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Ampco Pro Rent Provides The Sound Of Womad
For a record twelfth year in a row, Holland’s Ampco Pro Rent (APR) supplied the complete audio production for the WOMAD Festival at the Rivermead in Reading, Berks – itself a record breaking sell-out with no less than nine stages pumping out tunes, poetry, dance and arts workshops, all featuring performers from around the globe.
APR, as the founder member of the Synco Europe Network, provided its Synco by Martin Audio W8L and W8LM Line Arrays, along with the network’s own acclaimed Synco stage monitors and Renkus-Heinz STS arrayable cabinets for the smaller stages and sundry sidefill and near fill duties. APR, like all Synco Network members, employs XTA signal processing and BSS Soundweb distribution, and every system uses identical cabling, racks and flightcases for easy interchangeability. Around 80 per cent of the Reading event’s total of 25 desks are Midas Heritage Series or XL3 consoles.
“The festival has grown again since last year,” says APR production manager Dieter van Denzel, who also mixed many of the bands. “This year they added a ninth stage for the first time – the BBC Radio 3 World On Your Street Stage, to one side of the main arena. This was planned to be a little booth for 200 people but ended up being a club-sized sound system that drew up to 2000 people.”
He adds: “In the past 12 months we’ve worked on WOMAD festivals in Singapore, Cáceres and Madrid in Spain, Grand Canaria, New Zealand, Australia and Sicily, and now here we are again in the English summer!” Those locations will be joined this autumn for the first time by WOMAD Sri Lanka.
What all of these have in common is the organisation – in each country it’s a joint partnership between WOMAD, co-founded by Peter Gabriel and Thomas Brooman, and local site production, with APR in charge of the audio and Stage Miracles providing stage management. “Consistency is a huge part of it,” says van Denzel. “Artists love to know that at every WOMAD they’ll find the same team, the same technical crew, the same stage setup, the same sound.”
All in all APR oversaw the action at the main (Open Air) stage, the ever-popular Siam Tent, the Village Stage, Rivermead Club WOMAD, Spiegeltent, Green Room workshops Thames Suite dance studio and the One World Platform.
Among the artistic highlights were Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour, Bill Cobham, Nitin Sawhney, Richie Havens, the Fatback Band, Yasmin Levy and Robert Plant.
4th August 2005
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