A Launch You Can Step Inside
Rapture started with a question we put to the team: what if an album launch was a place you could visit, not just a video you press play on? We set out to build a platform that plays visual material live, in real time, and shapes the whole world around the mood of the music. A release gets a space that looks, moves and breathes like the record itself.For this first build we chose the darkest brief we could think of: heavy metal and thrash. Deep underground, in a basalt cavern of hexagonal columns and black water, a monolith screen burns in the far wall. A crowd of figures stands in the shallows, completely captivated, heads banging in time with the drums. Above them a rift has torn open in the roof, showing a storm lit by sheet lightning. Every so often one of the crowd is singled out by a shaft of light and lifted up out of the world: the rapture the piece is named after.At the centre of it all is the Solarflare mark. It's the only real light in the cavern: it pulses on the kick, shatters on the drop and pulls itself back together on the downbeat, holding the whole crowd in its glow. We used our own brand to build another world. For a release, the mark becomes the artwork, the palette follows the record and the crowd moves to the single.
