Project Description

Over the past decade, Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon has emerged from the woods of Wisconsin as one of modern music’s most inventive songsmiths. Although his group’s musical path may have started out sounding something more akin to folk music, Vernon’s trajectory over the course of his last couple of records has explored everything from rustic chamber pop to haunting, textural collages of vocoders and electronica. The group’s albums are Grammy Award-winning, but their reputation for giving extraordinary live shows is even stronger. None of the performance is pre-recorded or set to timecode. Everything is done live—organically and dynamically—by the band, which never plays the same set twice.

After being invited to the L‑ISA studio in Westlake Village, CA, a collective decision was made to stage a Bon Iver performance using L‑ISA at the Santa Barbara Bowl, which has previously hosted the successful first L‑ISA performance in North America, for ODESZA.

Sound Design Solution

For Bon Iver’s unique Bowl performance, a flown 7.1 L‑ISA configuration comprised of three center hangs of eight L‑Acoustics K2 plus four Kara down paired with two adjacent hangs of 14 Kara for the five-array Scene system. This arrangement was flanked by two outer hangs of nine Kara enclosures each for the Extension system, while a dozen KS28 subs were flown in two cardioid arrays directly behind the center K2 hangs for focused LF. Nine coaxial X8 spread across the stage lip delivered front-fill, while two ARCS II on either side of the stage supplied coverage for the fans on the extreme sides of the stage. L‑Acoustics LA8 and LA12X amplified controllers powered all of the enclosures, and a pair of L‑ISA Processors at FOH generated the show’s spatialization.