Danish hip-hop band, Suspekt are known for their lyrics, style and now, production design. At the start of 2017, the band’s Lighting Designer Johnny Thinggaard Lydiksen, utilised a mammoth 104 Robe fixtures.
Among the fixtures were 48 Robe Pointes, 48 Robe Spiiders and 8 Robe BMFL Spots, providing a slightly old fashioned look, adding over 400 PAR cans to the stadium show rig and 24 Robe Strobes.
While a further scalable design was utilised during a smaller summer festival tour, and an autumn club tour, showcasing 10 Robe Spiiders, 10 Robe Strobes and 16 Robe 8-lite audience blinders on wind-up stands.
“I wanted to keep it brutally stark. It was the vibe of the music that gave me the idea for the wall of PARs for an extreme contrast in light sources and basically very moody and slightly scary lighting. It was more about creating an environment in which they can perform rather than lighting the band or even each song in a narrative manner,” explained Lydiksen.
The Robe Spiiders were positioned on 7 floor standing wheel bases, arranged in banks of 4 fixtures, ACL style, deployed at different depths around the stage, with 4 mounted behind 5 truss pods in the roof. Robe Pointes were outrigged on 6 double-stacked pre-rigged truss towers each filled with a double row of PAR cans facing frontwards.
The 8 Robe BMFLs were on downstage side trusses, serving as the main band key-lighting, creating a darker and more sinister look rather than ‘traditionally’ located front key light, while Robe Pointes were used extensively in conjunction with their frost filters to subvert a standard beam look.
Suspekt’s summer festival tour contained 108 Robe PARs, 24 Robe Pointes and 22 Robe Spiiders, all brought in under the production rigs provided locally at each event. Lighting was programmed by Lydiksen on a grandMA2 console and operated by his brother Jimmy Sorensen, a fellow Lighting Designer and Programmer. The floor package that featured 28 Robe Pointes and 8 Robe Spiiders, supplied by Comtech.