Christie Lites built the Impericon Mainstage design around 24 hybrid strobes and eight fat-beam fixtures, specified so that visiting productions could patch them to suit their own shows, across the German festival’s largest edition to date
With Judas Priest, In Flames and Arch Enemy headlining the bill, Reload Festival in Sulingen, Germany, staged its largest edition to date in 2026, drawing 20,000 visitors between 13 and 15 August to a festival pitched between metal, hardcore and punk. On the Impericon Mainstage, 24 GLP JDC Burst 1 and eight MAD MAXX fixtures formed part of the festival design by Christie Lites, meeting conditions that even experienced designer Toto Bröcking had not encountered before.
“There was a 15-metre-high dome of dust standing over the festival,” he recalls. “The fixtures looked afterwards as though they had crossed a desert. But we didn’t have a single failure.”
Christie Lites was responsible for lighting, video, rigging equipment and the preprogramming studio on the Impericon Mainstage, under project manager Michael Casper. The festival design has come from Christie Lites for many years, with Bröcking developing the setup and handling coordination with the bands. He has worked on Reload since 2019 and knows precisely what a design of this kind has to achieve. It must give the mainstage its own visual frame while remaining open enough for changing productions to fold it into their own shows without detours.
The strobes were positioned to serve both purposes at once.
“The JDC Burst 1 were distributed evenly across the back of the rig,” says Toto Bröcking. “They served as classic strobes, and at the same time, the LED plate let us give the set a visual finish along the top.”
The JDC Burst 1 combines a segmented white strobe line with two large-area RGBW plates. Twelve individually controllable strobe segments meet 48 plate segments, and the range that opens up runs from a massive strobe hit through to nuanced colour and wash effects. At Reload, Bröcking used exactly that dual function – strobe punch for the show and area coverage for the architecture of the festival design.
For Michael Casper, the fixture is, above all, the contemporary continuation of a familiar tool.
“For me, it is the logical successor to the JDC1 – more output, a really good white, and all of it with very simple handling,” says Michael Casper, project manager, Christie Lites.
That last point carries particular weight in festival operation. The JDC Burst 1 can be integrated into the festival design in its most extensive mode without visiting lighting designers being obliged to take on that depth of functionality. Multi-patch and legacy options allow the fixture to be set up in whatever way suits the show in front of it.
“I can have the fixture hanging in the roof in its largest mode, and a guest LD still patches only the smallest fixture if that suits their show better,” says Bröcking. Existing programming does not have to subordinate itself to the festival setup. The setup adapts to the production instead.
The JDC Burst 1 being IP65 certified was not, as it happens, a deciding factor in the specification, since the fixtures all hung safely beneath the roof. But over the course of the weekend, the certification would nonetheless prove its worth.
The eight MAD MAXX were deliberately not a fixed component of the design. They were offered to the bands playing later in the evening as an additional option. The LED fat-beam fixture generates a beam roughly 750 millimetres wide from 19 individually controllable LED beams, usable for both massive looks and segmented effects, and it works without a laser source. In a tightly scheduled festival, that operation amounts to considerably more than a technical footnote.
“The productions were consistently delighted by the straightforward handling and by the fact that they didn’t have to worry about safety distances,” says Casper.
In that respect, the MAD MAXX fit neatly into the working method behind the rest of the setup. Christie Lites made additional possibilities available to the productions without turning them into additional organisational baggage.
In the end, the hardest test for the equipment came not from the bands but from the weather and the festival site itself. On Friday in particular, there were spells of complete stillness, and the dry ground turned the site into a dust bowl of a kind that even the festival-hardened Bröcking had not seen before. For the MAD MAXX, that had a welcome side effect. Their wide beams stood out all the more sharply in the thick air.
“It really did the look of the MAD MAXX a lot of good,” says Bröcking.
The conditions were a challenge for all of the equipment, nonetheless, which made it all the more valuable that the JDC Burst 1 is protected against dust and moisture to IP65, and that the harsh outdoor conditions could do nothing to the MAD MAXX thanks to its IP66 rating.
Reload Festival returns from 12 to 14 August 2027, with Electric Callboy and Heaven Shall Burn confirmed as headliners so far.
Almost as sought after as the lighting equipment that weekend, meanwhile, was a considerably more modest GLP product. Bröcking had brought along a number of GLP console brushes, which proved useful for clearing dust from desks and work surfaces.
“Those made a lot of eyes light up that weekend,” says Bröcking.
