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Smode Tech joins Cercle Odyssey as official technical partner

Smode Tech has announced its partnership with Cercle Odyssey, the world’s first large-scale 360° immersive concert. As an official partner, Smode Tech is providing its real-time media server technology, Smode, for Cercle Odyssey’s global tour, which is pioneering an ambitious new form of entertainment fusing spatialised sound, video, olfactory experiences and classically influenced storytelling.

The Cercle Odyssey tour began in Mexico City before heading to Los Angeles, and will be culminating in Paris for a finale from May 28 to June 1, 2025. Highlights from the Paris leg of the tour include Max Richter (May 28), Artbat and WhoMadeWho (May 29), NTO x Sofiane Pamart and Monolink (May 30) and Bonobo and Ben Böhmer (May 31).

Described as a “nomadic” installation, Cercle Odyssey places audiences at the heart of a technological and artistic odyssey designed to replicate the feeling of Cercle’s outdoor electronic music shows in an indoor setting. Centred on a 360° canvas cube offering 2,300 m² of projection space, the project utilises a total of eight Smode servers and also features thirty 4K projectors (two stacks of twelve projectors for the walls and six for the ceiling) and 72 L-Acoustics speakers installed throughout the 50 m-long x 10 m-high temporary structure.

The Smode media servers are supplied by Alabama Média, a Groupe Novelty company. César Andrei, managing director of Studio Énorme, was involved from the outset as a Smode consultant, responsible for training the operator teams and supervising all aspects of encoding.

Besides the media servers, Smode technology is also used for all pre-production - for encoding, pre-visualisation and adaptation - to make each show unique and enable synchronisation between the projections and the music. As a technical partner, Smode Tech is providing encoding licences, training and consulting sessions, to push the best possible workflow for the Cercle Odyssey video team.

“When I started creating the Smode software in the early 2000s, my vision was to create a form of ‘visual music’ - a visual language so closely connected to audio that it would become almost like a new member of the band”, explains Francis Maes, CEO of Smode Tech. “Cercle Odyssey resonates deeply with me because, twenty years later, it beautifully brings this original dream to life. It’s a marvellous realisation of the idea that visuals should not just accompany music, but become an integral part of the performance.”

Conceived by Cercle’s founder and creative director, Derek Barbolla, Cercle Odyssey is inspired by the myth of Ulysses (Odysseus) and centres around the universal theme of “returning home”, with each city on the tour becoming a chapter in the story. Each show is hosted in a circular structure accommodating up to 5,000 guests per performance, with two shows daily across five days per city, and has a strict no-phone policy to enable audiences to fully connect with the performing artists.

“Cercle Odyssey perfectly embodies the kind of show that Smode was made for. From its beginnings, Smode has been rooted in the idea of extending music through real-time visual expression”, says Maes. “To my knowledge, there is no other solution available today that fits the demands of immersive concerts as naturally and completely as Smode does. With Cercle Odyssey, we’re proud to be at the forefront of this new genre of live entertainment.”

(Photos: Cercle)

www.smode.io

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