Case study

Paul Kalkbrenner

Berlin, on tour across Europe

Two tours. One about 1991, one about a pair of hands.

Paul Kalkbrenner plays live. He builds his sets on the spot, and no two nights ever come out the same.

Lovely for the audience, tricky for anyone designing visuals. You can't run a timed sequence behind an artist who decides in the moment how long a track lasts. We made two tours for him anyway. One looks back at the music that shaped him. The other looks at his hands.

What we built

‍Back to the Future

It all started with a mixtape series: more than 60 tracks from 1987 to 1993, the music Kalkbrenner grew up with on the radio as a teenager in East Berlin. The tour opened at the Columbiahalle in Berlin on 7th April 2017. The brief was time travel, so the design speaks the visual language of the era, RGB bit graphics and monochrome light, running on today's event tech. At its center stands The Tunnel, a custom light installation on a 25 x 25 pixel grid that handles simple spotlights as happily as bit graphics. Behind it, a modular RGB banner changes its look with every light setting. Modular because it had to be: the tour kept visiting venues it had never seen before.

The identity

Logo, print and merch followed, plus an exhibition that traveled with the tour: slide and video installations with original photographs by Ben de Biel and Tilman Brems (Zeitmaschine) and a video edit by Varnish RGB. On their way to the dancefloor, fans walked straight past 1991. The time travel started in the foyer.

Parts of Life

For the Parts of Life album, released in May 2018, we turned the camera around. The idea came from Kalkbrenner himself: the most interesting thing on that stage is a man making music with his hands. So he was filmed at his setup while he played, the footage composited live in TouchDesigner with generated visuals and shown behind him in real time. Suddenly, row 30 had the view from row one. Two music videos grew out of the same idea, both in black and white. Part Three was filmed during rehearsals for the live show. Part Eight leaves him alone on the rooftop of Kraftwerk Berlin, filmed by drone, playing to a city that can't hear him.

The challenge

The task: a live identity for an artist who never plays the same set twice, sturdy enough to survive a European tour. Flexible enough for any venue, quick enough to rig and strike between cities, and distinctive enough that nobody would mistake it for anyone else. Oh, and it had to look like 1991 without looking like a cheap copy of it.

One tour shows where the music came from. The other shows the hands that make it.