The Johnny Tupolev Experience

The Review…

On August the 4th, 2023, was the starting signal of one of the surely most unusual concert series of the last years.

In Wuppertal’s Visiodrom, a disused liquid gas tank and gas boiler from the last century, JOHNNY TUPOLEV presented a rock show of the absolute superlative that nobody would have expected.

10 songs, 30 meters
above the city

LIVE AT THE VISIODROM

The band performed live on the former gas pressure plate inside the 70-meter-high boiler – that alone was a special feature. The Visiodrom is a pillarless cylindrical space with a diameter of 38 meters and a height of 47 meters.

A special kind of rock show

FIRST TIME AT THE VISIODROM

What was unique about this project was the audio technology. In order to make music audible at all in a “cylindrical metal structure” of such dimensions as the VISIODROM, the JOHNNY TUPOLEV ROCK SHOW had to manage without loudspeakers.

Since running times and reverberation of several seconds make conventional sound reinforcement impossible, the show was transmitted completely via a broadcast system without delay (latency-free) to radio headphones. Each listener/spectator could adjust the volume individually.

About the show

Live and in real time

In sync with the music, 33 high-performance laser projectors project coordinated films for each song – and not in 2D: pictures, images and videos of the band could be seen on Europe’s largest 360-degree screen, with a total projection area of 6500 square meters.

Live and in real time, the audience was thus immersed in a unique way in the emotional world of each song and its story. You could move freely, but you were always in the middle of it, surrounded by light, shapes and colors – and the music of an absolutely exceptional band around frontman and singer Tom Berger.

Responsible for the images and visuals is none other than Frank Petzold, multiple Oscar nominee for his work as VFX artist on many Hollywood blockbuster productions. Currently he is responsible for the effects in the anti-war epic “Nothing New in the West”, by the way, again Oscar-nominated.
He was supported in his work for the Johnny Tupolev Rock show by Christoph Vitt, photographer, video and film artist. Christoph has already won an Emmy for his documentaries and has captured the project in sound and vision.