NEWS
07
Elation lighting fixtures took centre stage at the tenth anniversary of the Untold Festival – one of Europe’s largest music festivals, held 7 to 10 August in Cluj-Napoca in Transylvania. With over 470,000 attendees and a line-up featuring, Armin van Buuren, Post Malone, Martin Garrix, Becky Hill, Tiësto and more, the milestone edition was celebrated with a truly spectacular production. Apart Productions, led by Andrei Predut, took charge of Untold’s main stage lighting for the very first time, after several years of working on the festival’s secondary stages. The main stage design, inspired by Romanian fairytales and folklore, featured an elaborate dragon motif that was dramatically brought to life by 130 Sōl I Blinders deployed, not as regular blinders, but as texture enhancers and eye candy to accentuate the dragon decor. Arranged in a crisscross design to mimic dragon scales, the Sōl fixtures highlighted the ornate decor using gradients and dynamic colour shifts that brought depth and motion to the scenery. TAKING CENTRE STAGE
AV UPGRADES FOR LIBERTY
Unicol Engineering has supplied custom mounting systems for a major installation project at Liberty Global. The upgrade included AV systems across both Liberty Global’s London and Leeds offices, featuring Nureva speakers, Logitech Rally range equipment, and video conferencing capabilities integrated with Sharp screens, all of which were installed using Unicol mounts. The project ran from September 2024 to May 2025, led by James Robinson, director and principal AV consultant at AVenture Audio Visual, who served as a third-party specialist to oversee the design and implementation process.
“Unicol designed a custom floor mounting solution with an excellent video experience while preserving the architect’s original furniture plan,” Robinson noted. “Both myself and the client are very pleased with the outcome.”
FOLK FEST PEDALS FOR POWER
and the idea really took root after the band played the Quad Stage at the 2019 Newport Folk Festival, where 2000-plus bikes commuted to it. The festival loved the idea of bike-powered performance and invited Illiterate Light back in 2020 with a full-blown stage at the festival (which has persisted to this day). “A stage powered by bikes and solar was completely off the grid,” noted Eric Shy, “but the organisers loved it and the following year agreed to dedicate an entire stage.”
Back in 2020, the iconic Newport Folk Festival introduced a bike-powered stage, following the organisers’ desire to incorporate bicycles into the festival experience and provide an alternative power source for performances. Masterminding this was Illiterate Light, a two-piece rock band from Virginia who first experimented with the idea of carrying a simple sound system powered by bike, after setting up in 2015. Eric Shy took over production manager duties as the tech scaled up,
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