Very proud to announce that Arcora is born! Arcora is my own string orchestra. Think of it as a crossover between a rockband and an orchestra. Oh yes we rock! Our first setlist consists mainly of songs by the band TOOL, which I have arranged for the string orchestra.
Yes, you’ve read that correctly! Tool songs, played by a string orchestra! But don’t worry, we still have a hard hitting drummer and a vocalist to maintain the energy of the music.
I always wanted to combine my love for heavy rockmusic with the sound of an orchestra. I thought arranging the music of Tool would be an ideal starting point. I went looking for good players to join me in this journey and many good, young and enthousiastic players joined me. We knew this wasn’t gonna be the easiest thing to do. The music is very rhythmically intense, with lots of changing time signatures and it always has to sound powerful. This means I had to lead the way and change the way of thinking for most players. Especially the ones with a very classical approach to playing their instruments.
I experimented with ways of conducting the orchestra and found that head banging was unavoidable. So if you ever want to see a head banging orchestra with a head banging conductor, you definitely have to check out a concert!
On the technical side of things, I teamed up with a great light designer, Kristof Van Mensel (T.C.F.) and a great audio engineer, Michel Daems (AudioFrame). Both guys are very professional and close friends of mine. They really believed in this project and did all they could to achieve the best results. It wasn’t until I realised that Kristof had ordered not one, but two trucks of equipment, that I knew that this was going to take epic proportions. In total around 120 moving heads (lights) of various types (Robe Ledbeam 100, Robe Ledwash 600, Martin Atomic 3000’s, etc) were being put to use.
Check out one of the videos of the concert below!
More info, videos and photo’s about this project will be coming your way in the future. I would greatly appreciate it if you like our Arcora facebook page. www.facebook.com/arcoramusic.
