London – Lighting rental company Colour Sound Experiment (CSE) designs and supplies lighting and rigging for a number of UK clubs including the newly opened “Electric” live music venue in Brixton. Other current projects include The Box in Soho, four venues in Brighton and the Ice Bar in London. Each club has its own production needs, which CSE fulfills.
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Colour Sound Makes the Rounds at London Clubs
London – Lighting rental company Colour Sound Experiment (CSE) continues to build its contract rental business, designing and supplying lighting and rigging for the newly opened “Electric” live music venue in Brixton and The Box in Soho.
The South London club Electric is a place with an illustrious history, best known as the legendary Fridge, and before then, The Roxy.
The installation was project managed for CSE by Fletch who designed the rig in conjunction with Cy Kelly from Electric. The creative and practical concept maximizes the available space, offering a system versatile enough to cater for a variety of entertainment, from full on club nights to a selection of live music encompassing a dynamic mix of genres.
The venue has a traditional theatre style stage with a standing auditorium downstairs and a first floor balcony adding more standing room.
Two small trusses have been installed over the stage, together with a main front truss in the auditorium plus a box truss further back over the dance floor area, which is on motors. To maximize the budget, the design also allows for lighting fixtures to be removed from the box truss and added to the over-stage lighting rig when more lights are needed for bands and vice-versa. The over-stage and front trusses are accessible via manual chain hoists.
The moving lights are currently 10 each of Robe’s ColorSpot and ColorWash 575E ATs – chosen for their robustness and durability as well as appropriate size for the space – plus five bars of 6 PARs, four Martin Atomic strobes and six 4-lite linear Moles.
For control, an Avolites Pearl 2004 console was specified together with a 72-way Avolites FD dimmer. CSE also designed and built a custom power distro for the venue for all the hard power requirements.
The Box
CSE also continues its long term contract rental to exclusive nightspot The Box in Soho, famed for its ‘risque’ cabarets, burlesque shows, trail of A-listers and carefully selected super-rich clientele. It’s modelled on the venture of the same name in New York.
CSE supplied a lighting rig to The Box owner Simon Hammerstein’s original specification, incorporating a main room with stage, a smaller second space, The Green Room also with a performance stage, plus architectural lighting throughout.
“Simon knew exactly what he wanted, and so we effectively translated it,” explains Fletch. The requirement was that lighting should enhance the ambiance and be diverse enough to cater for high profile stage shows, private performances/parties and corporate events.
Trussing is not used as there is limited headroom over the stage, so lights are rigged on a myriad of internally-wired-bars which are hung as discreetly as possible – with some recessed in the ceiling – throughout the space.
The moving lights in the main room are nine Robe ColorSpot 700E ATs, two GLP Impression LED wash lights and three GLP Impression Zooms. These are joined by eleven LED battens and two Pixel Line1044s to illuminate the audience. Seven i-Pix Satellite LED ‘bricks’ are dotted around above the stage, together with seven Source Four profiles, two Sunstrip DMX actives and two Atomic strobes.
A Wholehog 3 console is used for control and the dimmers are a mix of existing house ones plus some additional installation dimmers supplied by CSE.
In the second room, CSE has supplied a single PixelLine and an Atomic strobe, three i-Pix Satellites and two LED battens and a Source Four profile, plus a Pulsar Masterpiece for control. There is also a quantity of architectural lighting highlighting the room.
For the VIP room, 12 x 600mm Pulsar ChromaStrips uplift the walls and another 10 are used for highlighting the various corridors and passages connecting the different areas together.
About 50 meters of LED tape is also used for down lighting the entrance and main stairway of the venue, with other areas grazed by low profile Tricolor LED spots, all effectively enabling whole areas to be transformed with blocks of color. These architectural elements are controlled by the Wholehog 3 in the main room so Evan (the house lighting operator) can control the look, feel and vibe of the entire venue.
Says Fletch, “It is always good to work with clients who have creative vision. It makes it even more rewarding in being able to deliver their projects.”
