Thursday 8 September 2011

Skogbrannfestivalen



Half a year ago Tanya and Hans Jakob Winsnes at Alive Dance Ministries in Norway, shared their vision of a brand new festival with a small group of people. Half a year later the Skogbrann Festival was a reality. After much effort from the many volunteers and swift planning as the project came along, the festival could receive its first ever delegates on August 27 and 28.

My role in the team was as a technical consultant and sound-designer. A challenge we came across from the outset was to plan the stage, rig and sound-system to the right size. It needed to fit with both the number of delegates and the acts going on stage. With a versatile Meyer sound-system and a stage that could easily fit our most spacious acts we could cater to a large span in delegate numbers.

The festival aimed to gather U.S. and Norwegian artists together for praise and worship from across different Church communities. Amongst the artists were:
Amber Brooks (Morningstar Ministries, U.S.)
CJ Hardee (Morningstar Ministries, U.S.)
David Vallier (Morningstar Ministries, U.S.)
Liz Fox Stillwell (Life Church, U.S.)
Impulsbandet, Norway
Marion Winsnes, Norway
And several others…

For the tech-heads:

All performances were taped right to ProTools from three Dante MY16-AUD extension cards at the back of the front-of-house mix (a Yamaha M7CL with stageboxes). The cards were connected to a router, and further to a MacBook Pro by Cat 5 cable. The data was sent from the Mac to an external hard-drive with a RAID 0 setup to swiftly push away as much data as possible. Connection to the hard-drive was done on FireWire 800. The Dante cards lock you to 48 kHz and 24 bits and are hence predominantly aimed at the film and broadcast marked. After some installation headaches with the Dante-software the recording-rig eventually ran smoothly. The OS Snow Leopard had to be run as a 32-bit system in the end but this also worked fine. The Dante cards were great but installation and licensing could have been made a lot easier. Many thanks to Norsk Produksjon who put in a lot of effort to make sure our recording-rig got up and running. A lot of great music was played over the weekend and it’s gonna be exciting to get the final mixes done.

A rainy weekend in a muddy field gave many a musician associations to Woodstock. Even more reason to come back next year!


Early in the morning: Big stage alone in the woods of Norway


Amber Brooks, CJ Hardee & David Vallier in action


View from my office


The work desk

Tuesday 6 September 2011

Photo Exhibition & Raphael Saadiq at Olavfestdagene 2011



From July 28 to August 4, the annual St. Olav’s Festival, or Olavfestdagene, in Trondheim, Norway, was arranged. I had the privilege to help with the installation of ultra-sound loudspeakers that were used at a photo exhibition. The sound installation was produced by a team from Soundscape Studios, lead by Robin Støckert.

The photo exhibition entitled “hope” was a collection of pictures from Afghanistan. (Click here for Norwegian news report from the event.) The Red Cross and Red Crescent handed out single-use cameras to mothers in Afghanistan, who passed them on to their children. The children were encouraged to take pictures from their local communities that symbolized hope to them and it were these pictures that were displayed at the exhibition.

The sound installation was a comprehensive blend of sound-sources. At the entrance there were several display mannequins dressed in traditional Afghan clothing with speakers mounted under the veils. The speakers would play back whispers of the word hope. Further on, several of the photographs had contact speakers attached so the pictures themselves would actually vibrate with sound. This is a brilliant way of confusing the listener with the location of the sound source, since there is no speaker to be seen. The result is a full integration of the sources of the experience, in contrast to the traditional dislocation of sound and image. Several other speakers were hidden behind the walls and in the ceilings of the display area. On top of two of the display walls there were motorized ultra sound speakers panning back and forth. An ultra sound speaker doesn’t emit any audible sound per se, but when the carrier waves hit a medium, audible sound appears. With these speakers panning back and forth well over people’s heads the sounds were moving back and forth on the walls across the space. But the most interesting effect is when you walk through the beam. You start off hearing the sound on the reflecting wall, then it literally moves through your head (audible sound occurs when it hits your cranium), before it dies out behind you or reflects off another wall.

The sound works that were installed were a combination of atmospheres, atmospheric music, words and vocal sounds, and the sound of children playing. The various sound events were playing back at random times to make an organic atmosphere.

Big shout out to the Soundscape Studios team for making a very smooth integration between sound and image! –and thanks for letting me get my fingers dirty in the installation process!

Raphael Saadiq

While being involved with the “Hope” exhibition I got the chance to attend one of the concerts at the Olavsfestdagene festival. One of my songwriter heroes, Raphael Saadiq came to Trondheim. Saadiq started out as a bassplayer for Prince and his 2000 collaboration with D’Angelo won a Grammy Award. Over the last decade he has operated both as a solo artist and a producer in a number of high profiled collaborations.

Saadiq’s support act were none other than the M.G.’s minus Booker T. They’re also known as STAX and the band from the Blues Brothers films. A star-spangled night, Eddie Floyd was also there to perform some of his original hits with the STAX band.

Here are some pictures and a short video-cut from Raphael Saadiq’s performance.