France - Spanning Mexico City, Los Angeles and Paris, and creating 30 concerts, Cercle Odyssey combined live music with real-time visuals, spatial audio, synchronicity and rich narrative. At the heart of this live, multisensory experience was Smode – powering generative visuals, compositing and playback in real-time across a massive projection surface.
The brainchild of French music platform Cercle, Odyssey was conceived as a new type of ‘nomadic’ concert – monumental in scale yet intimate in execution. Audience members entered a 2,300m² structure surrounded by 50m-wide and 12m-high screens on all sides with the artist placed at the centre. Every aspect of the show was designed to immerse the audience in a cohesive journey, from multi-layered audio and cinematographic visuals to the diffusion of specific scents.
“This is a new type of immersive and nomadic concert experience,” says Cercle Odyssey’s visual creator, Mathieu Glissant. “We travelled the world with a monumental installation – a mobile immersion space with giant screens, a central stage, spatialised sound, synchronised scents . . . everything is designed to offer a completely new multisensory experience. The aim was to reinvent the way people experience music at concerts.
Smode was chosen as the media server and real-time visual engine for the project, provided by Alabama Média, part of Groupe Novelty, using its proprietary X-REAL media server bays. A total of eight servers (including four spares) handling 12x4K feeds, each equipped with Smode licences, powered the demanding multi-screen projection setup. The video signals were transmitted via HDMI over optical fibre, with Lightware distribution systems ensuring low-latency delivery to the projectors.
What set Cercle Odyssey apart from traditional concert visuals was the real-time nature of the entire performance. Visual content was not pre-rendered – it was created, adapted and synchronised live, making each concert a unique, once-in-a-lifetime event, not to be replicated again. Smode enabled operators to control and modify media directly during the show, making it possible to respond to each artist’s unique needs and performance style. Original content was supervised by Cercle and created in collaboration with Paris-based creative studio Motion Palace’s director Neels Castillon and his team.
Every Cercle Odyssey show was a singular, site-specific creation where artists such as Ben Böhmer, Rawayana, Max Richter, Monolink and Moby, amongst others, brought their own individual musical style, with the help of Smode to tailor content for each performance. While shared media libraries were often used as a starting point, they were continually reinterpreted and rearranged according to artistic direction thanks to Smode’s versatile real-time compositing workflow.
Smode visual operator Morgan Davodet controlled the show live using Smode as the central tool. Depending on the artist, content could be triggered with a console or even manipulated through gesture-based tools like a theremin, all within a setup that maintained fluid performance even at ultra-high 8K resolution across five synchronised projection surfaces.
“Each concert is different, and each artist has their own specific needs. Smode allows us to adapt visual content to each performance without having to start from scratch. It allows us to reconfigure, reinterpret and reorganise media libraries according to the artistic requirements,” he says.
Groupe Novelty’s project manager, Julien Pagnier, led the event’s immersive audio design department (technical direction, sound design, pre-production support, and object-based mixing for the bands).
In addition to providing the video infrastructure and Smode-powered servers, Alabama Média played a wider role in the production, overseeing logistics, technical coordination, setup and management of all video content. As the industry’s only technical service provider with a dedicated immersive sound department, Groupe Novelty also played a significant role in the project’s audio system, with Alabama providing audio services as well.
The video and audio systems were deployed by Dushow (a Groupe Novelty company) in Paris, with immersive front-of-house setups and a powerful L-Acoustics system tailored for object-based spatial audio mixing.