Coachella Chauvet!

From multiple Color STRIKE M motorized strobe-washes rocking with Justin Bieber’s 34-song late-night set on the Coachella Stage, to 57 COLORado PXL Curve 12 battens anchoring Paul Guthrie’s deeply evocative design for Nine Inch Noize (the iconic Nine Inch Nails playing with Boys Noize), to Cort Lawrence calling on the battens for K-Pop stars BIGBANG at the Outdoor Theatre Stage, CHAUVET Professional made their presence felt throughout the Empire Polo Club last month.

Discussing how the battens played a variety of roles in his powerful show, Guthrie said, “I used them in a square above the band and outlining their performance area on the floor so I could make a cage/box. They created a row of footlights on the downstage that could up light the dancers (who were on the platform outside the cutout). I also used them for audience punishment throughout the show.”

Here is a deeper dive into another Chauvet special from Coachella: Ed Warren’s widely acclaimed show for Interpol…

About 2,700 miles separate the Empire Polo Club from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where the legendary Luna Lounge once stood. But on April 12, the Mojave Stage on the windy club grounds during the Coachella festival was transformed into a classic post-punk hotbed when New York’s own Interpol kicked off their mercilessly intense performance.

As soon as the first instantly recognizable chords of the band’s seminal hit “Obstacle 1” rang out from the red-drenched stage, fans knew they were about to embark on an unforgettable experience that would rile them on the deepest level.

The raw, edgy music was at the heart of it all, but there was also Ed Warren’s lighting and production design that set the unsettling mood. As one fan’s social post expressed it: “Their lighting is incredible, and honestly that helps so much, but they sound so good!!”

Warren programmed his show on his ChamSys MagicQ MQ500M Stadium console and had his LD, Christian Lincoln, run the show on the same model console during the festival. To provide extra firepower to the show, he relied on 35 CHAUVET Professional STRIKE 1 fixtures from his touring package.

“We had our STRIKE fixtures in columns of five on seven of the stage’s nine upright towers,” said Warren. “They were used for backlighting and strobe effects.

“As always with Interpol, I like to create a dark, moody look that is mostly backlit. to provide mood-setting backing and intense strobe effects, he continued. “Throughout this design, I incorporated clean geometric vectors and wide washes of solid block color. I love the use of straight lines with this band — as I’ve shown with previous design iterations. This time, I wanted to kind of encase the band in a room of narrow beams, which slowly develop and expand with the music.”

Another important function of the STRIKE 1 units was to unleash the bold strobe effects that punctuated the show. When paired with the monochromatic washes and generous level of fog that covered the stage, the strobing projected a restless in-your-face energy level, the kind reminiscent of Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, back in the day, when this bold group of New Yorkers was starting to shake up the music world.