Infuze NYE is a rap-focused festival that was held at the Helsinki Ice Hall on New Year's Eve 2026. The event's lineup consisted of rap artists such as DAVI and Purplape, as well as performances by several DJs.
The Infuze team reached out to Next Live regarding the event's audio and lighting technology — they were looking for a technical partner they could confidently trust with the technology for a 3,000-person event. Since the venue was the Helsinki Ice Hall, the partner would absolutely need to have experience with technical productions in an arena environment. We accepted the challenge.
For a music-focused event, we always start from a few basics on the technical side: the size of the audience, the genre of music, and the venue. With this information, we have a solid starting point that can be fine-tuned based on, among other things, the artists' technical riders.
There are two directions you can take when building out the technology for an event: from the floor or from the ceiling. A floor-based setup is exactly what it sounds like: all the equipment is built so that it is supported against the ground.
In an ice hall production, building from the floor is tricky, because the lights need to get up high and the entire setup has to be built within a single day — building from the floor would take considerably more time. The only viable option is therefore to rig the equipment from the ceiling of the ice hall. Rigging is actually an excellent solution, as it makes it easy to achieve an impressive result and allows the sound system to be raised to the optimal height.
Many people don't stop to think that several people (riggers) have to climb up into the ceiling suspended on wires in order to make the show happen!
Since Infuze's main genre is rap, there is one particular requirement for the sound compared to many other genres: the bass needs to hit hard. As one colleague put it: "your ribs should rattle" — which probably wasn't far from what it actually felt like inside the hall at the turn of the year. There were, after all, 18 subwoofers in total.
In an arena, the best way to cover the audience area is to hang the sound system from the ceiling, so the centrepiece of the setup was an L-Acoustics line array system.
The event's lighting was designed so that the lights could easily create a range of different atmospheres: the setup included a generous amount of moving lights, audience blinders, strobes, and of course a hazer suitable for arena use.
Artists' technical riders often set the constraints for the lighting, but in this case we were in the comfortable position of being given almost complete creative freedom by the artists.
If you're organising an event at the Helsinki Ice Hall or any other ice hall around the country, we'd be happy to help!
hello@nextlive.fiGet our newsletter
Next Live, part of Enchant Ltd
Business ID 3309336-2