Returning after a two-year hiatus, Southeast Asia’s Wonderfruit festival revived its mix of live electronic music and art, alongside wellness and lifestyle activities at the tail end of 2022 for 25,000 festivalgoers.

A range of regional and international touring artists appeared at the four-day outdoor festival held the Siam Country Club in Pattaya, Thailand. Among the dozen stages on the 140-acre site, Polygon is a 2,000-plus-capacity space under a 25m diameter polyhedral dome rigged with 360° L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal Sound technology from L-Acoustics. The stage hosted live sets from electronic artists Viken Arman, Photay, Âme and O/Y. When the Polygon team informed them that they would have the opportunity to perform in 360° immersive audio, they began working together to prepare their sets for this new technology. With the artists spread around the world, these sessions were conducted both in person and remotely.

French DJ/producer Viken Arman was able to put L-ISA to the test in a London studio before the festival began. Known for his minimal style of electronic music, Arman spent a day listening to his tracks on an L-ISA system. ‘I left the London L-ISA studio having a sense that this wasn’t just an immersive gadget attached to a few surround speakers,’ he says. ‘I could see many possibilities beyond a standard stereo output mix. It got me to think critically about the spatialisation of every sound in my tracks for the Wonderfruit set.’

Ahead of his performance, Arman also tested his live mix at the Polygon stage on-site at Wonderfruit. Here, Polygon’s spatial engineers, led by Davey Williamson and including Matt Gush and Matt Hill, helped him to move his percussive and modular synthesiser elements around the L-ISA system.

American musician Photay (Evan Shortstein) depended on a more extended soundcheck slot at the festival. After a virtual consultation with Gush, he prepared most of his performance material in a home studio and on the plane to Thailand. During his soundcheck, Photay solidified his vision of how he would organise his stems into channels with clear categories, allowing for smooth transient textures, rhythmic beats, melodies, percussion and drums. ‘I approached the immersive performance with a minimalistic approach,’ he explains. ‘It allowed me to give each sound and its groups the freedom to travel and explore various depths and heights within the L-ISA system.’

Like the other artists, Berlin-based O/Y, had used an eight-point surround system before, using an audio interface to route eight channels to an Ambisonic system. To prepare his show, he was introduced to L-ISA during a studio session where he began to experiment using all 64 output channels. After the session, he reorganised his tracks’ stems and re-approached the live mix, opting for a clean and concise overall mix on each of the 64 output channels without the need for bus mixes, input returns channels or master chain processing.

The Earth Echo collective, led by sound artist Phan Tu, had a different approach to preparing its daytime sound healing sessions. Earth Echo’s sound bath involves Tu using both a soundscape playback and live instruments, which she moves over the bodies of participants so that they can physically feel the sound around them.

Earth Echo’s dedicated spatial audio engineer, Daniel Figols, shared his tracks with Gush, who then optimised the mix in the Delta Live L-ISA studio.

‘After Figols prepared our mix, we tested our content on a similar Polygon rig at Soundstorm in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, a few weeks prior,’ says Tu. ‘It was fundamental to understanding how our tracks reached ears and bodies within the live space and allowed us to adjust our sounds and stems for a more optimal experience at Wonderfruit.’

For Photay, Viken Arman and O/Y, the Wonderfruit performances were a first. The immersive audio system changed how they performed their music, and allowed them to feel more creative as they played and improvised. The musical dialogue with the audience was also an entirely new experience.

‘The crowd during my set seemed more interested in listening than just dancing,’ says O/Y. ‘I believe L-ISA technology played a major role in evoking this unique response. It is a game-changer for the festival experience produced by Polygon, powered by L-ISA.’

More: www.l-acoustics.com