Robe SVOPATTS Chosen for Bleachers Tour

	Photo: Rob DeMartin

The rock band Bleachers is on the road this year after its fifth studio album, Everyone for Ten Minutes, dropped in May, fronted by lead singer (and well-known producer) Jack Antonoff.

Antonoff brought on lighting and visual designer Tobias Rylander, who went with a retro and authentically analog stage look. He specified 30 Robe SVOPATT in the rig, which also features several customized tungsten fixtures incorporating bulbs from different sodium luminaires, repurposed as bespoke theatrical profiles and fresnels.

The units were supplied by Burbank-based Volt Lites, with Matt Shimamoto as the account manager. "Volt is one of my favorite vendors," Rylander says. "They were brilliant as always on this tour, ensuring that everything we wanted happened."

Rylander's initial design drawings had included the classic Svoboda lighting fixture. However, with a lot of dimming channels already on the plot, Shimamoto showed him the SVOPATT video as a potential power-saving alternative.

"I wanted it straightaway," Rylander says. "It was such a fun fixture with all the color mixing, and the potential for multiple different layouts and effects. It can be a strobe, a wash, a light curtain ... exactly what I wanted."

The SVOPATTS are rigged on three over-stage trusses, 10 fixtures per truss.

The units' physical rigging took some figuring out as Rylander wanted them to resemble classic Svobodas and produce spectacular light curtains, among other effects, including silhouettes. So, he had them hung with odd and even SVOPATT modules producing linear rows when illuminated -- effectively with every second fixture hung upside down.

"Once this was accomplished, it was fantastic," he says. "We ran them in full pixel mode and pixel mapping became much more straightforward. Having this huge canvas looked beautiful, especially when running with video-style effects...very organic and eye-catching with intensity chases and color mixing effects."

Rylander also created the tour's stage layout and scenography, which he describes as "scenic and analog music studio-esque." There's no conventional video, but he filmed some analog light bulbs and other tungsten illuminative effects in action, with the footage fed into the strobes to produce specific, unique kinetic effects running in conjunction with the lighting effects on the SVOPATTS.

Lighting programmer and operator Dustin Snyder, on the road with the tour, has also been instrumental in developing the lighting's look and feel. He was also new to the SVOPATT. "They are awesome fixtures, very cool and something totally different," he comments.

He observed that Rylander likes sparse, individual pixel effects and single-pixel or one-pixel-zone at a time looks, and that the SVOPATTS as a backlight can bring a fuzzy analog "illuminated atmospheric" feel, similar to an old-school 120V PAR rig but with contemporary brightness, features, and colors. "The zoom enables some very interesting and varied looks, and they are super bright!" He also notes that the SVOPATT units have been robust when on the road.

The tour is ongoing, with another US leg upcoming, followed by Australia, then the UK and Europe in late fall.