge for The O2 show was simply time,” says Lechterman. “Getting all the lights embedded into the video screens and dealing with cable bridges around the very wide I-Mag screens was a challenge in terms of order of operations. All departments had to play along nicely.”

The designer adds that it’s also tricky not knowing exactly how the band will play songs live. “There are things in the live show that are accentuated much differently than the album version, so when we got to our one day of production rehearsals with them, there was a bit of ‘oh sh*t, that’s what’s going to happen here?’”

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