Inside Cercle Odyssey: the immersive new travelling concert experience

Since forming the company in Paris back in 2016, creative director Derek Barbolla has built Cercle into a cult phenomenon among electronic music fans. Their events – one-off in-person shows or filmed performances – transplant artists into sites of vast natural beauty or cultural heritage. Over the years, these have included German DJ Ben Böhmer playing in a hot air balloon over Cappadocia in Turkey, French house producer Sébastien Léger performing in front of the Great Pyramids of Giza and multi-instrumentalist FKJ playing in the middle of Bolivia's Salar De Uyuni - the world’s largest salt flats. Regularly, these videos notch up tens of millions of streams online, with Cercle devotees travelling across the globe to attend their hot ticket experiences.

For their next trick, however, Cercle will be opening an entirely new concept: a nomadic, touring show entitled Cercle Odyssey, designed to give audiences a flavour of the majesty of these events, but within a more accessible setting. Formed of a 360-degree immersive cube constructed from canvas screens with a stage in the centre, each headliner will play whilst surrounded by bespoke, special-commissioned footage shot in areas of natural splendour around the world, with a loose narrative concept based around Homer’s Odyssey and the idea of journeying home. So far, three residencies have been confirmed for spring/ summer 2025 in Los Angeles, Mexico City and Paris, with Max Richter, WhoMadeWho and Monolink among the confirmed artists.

With Cercle Odyssey currently in the midst of technical rehearsals for their opening run, we spoke to Barbolla about his plans for the show and the sustainable initiatives that they’re putting front and centre of their ambitious new offering.

Tell us how you went about conceptualising and designing what the show would look like.

I’ve always been into immersing artists and people within an idea. At the beginning of Cercle, it was about immersing them in nature or cultural heritage and at some point I think the main motivation to find something else became: how can we bring the Cercle experience closer to the city and to more people? Because travelling to the Pyramids in Egypt can be very expensive and also it’s only for very few people. That was the starting point of the creative sessions we had with the team and how I came up with surrounding people and artists with screens; with screens, it puts the creativity at the maximum level because we can do whatever we want on them and within this box.

In Las Vegas, they recently opened Sphere, why does Cercle Odyssey work best as a cube?

There was a lot of back and forth about the nature of the structure – would it be a cube or a sphere or a polygon? The biggest constraint was where the venues were and where we could put the structure; we can’t put it outside because of the wind as the screens are canvas not LED. At the beginning we were looking at stadiums or arenas. A stadium could work with a spherical structure but that wouldn’t work in an arena because they have seats all around which we couldn’t use. Eventually we went back to a cube which was the first version I had in my mind – which is what happens with creative ideas most of the time! It’s a big word to say ‘easy’ because nothing is easy with this project, but a cube is the easiest way to make it work and I love when things look simple and easy. ‘Less is more’ is my motto.

You’ve said that watching Fred Again..’s recent live show was one of the inspirations for the project - what was the influence there?

What really inspired me in Fred’s work was how he used the screens. It didn’t feel like the screen behind him was just playing random images, he was playing things that [evoked] the emotions that he also wanted to showcase in the music. Creatively speaking, he really wants to shorten the connection as much as possible between his music and the emotion of the audience and he’s really into that state of mind which I’m also always into. It was also very inspiring that he had the courage to do that production in a very short amount of time; his career exploded so quickly and he had to create something new and very ambitious with hardly any time. It was very ‘go big or go home’ and I’m also a very all-in kind of person!

How did you decide on filming locations and what world did you want to build visually with the footage?

Neels, our film director, had the vision and I really trusted him with it. He wanted to [focus on] the colours first and he saw them as different elements, so blue for the ocean, yellow and amber for the desert, green for this very lush forest and white with the snow and ice. He was linking colour with emotion and worked on that basis to select the locations. We wanted to travel around the world to showcase as many different [climates] as possible; we couldn’t go to every continent but we almost managed it. So he came up with Namibia in Africa and French-Polynesia which has the ocean and forest, cities including Mexico, LA and Paris and then the ice and sky in Iceland with the auroras. My only ask was to film in Bolivia because one of the shows that Cercle is most known for took place there so I really wanted us to come back as a symbol.

Cercle Odyssey is a nomadic project that moves from city to city. How have you designed the show to enable that?

We just travel with the canvas and the media server, which is basically a huge computer with all our content on it. We rent all the rest locally which is sometimes a big challenge because, for example, the sound [at the venue] in Paris is using speakers that only exist in France. So we’re seeing how we can bring it to Mexico and, if not, what will be the alternative because we want to have the most perfect sound possible as that’s the nucleus of everything. It’s the same for the video projectors; we’re using a very specific make and model and we’re not sure if we can find them in Mexico so maybe we’ll bring them from the US but that comes with its own problems. Also every venue is different; they’re all exhibition halls but they’re different sizes and different heights which we need to adapt everything to. Most of the challenges come from either adapting to the venue or to the country we’re going to to ensure that people have the best experience.

Renting equipment locally is one of the sustainable initiatives that you’ve prioritised with the show. The costs of touring a large-scale production are often criticised for their environmental impact – how did you take that into consideration here?

One of the big reasons we chose the canvas instead of the LED screens is to travel as light as possible. I think we’ll only use one container for all of the equipment, so it’s a very small production compared to how it looks in the end, which I’m very proud of. For every aspect of the show - sound, light, visuals - we try to keep down the materials that we’re shipping and working with. Also I’m aware that the biggest ecological impact is people travelling to the shows, so by travelling ourselves and not asking the audience to come to us [as with previous Cercle events], people are making less of a footprint. In 2025 we only have three cities, but in 2026 we’ll be touring a lot more so the goal is to be closer to the people.

What have been the challenges of working in listed or protected spaces before now?

The first thing to say is that, in the past eight years, we’ve never done a show in nature with an audience. That’s a very important guideline for me because I don’t want to inspire people to have a rave in nature and for it to be harmful. Secondly, with cultural heritage sites and an audience, there are a lot of logistical issues: there are very fragile monuments so we work with sound engineers who know how to cut the frequencies in the soundcheck to preserve the location. We always make sure to respect the monument and that’s the most important thing and why we’re still here, because we’re doubling up on everything to make sure the venue is respected.

Which dream artist would be the perfect fit, in your eyes, to perform as part of Cercle Odyssey?

Rosalía, for sure. I’m really into her music and her universe and the way she really works to make something as excellent as possible. She’s very into details and very into every aspect of her show - I saw the Motomami Tour and it was so well executed so I’d love to work with her. And then Fred Again.. also of course.

Cercle Odyssey runs from April 23-27 in Mexico, May 7-11 in Los Angeles and May 28-June 1 in Paris. You can pre-register at odyssey.cercle.io