GLP helps bring ‘mushroom’ stage to life at Coachella 2024

In recent months, turnkey production design studio and rental company Maktive has invested heavily in GLP’s new impression X5 IP platform – sensing both the potential for deployment in the arduous weather conditions of the outdoor season and that the common chipset will guarantee uniform, homogeneous colour.

As a result, when it collaborated with fellow design company DoLaB to present its unique MACROdose dance music stage for the first time at this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, it were able to integrate large quantities of its recently acquired impression X5 IP Bar 1000s, X5 IP Maxx and JDC2 IP to animate a series of ‘fabric mushroom’ sculptures which looked like they had just sprouted out of the desert grass.

DoLaB itself is a collective comprising brothers Dede, Jesse and Josh Flemming which builds bespoke architectural and art pieces. The installation itself consisted of nine oversized, satellite-shaped sculptures distributed across a field, under which festival goers could get some shade, rest and dance. Maktive delivered all the lighting and took care of the programming.

Maktive director Bryan McClanahan, who co-founded the partnership with Patrick Randall, explains that the two companies had collaborated on avant garde art projects in the past: “For Coachella we were asked whether we could come up with a couple of different scenarios with different lighting configurations.

“The goal was to keep as many lights hidden as possible, but obviously some fixtures needed to be unobstructed.” Those that they chose to reveal included FUSION by GLP Exo Beam 10 and JDC2 IPs. Meanwhile, up inside each of the mushroom type shapes were the X5 IP Bar and also the X5 IP Maxx – part of a burgeoning fleet of GLP new generation solutions in its rental inventory.

The new JDC2 IP, offering more power and creativity than its predecessor, has excited the company the most however. Significantly, it offers the ability to create unique digital effects with an individually controllable pixel matrix. A powerful built-in dual-Cortex CPU with graphic processing offers over 100 GLP DigiFX, giving a range of digital content.

As for the X5 IP Maxx and X5 IP Bars, they were placed inside each of the mushroom-type shapes. “At Coachella they really got to shine,” said McClanahan. “The Bars themselves were mounted from the inside of a pole through the middle of the mushrooms, shooting outwards from the centre, and we mounted the X5 IP Maxx on the outer tips of the mushrooms shooting in. They did all the heavy lifting, illuminating the mushrooms with no uplighting – the mushrooms almost glowed from the inside out.”

It provided a perfect scenario for a star-studded line-up of artists, the DoLaB stage hosting performances from Chase & Status, Alesso, Anna Lunoe and DJ Tennis, plus back-to-back sets by Kaskade and Alison Wonderland and an impromptu party hosted by Billie Eilish.

“We were able to provide the lighting entirely from the GLP catalogue,” concluded McClanahan. “And the fact we were able to match the chipsets meant we got an even homogenous colour.”