Germany – The largest electronic dance music festival in Northern Germany, Airbeat-One, takes place in Neustadt-Glewe. It lasts four days and sees up to 40,000 people take part. To get ready for an event of this size, stage designer Sebastian Eggert, from Music Eggert, designed a huge stage. He then designed the lighting for it, together with Sebastian Heise, and equipped it with Lightpower lights.
They used 190 Claypaky Mythos units, 46 Claypaky Sharpys, three grandMA2 full-size desks, four grandMA2 light consoles, six MA Network Processing Units (NPUs) and one dot2 core.
Heise had this to say: “After our positive experience last year, we opted for Claypaky Mythos units as the chief system on the main stage. The Mythos is the perfect compromise between a beam light and a washlight. Its CMY colour system gives an excellent output, and the gobo projections, together with the wide zoom, meet all the requirements for this type of production. We deliberately did not use any other moving lights along side the Mythos units, since that way it was possible to achieve excellent system performance from the rig, and the massive use of Mythos lights, in conjunction with video, allowed us to create stunning optical effects.”
“Every year Airbeat-One has a specific theme,” Heise said. “This year’s theme was ‘Asia’, and next year it will be the USA. The lights are design to have a massive impact on the show and, at night, they not only have to support the stage design, but also be an effect in their own right.”
Eggert explained the reasons for his choice: “15 years ago I had no idea that the electronic dance music scene would have developed so much as to reach this size and be the theme of a music festival. At first it was followed by only a few thousand people, but now the audience is over 40,000 strong. We have always set up the event ourselves as Music Eggert. Initially, we also dealt with the technical part on our own. Today, though, we mainly assign the task to outside suppliers, for reasons of size. However, we always see to the stage and lighting design ourselves, and do all the planning and decision-making for the festival. We try to develop new optical highlights for our audience every year. The encouragement we receive from the general public and our continual growth confirms we are on the right path, and we will certainly continue in the same direction in 2017.”
Heli Showtechnik provided the lights.