08 Jul AU Mag Interviews Myles Mangino
Legendary alternative rockers The Pixies played four sold out shows at the Sydney Opera House as part of the 2014 Vivid LIVE program. Critics raved over them hailing the shows as some of the finest performances of the year.
Myles Mangino has been with the band for many years earning a reputation as an innovative and artistic lighting designer willing to go the extra mile. Vivid saw him adapt his show to fit in with the equipment that the Opera House owned and the fact that the stage at the Concert Hall is deeper and taller than most. However, Myles notes that to the average person it would look the same.
The set pieces of TV Lenses and Mirror Domes are crucial to the light show and travel in three cases. Five eight foot long sections of flat ladder truss are below the midstage truss and the thirty TV Lenses clip to these ladder trusses. The four Mirror Domes hang from safety cables, one above each band member.
Four Clay Paky Sharpy fixtures reside on the stage floor from where they can shoot into the Mirror Domes from where their beams reflect back onto each band member as key light.
“I have to say though that Martin is my favourite lighting brand and elsewhere I now tend to use the RUSH MH3 instead of the Sharpy,” added Myles. “I have fifteen MAC Vipers on this show and they are currently my favorite fixture. The optics are wonderful and the speed of the zoom is unmatched.”
At the Opera House Myles had the specified MAC Auras replaced by some GLP impressions which he didn’t particularly like describing them as a bit old and tired. However he was given eight ‘very nice’ MAC101 CT’s which he used for additional key lighting.
Myles says that he is always looking for ways to do a bigger, higher impact show with less fixtures.
“The band is very simple, it’s four people that plug straight into an amp and play,” he said. “It’s all stripped down. To make it work I always try to do a show that is simple and stripped down but is also memorable and exciting. My initial idea was to use the big glass lenses they use in lighthouses, which were the original Fresnel lenses, but I discovered that they are very heavy and fragile. My research into Fresnel lenses led me to the Deep South of the US where people in rural areas take the old Fresnel lenses out of television sets, hang them from trees and use them as solar cookers. I wondered what the quality of light would be from one of these so I bought one and it does really interesting effects when you shine light through it.”
These TV lenses were designed so that RGB projectors in the TV sets could produce a 180-degree-wide image from a projector that was very close and consequently they have tiny vertical Fresnel cuts in them. When a sharp edged beam is shone through them, it outputs at the opposite angle it entered the lens and produces interesting beam-bending effects.
“If you hit them out toward the far left or right edges of the lens, the beam make a right angle on the output and it looks great,” commented Myles. “Basically if the beam goes in at thirty degrees, it goes out at thirty degrees and at the same time it holds an image. Because you see the shape of the beam on the lens, and then the beam emanating from it, it also gives the appearance that the source of the light is moving around back behind the lens wall.”
Behind the wall of TV lenses are only eleven MAC Vipers but because the lenses hold such a large image and at the same time produce beams, the fixture count appears to be much more.
The mirrored domes were originally discarded Christmas ornaments from a New York’s Rockefeller Centre that Myles came upon as he was loading out a show at 2am. However as they were not designed for touring, they soon ended up damaged and so Myles had the current versions manufactured.
It’s very refreshing to come across a lighting designer who does more than just use what is offered by the standard lighting manufacturers.
“It seems like many lighting designers just rearrange fixtures into different positions,” commented Myles. “Even if they don’t have a set, you can watch an entire show and no one lights the backline, no one projects patterns onto the floor, no one lights the backdrop, no one silhouettes the band – all missed opportunities right in front of them. I try to imagine that I am doing theatre, ballet, television and concert all together. Anything downstage of the band is always lit with a tungsten or a CTO, so if it is to be filmed for television it already works. I always light the background as in theatre to give a nice depth which a lot of people don’t do and a lot of concerts look really flat.”
Myles admits that he goes to many live shows, observes how things are done and then intentionally tries not to do anything like it. The Pixies are famous for their live performances, notorious for not sticking to a standard set list as they fluctuate everything from tempo to song length.
“They jam, feel each other out and feel the crowd out,” explained Myles. “Running chases or hitting go-buttons where everything is perfectly timed out looks very rigid and artificial to me, especially with a band like this. It may look cleaner and more intentional but The Pixies are chaos on stage and I wanted to match all that with how I perform on the console.”
Consequently, for control Myles used a grandMA2 to operate in his own unique way with the entire show run off the temp faders.
“When a song comes up, I hit the executor page for the song and I push up the first fader which is a mark which loads all of the colours, gobos and positions,” began Myles. “From there on any kind of motion is manual. For example, as the band get louder I have a fader that I can slowly push up so everything moves into open white, or maybe the zooms may get wider. Everything looks like it is growing or shrinking with the dynamics of the band. The Pixies invented the style of music called ‘loud-quiet-loud’ and so I try to match that with the lighting. For ten years I worked as a record producer and really my lighting design is done in a similar manner by layering and adding elements.”
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