Please also visit:

An exploration of immersion

An exploration of immersion

An exploration of immersion

A chance encounter in London has opened doors for immersive audio specialist Sonosphere in Saudi’s fledgling music scene

Music in Saudi Arabia is a hotbed of new talent and raw enthusiasm. The rapid breakdown of restrictions in the country that govern the dissemination of music heading towards the 2030 Vision has created an incredibly vibrant local music scene, full of experimentation and exploration. It’s something that MDLBEAST Records, as one of just a small handful of serious labels in the territory, is eager to cultivate.

Following the roaring success in late 2019 of the country’s first-ever EDM music festival, MDLBEAST Soundstorm, combined with some unintended downtime in live events brought on by the pandemic, MDLBEAST has taken on responsibility for helping to develop artists and promote new talent for this expanding environment through its record label. This culminated in late 2021 with the launch of Saudi producer BluePaper’s latest EP, Elephant Rock. In such a brand-new landscape, everything is somewhat experimental, and this spirit bleeds through to the music in nearly all aspects.

L–R: Jamie Gosney, BluePaper, Phil Wright and Duncan Bell
L–R: Jamie Gosney, BluePaper, Phil Wright and Duncan Bell

“The label has really been a product of what happened at that time,” explains Munira Al Muammar, project manager at MDLBEAST, referring to the event. “We decided in 2019 to host the first-ever electronic festival in Saudi and the biggest in the region, which ultimately more than half a million people came to. We were in disbelief that something like that could happen here, but this is where the whole creative movement in Saudi started. We really did not have that ecosystem or the tools in the country beforehand to support any creative output in that sense, and so that’s where our initial focus began.”

BluePaper’s first performance was at XP, the MDLBEAST annual music conference, and the label has been supporting his development ever since. It wasn’t long after Soundstorm that BluePaper was back exploring new creative directions for his music. This led Matthew Dicks, executive director for music and talent at MDLBEAST, to a chance encounter with the team at UK-based company Sonosphere. “We try to identify what is the unique opportunity for each artist and, in this case, there’s a very atmospheric side to BluePaper’s music,” explains Dicks. “Separately, I’d been introduced to the Sonosphere crew as we were discussing their involvement in our XP Music Conference programme, and I was intrigued at the possibilities they could offer BluePaper. It was a perfect opportunity to bundle everything together as five tracks and hopefully give people that full-on spatial audio experience across the whole EP.”

Sonosphere has built an impressive reputation for turning static stereo soundscapes into fully immersive moving mixes, and Dicks was keen to find out what the Dolby Atmos treatment could bring to the BluePaper EP. “Matt came to us with five tracks that he was keen to get mixed in Dolby Atmos, but was under the impression that additional tweaking would likely be needed to make them work,” recalls Sonosphere’s creative director, Jamie Gosney. “It sounded like he wasn’t too confident that these tracks had enough content in them for this purpose.

He sent them over to Phil Wright, our senior engineer who runs the studio at Metropolis for us, and it turned out they were just amazing.

“It became apparent that we had all the elements to enable us to go really over the top with the spatialisation using the movement processor within the Dolby Atmos spatialisation suite. Nothing new was added. Phil worked his magic and I went in and heard the results – I was so blown away with what he’d achieved. I quickly called Matt up and I said, ‘you’ve got to come to the studio and listen to this’.”

The MDLBEAST executive director and BluePaper soon headed back to Sonosphere’s base at London’s Metropolis Studios, eager to hear the result. “BluePaper sat there with myself, Phil, Matt and Duncan Bell, my partner at Sonosphere,” continues Gosney. “He was sitting there with his head in his hands and we were all thinking, ‘oh no, he hates it’. But he looked up after the first track and there was a tear rolling down his cheek. He said, ‘I can never go back to stereo now, it just doesn’t make sense anymore’.”

L–R: Matthew Dicks with BluePaper in Metropolis
L–R: Matthew Dicks with BluePaper in Metropolis

While the project has been a match made in heaven for Sonosphere and BluePaper, it’s also had the knock-on effect of opening up new doors for the British company in the Middle East. “We now are quite serious about looking to start Sonosphere Middle East, because Saudi is a blank canvas when it comes to music and they have no preconceived ideas,” notes Gosney. “One of the battles we’ve had here in the UK, particularly being based in Metropolis Studios which is known for being an old school analogue studio, is that not everyone understands where we clearly see the industry is heading. People we’ve met from Saudi don’t have those same preconceived ideas about how everything’s got to be created in stereo first before we can then mix it. One of the things we want to do in Saudi is help them build studios with end-to-end workflows where they don’t even need to think about stereo anymore. Everything gets miked, with the end result being mixed in Doby Atmos or any other spatial format.”

Spatial mixes are but part of the equation though; for the immersive audio market to really take off for EDM, a lot more development is necessary in the live events market globally. “We’ve got a lot of work coming in and a lot of new artists in a region where there were only two other labels before MDLBEAST came along,” says Dicks. “We hope that clubs adopt this technology – it has to be the case. In fact, I saw a quote the other day from François Kevorkian, the legendary New York producer, DJ and former session drummer, who had recently DJ’d with spatial audio. He said this is going to be the future and can’t understand why more people aren’t doing it. I completely agree.”

“We just know there’s a tipping point coming,” adds the Sonosphere creative director. “We are talking with a fairly large company about a strategic partnership, which is going to push the whole spatial audio thing into the live environment. Without there being systems in clubs, theatres and concert halls, what we do doesn’t really make much sense. But with people like Apple, Amazon and, soon we hope, Spotify bringing spatial audio to the streaming market, that is going to be the beginning of the floodgates opening and people will then need to put these systems into clubs. We’re already talking to a couple about creating immersive live systems for them. It’s not a case of if it happens, it’s just when.”



You may also like:

Please also visit:

Information on cookies

Cookies are short reports that are sent and stored on the hard drive of the user's computer through your browser when it connects to a web. Cookies can be used to collect and store user data while connected to be able to provide you the requested services. Often cookies are getting deleted when the user leaves a site or logs out of it.

There are several types of cookies:

  • Technical cookies that facilitate user navigation and use of the various options or services offered by the web, such asas identifying a session, allowing access to certain areas, facilitating orders, purchases, filling out forms, registration, security, facilitating functionalities (videos, social networks, etc..).
  • Customization cookies that allow users to access services according to their preferences (language, browser, configuration, etc..).
  • Analytical cookies which allow anonymous analysis of the behavior of web users, measuring user activity and development of navigation profiles in order to improve websites and the experience of future visitors.

When you keep using our website, in compliance with Article 22 of Law 34/2002 of the Information Society Services, in the analytical cookies treatment, we have requested your consent to their use.
We use cookies to improve our services. For more details please refer to our Terms of Use and/or our Privacy Policy.

Please note that you can enable or disable and delete cookies in your web browser.

S E A R C H I N G