James Murphy and Soulwax Designed A 50,000 Watt Soundsystem

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James Murphy and Soulwax Designed A 50,000 Watt Soundsystem

James Murphy and Soulwax have designed a 50,000 watt soundsystem.

LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and the Dewaele brothers, better know as Soulwax and 2ManyDJs have designed and built a 50,000 watt soundsystem for ‘Despacio’ a three night residency in Manchester.

Murphy headed the build falling back on his 20’s as a audio engineer before following his dreams as a rockstar.

‘Despacio’ translates in Spanish to ‘slow’ with the towering sound system originally intended for an Ibiza party with records being spun between 95bpm and 115bpm.

“We’ve really been into the concept of taking records and slowing them down on the turntables to produce this swampy, sexier effect,” explains David. “When we moved it to Manchester we just stuck with it.”

The 50,000 watt rig stands 11 foot tall with eight speakers in total that surrounds and is aimed in towards the audience for a full feeling system geared for quality over loudness. James adds;  “The system is like a dinosaur, if dinosaurs had survived and evolved along with modern creatures,”

LCD's Soundsystem

James follows on querying the de-evolution/evolution of club sounds “As time went on, smaller, more efficient boxes and drivers were built with minor compromises to the quality but massive advantages in size, power requirements, et cetera. Each time one of these small evolutions happened, there was another small compromise (in my mind) and eventually we wound up with the modern club system. That can range anywhere from a bunch of shit piled up and run in the red to make drunk people not hear other drunk people very clearly, all the way to the modern awesome-sounding club / dance PA rigs, which, to my old-dude ears sound totally sweet if you play modern dance music, but don’t tend to reproduce ‘Hells Bells’ particularly satisfyingly.”

The cherry on the top, the trio will be playing vinyl exclusively for the night, asked why Mr Murphy tells “Vinyl sounds better,”

A future collaboration is also teased  “We’ve been making some ‘stuff’ and ‘things’ together for fun over the past few years, but we haven’t made any decisions about if / when / how to inflict these dubious mongrel creations onto the world,” says James. “The truth is that we’ve made some amazing music together but ‘someone’ has been too ‘busy’ tasting wine and producing popular music, so none of it has been finished yet,” David adds.

Despacio is running for three consecutive nights in the ballroom of New Century House during the Manchester International Festival, from July 18th to the 20th.

Read at the verge.

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