Australia - The Cat Empire brought their new studio album, Bird in Paradise, to life on stage this August and September.
Melbourne-based Atlas Studios, comprising Matt Jones and Thomas Herterich, delivered an original lighting design on a limited budget.
“We have always been given a lot of free rein with The Cat Empire,” commented Jones. “Among ourselves, however, we wanted to deliver a design that was different from the other designs we had done for them in the past.”
The design that Atlas Studios needed to create was a touring package that could be easily toured and fit into a wide range of venues around Australia. The touring package design they settled on needed to meet the usual common criteria for many Australian touring bands - it had to be budget-friendly, easily accessible in all states around Australia, and it needed to be flexible enough to suit the diverse genre of music for which The Cat Empire is known.
“We knew roughly what venues we would be playing in, so we were able to factor in most venues' limitations in the floor package,” explained Thomas Herterich. “We needed to keep in mind the ‘tour-ability’ of any design we came up with.”
The design ultimately took inspiration from The Cat Empire's recent album artwork, which is vibrantly colourful and features a heavy emphasis on floral elements.
“We utilised 20 Astera NYX Globes with custom flower surrounds, 11 of which were hung at random spacings and heights across the back of the stage, which were spaced between five 5m custom floral vines,” said Thomas. “Each custom vine incorporated 100 full RGB LED bud lights, each individually controllable. The remaining nine Astera NYX Globes with custom floral surrounds were placed around the band on stage.”
In addition, there were 12 Martin MAC Ones, hung in clusters of three, on verticals with the vines. Across the back of the stage, there were five MAC Aura XIPs, four MAC Vipers, 10 ShowPRO Fusion Bar QXVs and four CuePix Warm White Blinders.
On the downstage edge of the drum riser, there were an additional six MAC Ones, situated between more custom floral pieces that dressed the front of all the risers. On either side of the stage, there were three SGM P5S to provide side colour wash for the band.
“One of the biggest challenges for The Cat Empire is their rather extensive catalogue of songs to program,” commented Thomas. “The band do not use a click track, so there is no possibility to incorporate timecode into the show, as there is so much fluidity in their performance. They will often run with an instrumental riff that can be longer or shorter, depending on the crowd's vibe. For this reason, we incorporate a busk element into all songs to cater to this, and also maintain a wholly separate busk page that allows for any back-catalogue songs that might be added to the setlist unexpectedly.”
All of Atlas Studios’ shows are programmed on MA Lighting grandMA3, and The Cat Empire was no different.
“The show was programmed by Ben Kocsis and was fully live, with no timecode,” added Matt. “Each song is fairly structured to continue to provide the consistency between shows, with busk elements added into the songs as needed.”
The touring package was supplied by Phaseshift for the Melbourne show, and Chameleon supplied the shows in NSW and Queensland. The custom floral set pieces were created and provided by Kate Beere. The custom LED bud lights were manufactured and provided by Josh Heron.