Sound design, music, mix engineer
Premiere: 2017
Touring and development: 2017-19

It's certainly worth reading Nora's words about this epic project.

From a design and mix perspective, this was one of the more challenging projects I've done. Nora was inspired by sound clash competitions. The first set, #Punk, featured 3 iterations of a set of music she put together with selections from Sly and Robbie, Hendrix, my own interpretation of some Thomas Mapfumo and others. These three iterations were played simultaneaously, but started at an offset of maybe 30 seconds from each other.

Likewise, the second set, 100% POP, featured two DJ's playing completely seperate sets at the same time.

The show's level lived mainly between 95 and 105db, so it was LOUD for hours. And both Shamar and Nora were on mic with a bunch of text that needed to be comprehensible. And it was performed in the round.

We developed the show on the road, there wasn't ever a technical residency or anything like that. But what ended up working really well was having a center cluster that primarily handled voice. Then a minimum of four big surrounds, ideally 8, to distribute the music to. Not in a "move it around the room" way, but in a "distribute the sonic material for clarity" way. I had read interviews with both Tom Dowd and Rudy Van Gelder where they talk about distrubuting the amount of work any one speaker has to do, which intuitively makes sense.

I saved some frequency space for voice by letting the subs carry as much of the perceptual loudness as possible while still trying to keep the music full sounding. There were often multiple bass heavy tracks hitting at the same time and in order to keep the pulse and rhythm present, I'd pick a primary track/input, take the low frequency output and side chain the other tracks low end to that. It created a kind of polyrhythmic groove that as cool.