DORTMUND, Germany — Dutch hard dance DJ and producer Sefa recently blurred the lines of concert and event by playing a 90-minute set with a full live band, headlining the event, This Is SEFA. Lighting production for the evening of Oct. 31 featured more than 120 ADJ fixtures, including Vizi Beam RXONE and Focus Spot 4Z moving heads alongside Encore Burst 200 audience blinders and Jolt 300 multifunctional LED panels.
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Despite having only celebrated his 21st birthday this year, Sefa has become a force to be reckoned within the European hard dance scene. He has been releasing tracks since the age of 14 and has headlined clubs and festival stages all over the world. Although closely associated with the Frenchcore subgenre of hardcore techno, Sefa’s music has a distinctly unique sound. This Is Sefa took that concept to a new level, adding in live guitars, percussion, and strings to create a full-on live band concert performance of fast-paced hardcore techno.
Hosted at the 3,000-capacity Warsteiner Music Hall in Dortmund, This Is Sefa featured a full supporting line-up of DJ sets. However, the focus of the evening was Sefa’s live performance. It featured a lighting, video, and effects rig anchored to the multilevel stage positioned at one end of the venue, rather than spread throughout the venue as is more common for a traditional dance event. This emphasis on the stage didn’t mean skimping on fixtures, as a huge lighting rig filled the space above, behind and around the performers.
Project Manager Patrick Hirt delivered the full technical production, working together with regular collaborator Yannick Richarz to design the stage set and lighting rig. Christian Sudhop was responsible for programming and operating the lighting, supplied by Hirt’s own company, Creative Sounds Veranstaltungstechnik, working with collaborator Guido Schütz and his company, LaserFrame. Having partnered on a series of livestreaming studios during the pandemic, using predominantly equipment from ADJ and sister company Elation Professional, this event gave Hirt and Schütz the opportunity to use the fixtures that became their workhorses on those projects in a live setting.
One of those fixtures is the Jolt 300, which Creative Sounds and LaserFrame invested in during lockdown and used extensively in their livestreaming setups. Featuring a central strip of cool white LEDs surrounded on both sides by arrays of multi-colored RGB LEDs, this versatile fixture provides lighting designers with a wealth of creative potential. It allows bright white strobe effects, vibrant color washes and eye candy chase effects all from one compact unit. The rig for This Is SEFA featured 35 of these fixtures, showcasing its suitability as a concert stage luminaire.
“The Jolt 300 is an incredibly good lamp, which offers an unbeatable price-performance ratio,” comments Schütz . “For the Sefa concert we had them positioned at the back of the stage facing out and also above the stage facing down. This allowed the fixtures to be used to their full potential; creating vibrant color washes on stage, energetic chase patterns across the background and filling the whole hall with blinding strobe effects.”
A staple fixture at dance events all over the world, 52 of ADJ’s Vizi Beam RXONE moving head fixtures were used to create aerial effects. Positioned on risers at the back of the stage as well as hung from angled trusses in the air above, these fixtures were capable of completely filling the whole hall with razor sharp beams of light. A fixture with a proven track record of reliability, the RXONE is popular with production companies and lighting designers alike due to its small footprint, big output, tight beam angle and useable feature set.
To complement the extremely narrow beam angle of the Vizi Beam RXONEs, the rig for This Is Sefa also used 18 of ADJ’s Focus Spot 4Z moving heads. Powerful, versatile, and compact, each of these fixtures harness an efficient 200W cool white LED engine, paired with carefully designed optics, to generate a potent beam of light. This can be used to project crisp gobo patterns onto surfaces as well as to create intense aerial effects due to an extensive collection of beam manipulation tools. These include motorized zoom and focus, replaceable rotating gobos, an independent color wheel, and two rotating prisms (6-facet linear and 6-facet circular).
“Having the Focus Spot 4Zs rounded out the rig and allowed a greater variety of effects to be created,” explains Schütz . “These included gobo projection on the floor of the stage, as well as wider beam effects using the rotating prisms. The output from the LED source is very impressive and allows the Focus Spot 4Z to hold its own alongside the intense RXONEs. It is also a similarly lightweight and compact fixture, which helps with rigging and allows a large quantity of units to be packed onto a truss. Another reason we like this fixture is that is has all the features we want, with no unnecessary extras, which makes it good value, too.”
The lighting rig was rounded out by 22 of ADJ’s Encore Burst 200 LED-powered warm white 2-cell audience blinder fixtures and 12 Elation Professional RAYZOR 360Z moving head washes. In addition, six ADJ Fog Fury Jett Pro atmospheric generators were lined across the front of the stage to shoot bursts of LED-illuminated quick-dissipating fog. Finally, a pair of Elation Professional Magmatic Therma Tour 800 oil-based haze machines filled the venue with a thin mist of lightshow-enhancing haze.
Fusing together elements of a classical concert and full-on rock show with the pounding kickdrums and rumbling bass lines of a hardcore rave, This Is Sefa was a unique event, which served as the perfect showcase of ADJ lighting used almost exclusively to create a high impact lightshow on a large concert stage.
