Visitors to the Artlab at EPF Lausanne surf through 50 years of Montreux Jazz
03/11/2016
written by Mohan Mani
The vision of Montreux Jazz Festival founder Claude Nobs is coming true in the newly opened Artlab building at EPF Lausanne: his fully digitized live concert recordings are being made available to the general public.
It took eight long years to digitize Claude Nobs' extensive live concert recordings and preserve them for posterity using the latest scientific methods from the EPF Lausanne and the local University of Applied Arts (ECAL). From the very beginning, the Montreux Jazz Festival has immortalized every single concert on film, with the extensive archive material being added to the "Memory of the World Register" by Unesco.
While in the previous Montreux Jazz Cafés it was only possible to immerse yourself in the jazz festival's past via a TV monitor with a streaming signal from Switzerland, the recently opened Montreux Jazz Heritage Lab in the new Artlab building at the EPF Lausanne opens up completely new possibilities for fans, allowing them to sit in a comfortable armchair in the Montreux Jazz Café and surf through thousands of archived concerts on a tablet. Over 50 years of live concert history can be called up with just a few clicks. Two glass boxes allow you to enjoy clips in a somewhat quieter ambience.
Mini stand-up movie theater Heritage Lab II
The organizers of the Montreux Jazz Festival are particularly proud of the Heritage Lab II. This is a kind of stand-up cinema with space for around 25 people. At the very front is a curved wide screen onto which the archive images are projected. To the left and right are mirrored walls that visually reinforce the action on the screen and support it with superimposed LED titles. In addition, 32 loudspeakers provide a sound experience that corresponds to that of the Auditorium Stravinski and even the concert hall in the Montreux Casino, the original locations of the festival.
