Walking through the fields of Glastonbury Festival two weeks before the festival gates open is like finding yourself in a quaint English town taken over by circus performers. The rolling hills, which will soon welcome 210,000 revellers, are relatively deserted, aside from a few stages, pop-up tents and the odd giant zombie baby dotted around an area called the Unfairground. There are no crowds and no music; just sunshine glistening off the Pyramid stage.
This tranquility is soon broken, however, by the clattering of drills and reversing forklift trucks from construction workers building a new stage for the 2019 festival: IICON, a skyline-dominating head located in Glastonbury’s hedonistic haven of Block9.
At nearly 20 metres tall, IICON glares down onto a 100 metre wide, open-air dance floor that can accommodate up to 15,000 people. A gigantic hollow cube, or “visor”, protrudes from its face. This is supposed to represent a smartphone; IICON is designed to distort what we think of as the Instagrammable festival experience. When the event is in full swing, the giant head will be lit up by projection mapping, and its groundbreaking spatial audio sound system will shake Glastobury’s foundations.
“We didn’t wake up one morning saying 'let’s build a massive head’, but the idea of creating something that speaks about the world we live in today was there from the beginning,” says Steve Gallagher, cofounder of Block9 alongside Gideon Berger. “‘Dystopian’ seems too obvious a word to use, but the world wasn’t like this 20 years ago.”
Berger describes IICON as “a giant monument to humankind”. “Through Netflix and Spotify it's easy to get to consume entertainment as a commodity, but it's a tragedy if hundreds of years of human history is disregarded as a piece of expired entertainment,” he says.
A DJ for over 25 years, Berger has curated the weekend performances at IICON, welcoming underground electronic musicians who he believes question the politics of today. The low-end bass rumbles of BBC Radio 1 DJ Raggs will kick off a weekend of grime, Detroit footwork, algo-rave and granulated post-dubstep from Burial collaborator Kode9.
IICON is just the latest Glastonbury experience to be imagined into life by Block9, which has also made stages for pop megastars Lana Del Ray, Gorillaz and Dua Lipa, and built Bansky’s Dismaland bemusement park in 2015. The duo’s absurdist empire began when the two met in 2001, both nose-diving into London nightlife while working jobs in set design and art direction. They debuted at Glastonbury in 2007 with NYC Downlow, the festival’s first gay club, inspired by New York’s Meatpacking District neighbourhood and the disco and LGBTQ club culture of the late 60s.
Pulling in countless favours from mates who could play records, paint and even cook meals for the crew, the first NYC Downlow was built out of a “couple of grand, some plywood and everyone mucking in to make it happen,” says Gallagher. “Or mud and spunk, as Gideon says.”
It immediately became one of the biggest attractions at the world’s greatest festival. In 2010, Block9 was born as a dedicated area, bringing along with it London Underground, the group’s ode to UK sound system culture, styled after a London tower block. Genosys, Block9’s first open air arena, came in 2013, akin to an abandoned factory overgrown with tropical plants which, when I visit before this year’s festival, retains a sense of awe despite being propped against a row of hedges waiting to be put together.
Block9’s past stages pay homage to historical musical movements, but IICON is a different beast – even if, at the time of writing, pieces of forehead and cheek lie scattered across the patch of land. The design process began around two years ago, with Gallagher and Berger trawling thousands of images in their West Silvertown studio. Michelangelo’s The Deposition, Greek Adonises, religious Russian iconography and the toppled statue of Saddam Hussein all featured on their mood board. They became enthralled by the idea of demigods, prophets, and celebrities past and present.
They designed the finished model virtually in 3D software. Gallagher says it took it at least 30 people across half a dozen studios and workshops to build IICON, working together with teams from scenery specialists Illusion Design & Construct and lighting designers Rockin Horse for two months beforehand and then assembling the stage for one month on-site.
Here, a 60-tonne crane lifts each of the 2x2 metre panels and slots them together to erect the stage. Each section is steel plated, skinned with a lightweight canvas and covered with a carvable spray foam, which is moulded by hand. Up close, you can see fingerprints indented into its skin. “We couldn’t have achieved the detail we wanted otherwise,” says Gallagher. “It needed a human touch, something with imperfections.”
The steel truss framework of the visor lies on an axis, so attaching it meant the connections had to be bespokely designed – “we couldn’t buy the kit we needed to make this happen,” says Gallagher. The stage can withstand wind speeds of 55mph (although Glastonbury would have long been evacuated if winds ever did reach that speed).
The mud that has become synonymous with the Somerset festival remains the biggest hurdle when pulling off something of this scale. “When we were building the new NYC Downlow stage, a crane slid off the track into the field,” recalls Gallagher. “A chariot of tractors chained together pulled it out. It was pretty spectacular.” Having trundled through torrential rain that flood tents and heat waves which cause mini sandstorms for 12 years, Block9 has learned that dealing with the elements is just part of the job. “We’re used to the mud now,” says Gallagher. “When it rains, we just put our waterproofs on.”
Once IICON is open to revellers, cameras will film the audience and mangle their faces with glitching, thermal imaging effects in real time. These images will then be beamed onto the IICON head via projection mapping designed by Bild Studios, using three industrial scale projectors. The idea is to turn the cameras away from the performers on stage to give those on the ground a warped five minutes of fame. "It's not about saying 'hello mum' on TV, it’s a lot darker than that," says Gallagher.
As for the music, sound system designer Simon Honywill from RG Jones believes he’s created a world-first for IICON, which will create unparalleled sound without upsetting the neighbours. Ordinarily, festival speakers face outward from the stage. At IICON, six Martin Audio stacks and 23-metres of sub-bass speakers all point inwards, confining the sound to a hexagonal central point and allowing for immersive, 360-degree listening for those within it.
Boasting a 20-metre wide sweet spot, IICON plays at around 100db – “any louder is inhumane,” says Honywill – but can reach 120 decibels, equal to a thunderclap. “With this system you have a banging audio experience without getting in trouble with the local council,” he says.
Playing between the 35-plus hours of performances on the IICON stage will be AV-3D, an exclusive audio-visual piece produced by Berger that will put this system through its paces. For this work, Berger has recreated the 1941 chamber music piece ‘Quartet for the End of Time’ by Olivier Messiaen, using samples of around 60 modern club tracks interspersed with original recordings. He describes it as a “cherry picking of the best music bolted together and built into a soundscape.” He starts trying to describe his vision with the piece, but interrupts himself: "Actually, we just wanted to fucking show off what this thing can do.”
Recorded using ambisonic microphones (which capture sound in 360 degrees), 80s synthesisers and music production tool Logic Pro, AV-3D will be a unique experience to each raver. Through the spatial audio system, bass rumbles will ping-pong across the field, and 15-minute long synthesiser wobbles will swoop from place to place. “I’ve been like a pig in shit messing around with this,” Berger says.
For such a structural behemoth, IICON is surprisingly easy to transport and can be broken down into seven shipping containers, which sets it up for a second life beyond Glastonbury. Premiering in London next year, IICON will transform into an indoor exhibition and club space taking residency in Sydney, Shanghai, New York and beyond, with its creators aiming to examine how shifts across human history have changed music and culture, from pre-revolutionary Iranian pop to modern house music.
Ultimately, though, IICON is about reflection. “We want to say to the audience ‘this is about you,’” says Gallagher. “Within the digital panopticon it’s easy to cast blame on other people – big corporations, the powers that be – and that's all true, but that world exists through our own needs and desires, and we can change that.”
“But also, it's a massive rave in a field.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
