France - Smode Tech has announced its partnership with Cercle Odyssey, billed as the world’s first large-scale 360° immersive concert. As an official partner, Smode Tech is providing its real-time media server technology, Smode, for Cercle Odyssey’s global tour, which is pioneering an ambitious new form of entertainment fusing spatialised sound, video, olfactory experiences and classically influenced storytelling on a monumental scale.
The Cercle Odyssey tour began in Mexico City before heading to Los Angeles and will be culminating in Paris for a spectacular finale from 28 May to 1 June. Highlights from the Paris leg of the tour include Max Richter (28 May), ARTBAT and WhoMadeWho (29 May), NTO × Sofiane Pamart and Monolink (30 May) and Bonobo and Ben Böhmer (31 May).
Described as a “nomadic” installation, Cercle Odyssey places audiences at the heart of a technological and artistic odyssey designed to replicate the feeling of Cercle’s famous outdoor electronic music shows in an indoor setting. Centred on a 360° canvas cube offering 2,300m² of projection space, the project utilises a total of eight Smode servers and also features 30 × 4K projectors (two stacks of 12 projectors for the walls and six for the ceiling) and 72 L-Acoustics speakers installed throughout the 50m-long × 10m-high temporary structure, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in an indoor concert environment.
The Smode media servers are supplied by Alabama Média, a Groupe Novelty company. César Andreï, managing director of Studio Énorme, was involved from the outset as a Smode consultant, responsible for training the operator teams and supervising all aspects of encoding.
Besides the media servers, Smode technology is also used for all pre-production – for encoding, pre-visualisation and adaptation – to make each show unique and enable perfect synchronisation between the projections and the music. As a technical partner, Smode Tech is providing encoding licences, training and consulting sessions, to push the best possible workflow for the Cercle Odyssey video team.
"When I started creating the Smode software in the early 2000s, my vision was to create a form of ‘visual music’ – a visual language so closely connected to audio that it would become almost like a new member of the band. Cercle Odyssey resonates deeply with me because, 20 years later, it beautifully brings this original dream to life. It's a marvellous realisation of the idea that visuals should not just accompany music, but become an integral part of the performance," says Francis Maes, CEO of Smode Tech.
Conceived by Cercle’s founder and creative director, Derek Barbolla, Cercle Odyssey is inspired by the myth of Ulysses (Odysseus) and centres around the universal theme of ‘returning home’, with each city on the tour becoming a chapter in the story. Each show is hosted in a circular structure accommodating up to 5,000 guests per performance, with two shows daily across five days per city, and has a strict no-phone policy to enable audiences to fully connect with the performing artists.
“Cercle Odyssey perfectly embodies the kind of show that Smode was made for. From its beginnings, Smode has been rooted in the idea of extending music through real-time visual expression,” concludes Maes. “To my knowledge, there is no other solution available today that fits the demands of immersive concerts as naturally and completely as Smode does. With Cercle Odyssey, we're proud to be at the forefront of this new genre of live entertainment."
“As the world’s first 360° immersive nomad concert installation, Cercle Odyssey brings together a wide range of creative and technical challenges. To meet those demands, we’ve partnered with some of the most forward-thinking technology companies in the industry, including Smode Tech,” adds Mathieu Glissant, video director and curator at Cercle.
