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Serbia - Croatian megastar Gibonni recently played a special concert in the Kombank Arena, Belgrade, Serbia in front of 20,000 fans who all went crazy for the occasion! The lighting utilized 22 x Robe Robin Pointes and 36 LEDBeam 100s which were specified by lighting designer Sven Ku?ini?.

Ku?ini?, based in Zagreb, Croatia started working with the popular singer, musician and composer this year. Ku?ini? is a well-known LD in Croatia and was offered the gig following his high profile work with Croatian rockers Prljavo Kazaliste plus a plethora of musicals, concerts and events.

Gibonni is in the middle of a tour at the moment but this was a special show and saw a much anticipated and awaited performance in Serbia.

The starting point for the Belgrade show's lighting design was to

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France - Tapages & Nocturnes is renowned for the diversity and quality of its equipment range. Among the many items it stocks are a wide selection of DPA microphones, especially d:screet miniature and d:fine Headset Microphones that are particularly popular with production companies working on sports and reality TV programming.

"Our equipment is mainly designed for recording sound and it is used across a wide range of film projects and broadcast programming," says Romain Becquet, sales manager at Tapages & Nocturnes. "We own more than 1,200 wireless systems from all of the main manufacturers, and a lot of intercom systems. We also have an extensive range of DPA microphones that are in great demand because our customers find them very versatile and reliable."

The most commonly requested models are the DPA d:screet 4060 Miniature Microphone and the d:fine ran

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UK - VDC Trading Limited, the London-based company behind the Van Damme cable brand has recently been certified by Neutrik as a Certified opticalCON assembler (COCA), one of only 24 facilities world-wide and only the fourth in the UK. Thanks to VDC's investment in staff development and equipment, the company is now able to promote and deliver custom manufacture fibre optic solutions to a wide range of markets from a state-of-the-art laboratory at the Brandon Road Headquarters.

VDC CEO Niall Holden said, "This is a considerable investment but natural extension of our capability to deliver bespoke copper-based solutions. It represents a major step forward in our in-house cable technology and, as one of only four similar laboratories in the UK, will enable us to offer a vastly superior fibre optic service to our clients, but with the same great solution design and production t

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Indochine X PixMob Fan Immersion

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's - 40 thousand LED pixels on a ceiling!!! Indochine's whirlwind tour transports fans to another level of the live experience - immersing them from floor to ceiling with PixMob's X4 wristbands, and an LED ceiling made entirely of its NOVA Minis! With the vision of Indochine's creative team, PixMob used its LED fan-technology to turn attendees and venues into an ocean of effects, and a starry sky of LED magic. Très très cool!

Read more about the Indochine tour in the latest issue of LSi

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USA - The new office for Christie Lites New York is officially open for business. The warehouse is in a newly renovated 30,000sq.ft space at 13B Division Street in Fairview, NJ. This 14th location further strengthens Christie Lites' multi-office network supplying full service stage lighting equipment rentals across North America.

Said Christie Lites VP Rentals Ken Alexander, "We are proud of this new expansion which allows us to directly service our already loyal Northeast client base like never before and also provides the perfect avenue to reach new clients in the months and years to come."

Christie Lites New York has been unofficially operating for the past few months while ramping up and accumulating equipment inventory prior to any official opening announcement. Since October, the CLNY office has fulfilled several tour preps including a new NETworks Presentation

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Latvia - The Embassy of Latgale GORS is a place with a soul, where the cultural traditions of the region of Latgale combine with modern opportunities and give life to the fascinating stories of eras, people, music and art. In this place, the local dialect mixes with the sound of symphonies, and historical heritage combines with contemporary creative works. New meets old, guests encounter locals, songs hybridize with dance and art merges with cinema.

The GORS cultural centre has two concert halls, a cinema, an art school, an exhibition space, a restaurant where you can enjoy the pleasure of life, and a few rooms where dance companies and orchestras may rehearse: everything has a pulsating rhythm and is full of life.

A new building has been built in the park, on a bend in the river, near the 'United for Latvia' monument, known among the people as 'Latgales M?ra'. The purpose of

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Austria - La Bohème, composed by Giacomo Puccini, was performed for the first time in 1896 at the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy. It was an immediate success and is still successful today. This was confirmed by its recent staging during the St. Margarethen Opera Festival in the Römersteinbruch (a Roman quarry). The quarry has been a UNESCO world heritage site since 2001 and is the largest natural stage in Europe. For this reason, it makes an impressive setting for operatic performances.

Lighting designer and programmer Michael Grundner, event designer Ernst Hainisch and production manager Christoph Trauner (the latter two from Multisound) used 22 Clay Paky Alpha Profile 1500s, along with an MA system to manage the lights.

Grundner underlined that, "The Clay Paky Alpha Profile 1500s won me over with their great brightness and the way it is possible to change and sha

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UK - When experienced monitor engineer Becky Pell was asked to join Sarah Brightman on her world tour, she decided to take a creative approach to designing her stage rig.

Via Capital Sound Hire she sourced an inventory of Martin Audio's sleek LE1500 wedge monitors and W8LM Mini Line Array elements for side fills - emulating the set-up she had first seen Rod Matheson deploy, when she was teching for him on Kylie Minogue's 2008 tour. "He decided to deploy the LMs in an unusual way and it worked really well," she said.

The rationale once gain was simple. With Sarah and her four-piece band on in-ears, and with most of the inputs DI'd, she wanted to create an enveloping stage 'feel' in unobtrusive fashion, to preserve the overall look of the show.

"Sarah had previously used flown side-fills, but I've never been a fan of them for several reasons," says Pell. &q

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UK - For many years the O2 Guildhall Southampton has been a popular venue on the South Coast, hosting a wide variety of concerts and events from rock to classical, comedy and sporting, student and private parties, exhibitions, fashion shows and conferences.

Recently, Live Nation (Music) UK Limited decided that the foyer lighting needed updating as part of the venues O2 rebranding. Whilst researching potentially suitable fixtures, Simon Williams, the venue's head technician, approached local lighting experts GLS Lighting Ltd for advice. Ian Turner from GLS suggested the MilTec Batten2 as a suitable fixture, and so a demo was arranged. The result was that eight of the Batten2s have been installed along with two Par144Q led pars by the in house technical crew, along with new DMX distribution and associated cabling.

Williams commented, "The new MilTec fixtures have replaced s

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UK - The International Powered Access Federation (IPAF) has launched a Smart PAL Card (Powered Access Licence), available in different languages, which is machine-readable and can be used to ensure that only trained operators can use mobile elevating work platforms (MEWPs) on site. Standard PAL Cards will continue to be issued and accepted on site.

The Smart PAL Card looks the same as the standard PAL Card - the data stored on the card, such as the operator name, number and categories trained in, is also printed on it. The only difference is that the Smart PAL Card is marked by a wireless icon and has a chip embedded in it.

The data in the chip can be read by a card reader fitted to the machine. The reader can be set up to accept certain data which in turn will allow the machine to be operated. This data includes whether or not the cardholder (operator) is trained, to what lev

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Sri Lanka - When the recent Commonwealth Peoples Forum was held for the first time in Sri Lanka, Live Productions Pvt. Ltd was contracted by another local company, Dynamic AV Technologies Pvt Ltd to provide the lighting in front of 500 invited guests at the historic Galle Fort.

This comprised entirely of PR Lighting moving discharge and LED heads from their large inventory of the Chinese manufacturer's fixtures.

The lighting had to be purpose designed by the organising committee to meet the requirements of both the live audience - comprising the Secretary General Commonwealth of the Commonwealth, Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, and various Ministers and Foreign delegates - as well as the television audience. As a result the fixtures first had to undergo camera tests.

Under the production management of Dhanushka Fernando of Dynamic AV large quantities of PR Solo 575

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UK - On 14 November 2013, PRG teamed with leading production company Innovision to bring the EDF Energy London Eye to life, celebrating 15 years of Red Bull Music Academy. The event celebrated club culture, bringing together over 100 DJ's and artists including Lily Allen, Katy B, Rudimental, Ritchie Hawtin, Goldie, Gilles Peterson and a whole host of other performers.

Within each capsule of the London Eye, there was an individual lighting scheme for each club brand and even the TV show Channel 4 House Party had their own pod. Altogether there were thirty clubs, 31 live streams and over one million online viewers.

PRG's account manager Andrew Strachan comments, "Lighting each of the London Eye capsules individually was a real challenge. 32 pods, 32 technicians and one rotation of the eye to get it right - and we did! As well as lighting the capsules we also transformed the

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UK - Vaughan Sound has installed hearing assist, public address, background music and audio-visual systems as part of the £4.2m revamp of the Grade II listed Penarth Pier Pavilion in South Glamorgan.

Plans to completely refurbish and upgrade the art deco-style pavilion were approved in 2011, with the 12-month project commencing last October. The pier itself first opened in 1895 and has great heritage within the coastal town of Penarth. The original pavilion was lost to fire and replaced by the current structure, which opened to the public in 1929. However, it fell into a poor state as its fortunes waned - including being hit by two large vessels in 1947 and 1966 - and it was later closed in the 1970s.

Funded by the Big Lottery Fund, Coastal Communities Fund, Heritage Lottery Fund, Welsh Assembly Government and Penarth Arts and Crafts Ltd (PALC), Vaughan Sound has played

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UK - The feelgood factor of the 2012 London Olympics may have faded, but its legacy lives on from the state-of-the-art facilities installed to host it. Key amongst these is the former International Broadcast Centre, now transformed as iCity - the home of BT Sport, where five Yamaha CL3 digital mixing consoles are helping to deliver high quality sporting action, both on television and online.

iCity is a thriving business, broadcast, data and educational centre, put firmly on the map by the launch of the BT Sport channels in the summer of 2013. Offering fans a choice of live football and other sports from around the world, chat shows and in-depth sporting reportage, the launch of BT Sport undoubtedly made other broadcasters sit up and take notice.

The technical fit out of the broadcast centre was done by leading systems integrator Megahertz Broadcast Systems, who chose five Yama

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USA - Released in April this year, the instant success of Ayrton's MagicPanel 602 has been acknowledged at the LDI show in Las Vegas where it received the 2013 LDI Award for Best Debuting Product of the Year in the Projection category.

Ayrton MagicPanel 602 is a moving head LED beam projector equipped with thirty-six 15W Osram RGBW emitters in a 6 x 6 array. Each emitter projects a tight, powerful 7.5° beam and can be controlled individually or used collectively to produce a coherent 12,000 lumen shaft of light. Under individual control, the emitters can be pixel mapped or driven by video via Art-Net or Kling-Net. To supplement the graphic possibilities this control provides, MagicPanel 602 can be continuously rotated on both pan and tilt axes, which adds a dynamic dimensional effect to beams individually projected by mapped emitters. MagicPanel is also controllable via DMX-

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USA - Lighting designer, Liam Griffiths, recently selected GLP's impression LED spots for use on tour with New Zealand alternative rock band, The Naked and Famous.

Having provided lighting dynamics for the band since 2011 the LD - who runs West Midlands-based Stage Techniques - sourced 18 X4 spots from PRG in Los Angeles, and integrated his touring floor package, consisting of six legs of curved truss, with the house rig at San Diego's House Of Blues where the world tour kicked off.

The set-up has provided the LD with an economical touring package capable of delivering a big show from a small footprint. Easy to truck and then manually transport, and without the need for big power distro, it is the kind of practical solution that is deal for shows of this scale, where the overall economics are paramount to a tour's success.

"I had only ever used [GLP's] 120RZ on my desig

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UK - Over the past few months Pearce Hire has embraced it's CSR (corporate social responsibility) and established a link with a local further education college to provide an internship programme for young people in their locality.

Peterborough Regional College runs a BTEC Extended Diploma in Music Technology. It is a two-year full-time vocational course covering all aspects of music technology and is equivalent to studying for three A-Levels. Subjects covered include live sound and production; studio recording; acoustics and audio engineering; and media, marketing and promotional skills.

The link established between Pearce Hire and Peterborough Regional College has enabled those students with an interest in the Live Events sector to go into the workplace of this busy production and hire company and learn the ropes in a bona-fide work environment.

The idea was originally moot

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Belgium - Robe was once again prominent on the lighting spec lists for I Love Techno - one of the best known and most popular annual events in Belgium's action packed EDM calendar, staged at the Flanders Expo in Ghent.

Up to 35,000 techno enthusiasts enjoyed great vibes and an international DJ and artist line up in five main rooms, plus a Chill Zone and two special arenas sponsored by Red Bull and Coca Cola respectively ... all highlighting different genres and sub-divisions of techno.

Event production lighting designer Thomas Boets once again chose Robe as one of the main moving light brands for 2013 with approximately 250 fixtures on site. Boets designed five out of the six main areas - including the Chill Out Zone. He is a big advocate of Robe and uses various different Robe products on most of his projects.

His overall production design which also included video and LED

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Up and Coming - Fifteen rising music artists have been named on the longlist for the BBC Sound of 2014, which showcases some of the brightest new acts for the year ahead. The list was compiled using tips from 170 'tastemakers', who each named their favourite three emerging artists. Californian trio Haim came out on top last year, with Adele, Ellie Goulding and Jessie J also among past winners. This year's crop includes singers Sam Smith and Ella Eyre, who have both already featured on number one singles.

Junior Eurovision - Malta has won this year's Junior Eurovision Song contest held in Kiev, Ukraine. Eleven-year-old Gaia Cauchi scored 130 points with her ballad, The Start, which she also helped compose and write. She beat 11 other countries to win the trophy, with Ukraine and Belarus finishing second and third. It is the first time Malta has won the contest, after retur

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Australia - TC Group has confirmed the appointment of Audio Products Group (APG) as the exclusive distributor of Lab.gruppen and Lake in Australia and New Zealand. The new business agreement commences on 1 February 2014, when APG will take over from the current distribution partner Hills SVL.

This appointment consolidates TC Group's relationship with the Australian distribution company, who have enjoyed great success with Tannoy since taking on the loudspeaker brand in 2010. From 1 February next year, APG will now also offer the amplification and processing technology from Lab.gruppen and Lake to customers in the region.

Andrzej Sosna, CEO of Install and Tour for TC Group, said, "After building up a very successful relationship with APG over a number of years through Tannoy, we are delighted that we can now extend that to TC Group's other touring and install brands. This

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Sweden - After selling out shows across Europe last year, Travis Pastrana's Nitro Circus Live is back on tour - beginning at the new 40,000 capacity Tele2 Arena in Stockholm.

Capital Sound provided the sonic backdrop, including their Optocore X6R-FX interface rack, as some of the world's hottest and best extreme sports stars of freestyle motocross, BMX and skate took part. The show also featured tricks and stunts on the 15ft high Nitro 'Gigant-A-Ramp' where skis, tricycles, skateboards, freezers and boogie board stunts were featured.

However, the state-of-the-art football stadium, with its retractable roof, proved to be a challenge for the sound crew to achieve flexible pattern control and retain sightlines.

Capital project manager, Paul Timmins, fulfilled a design that was deliberately rigged off-centre towards the corner (for the stadium shows), to optimise the impact for

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Belgium - ETC's northern region is set to hold its second Masters training session for dealers and distributors in Belgium in the new year, concentrating on entertainment control systems.

ETC Masters is a series of training sessions developed for all distributors and dealers which gets together three times a year to share their experiences and learn from ETC staff. ETC's regional manager for northern Europe Tim Stokholm explains, "We work hard to ensure our customers get the best possible support from ETC. The most effective way of doing that is with an effective and knowledgeable dealer and distributor network.

"As ETC products become more powerful, they grow increasingly complex; by inviting so many of our colleagues together at once, not only can they learn from us, but they can also discuss solutions to some of their biggest challenges.

"It also gives our

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