Eric Prydz's 5-ton Holosphere Shows Ambitious Future of Concert Technique

Swedish producer and producer Eric Prydz and his team are behind some of the most extravagant and avant-garde dance music events. His last effort is the most ambitious – and potentially the shortest ever. It's called EPIC 6.0: Holosphere and, after years of development, the sphere of multi-level transparent LEDs was only given once at the Tomorrowland festival in Belgium. "What many people do not realize," Prydz told me, "is that even if they buy a ticket and come to see the show, it's two o'clock. For us, it's been two years. "

The Holosphere is Prydz's latest Prydz In Concert (EPIC) show. It is a multi-sensory experience in limited series that he and his team have been developing for almost 10 years. The show has grown tremendously over the years and its versions have included hundreds of laser beams, digital screens larger than a jumbo jet and colossal holographic effects. They are breathtaking, but not practical, and the production for The Holosphere is so great that Tomorrowland has had to redesign its terrain to adapt to it.

According to Prydz, this is an exciting project because each iteration takes years of development, is executed only a few times and always loses "hundreds of thousands of dollars". If that sounds unachievable, it's true, but Prydz is more interested in the limits of what technology can create on stage than relying on a clientele that has been popular for decades like pyrotechnics and confetti. . "We wanted to use the currently available technology that was not available at the time," says Prydz, "and try to do something different and more exciting."

The fact that Prydz has never seen EPIC itself is a misfortune to be at the center of his show. But to get a taste, he's watching videos that are uploaded to social media after a show. "They upload these videos to YouTube," he says, "which I love to watch afterwards … Sometimes I'd like to be in the crowd."

Prydz tracks the EPIC clips and looks at them with astonishment, showing some of the improvements and reworkings of the stage production. As Rolling stone Written last year, show designers have to increasingly consider not what a show looks like to an audience, but also to the millions and millions of people that we joined online with every tweet, Instagram post and snapshot. "A show does not start anymore when the curtain rises," said entertainment architect Ray Winkler at Rolling stone. "The show starts when the first person takes a picture."

The explosion of music festivals is another determining factor of on-stage innovation. As Quartz points out that this increase is partly due to the fact that festivals have become more profitable than concerts. Each day, several groups play on the same festival stage, effectively dividing the costs associated with lighting, sound and the team. This can make festival tickets a good deal for music lovers, who can see a lot of acts for a price. But if you're an artist playing a festival, how do you stand out when you share a scene with a dozen other artists? You can also customize your visuals to create incredible props, such as the legendary Daft Punk Pyramid, Gesaffelstein Vantablack Monolith or Prydz Multi-Stage Holosphere.

A massive and transparent sphere is ambitious in every way, but the unveiling of Tomorrowland has paid off. The millions of LEDs in the sphere completely masked Prydz when it was fully lit, displaying everything from blue microbial circles to planetary rock shapes to rotating robotic bodies. One of the most amazing moments was the moment when the sphere was transformed into a giant frantic eyeball. Only a few months ago, Prydz's team was working on this animation, testing the idea by projecting it on a yoga ball located in a small basement. Now here it was more than two stories, with Prydz in the center, visible through the unlit iris of the eye. The eye holds its gaze for a moment, before turning into a robotic tangle of acidic green acid.

While the first performance of the Holosphere went off without a hitch, Tomorrowland canceled the second after the fall of part of the ceiling of the festival stage. One of the problems facing these huge EPIC shows is the design of temporary festival scenes, which generally support less weight than permanent venues, and this constraint has been taken into account in the design of the sphere. A spokesman for Tomorrowland said The edge that the festival was not able to "rebuild the ceiling structure to Tomorrowland standards", and so, "unfortunately, there is no time to build his Holosphere."

Prydz director Michael Sershall called the holosphere a "tremendous success," but said the security issues were preventing the series from being broadcast to Tomorrowland. "They had problems with the roof of the freedom scene and … decided to close the entire arena. We were completely devastated, especially since it was a situation beyond our control, but security is still paramount, "Sershall said in a statement.

Picture of Becca Farsace / Le Verge

Prydz and his team do not know if there will be other representations of Holosphere in the future, but wondering about his future may be a problem. The Holosphere was only programmed for these two representations of Tomorrowland, and what makes EPICs so coveted is that they are all limited events. Even if it was only for one night, Prydz and his team reached their creative goal, impressing the Tomorrowland audience with an incredible show that had never been shown before. Now, everything is about what will follow.

"Since we started using EPIC, our goal has always been to try to take people away, but in a way that they have never been amazed at before. from an electronic music event. The new technologies will be available and we will find a way to integrate them, and we will be able to do something that we have not been able to do before. "

For more information on the Prydz holosphere, consult The edgeExclusive feature behind the scenes on how it was designed and built.