Rüfüs du Atmos

Talk about scope creep. Rüfüs Du Sol’s ‘Live from Joshua Tree’ started life as a Mixmag online special. The concept was to take Rüfüs’ live show and perform it to the coyotes. It was recorded live and shot as dusk turned into night, with lighting fixtures illuminating the dramatic desert landscape of the Joshua Tree National Park. It’s seriously worth a look/listen, even now, two years on from when it hit YouTube.

Actually, it was such a hit that budget became available to remix the production for a theatrical release. Rüfüs du Sol’s go-to audio engineer, Cam Trewin, booked himself into a Hollywood dub stage, to remix the audio in surround. The studio manager suggested he ‘may as well’ mix it in Atmos, as the room was equipped for it and wouldn’t attract an additional fee. Cam embarked on a crash course in Atmos mixing. The movie premiere was happening down the road, and Cam was able to test his Atmos mix in that theatre. He wasn’t convinced about the results (“the music sounded disconnected to the visuals”), so they resolved to spend the rest of the post production process in 5.1 and put the Atmos mix to one side. Where it stayed for over a year, until Apple made the snap decision to put its full heft behind Dolby Atmos for Music. Cam Trewin got a ‘drop everything’ phone call from the band who was getting pressure from its management who was getting pressure from its record label who was getting pressure from Apple. “We want Rüfüs to be a featured artist when the announcement goes public!”

The music industry was in full scramble mode, and as it transpired, the only Australian band to be part of Apple’s Dolby Atmos Music launch was Rüfüs with Live from Joshua Tree.

This is the story of how it was done, told by the blokes who did it.