When you combine the forces behind the most renowned electronic music festivals and one of the world’s most technologically advanced venues, the result is special.
UNITY, Tomorrowland and Insomniac’s collaborative show series at Sphere Las Vegas, isn’t quite what you’d expect. And that’s a good thing.
While a different artist closes each night of UNITY, that closing DJ set isn’t the core of the show. Instead, most of the evening takes attendees on an audiovisual journey through the worlds of Tomorrowland and Insomniac, the world’s preeminent EDM event organizers.
The two-hour experience is soundtracked by some of the greatest hits of modern electronic music. There were 90s jams like Outlander’s “Vamp,” Underworld’s “Born Slippy” and The Prodigy’s “Breathe.” Plus, plenty of anthems from the 2010s EDM boom like Swedish House Mafia’s “Don’t You Worry Child,” Zedd’s “Clarity” and Dada Life’s “Kick Out The Epic Motherf**ker.”
The show covered almost every genre of electronic music, from Anyma’s melodic techno to Subtronics’ screeching dubstep to Bicep’s hazy house. But what made iconic riffs feel even more special was Tomorrowland’s Symphony of Unity—a 50-person orchestra that often performs at the brand’s flagship festival—infusing lush orchestral music into the beats thumping through the Sphere.
UNITY treats the Sphere less like a stage and more like a portal to the decades of world-building Insomniac and Tomorrowland have undertaken. The show flows in chapters, starting with Tomorrowland’s realms—Planaxis, Adscendo and Orbyz—and ending with Insomniac’s festivals—Nocturnal Wonderland, Beyond Wonderland, Escape Halloween and Countdown. The result is eclectic by design.
Insomniac’s chapters feel like a party. They have neon colors, live dancers, whimsical animated characters and rapid camera swings. Surrealist, over-the-top set pieces take center stage for the Insomniac portion of the show.
On the other side, Tomorrowland’s chapters invite the audience to dwell. They have mechanical butterflies floating through the crowd and patient pans through underwater worlds and ice caverns.
Tomorrowland’s visual identity focuses on natural landscapes infused with mysticism. Not to mention, Jim Cummings, the iconic “voice” of Tomorrowland and the official voice actor for Winnie the Pooh, narrates each sequence.
“With UNITY, we’re immersing the audience in four richly detailed worlds, each paired with some of the most iconic tracks ever played at Tomorrowland,” Joris Corthout, the Prismax CEO and Co-Founder who oversaw Tomorrowland’s involvement, recently told EDM.com in an interview. “These environments are crafted with such depth and intricacy that you could watch the show multiple times and still discover new details.”
The Sphere’s cavernous canvas brought the worlds of Insomniac and Tomorrowland to life. At 366 feet tall and 516 feet wide, the record-breaking venue is the largest spherical building on Earth. It boasts a 160,000-square-foot, 16K wraparound display. Pictures and videos cannot capture the Sphere’s marvel, you need to see it with your own eyes to grasp the scale.
The sound of the Sphere is as uncanny as the visuals. It features over 167,000 speaker drivers, 3D audio beamforming to ensure sound lands the same in the nosebleeds as it does on the floor, and wave field synthesis that allows sound to flow from ear to ear when a visual moves across the screen. To top it all off, not a single speaker is visible to the audience. They’re all hidden behind the screen to provide unobstructed sightlines across the venue.
Seeing the Sphere through clips on social media is incomparable to experiencing it in person. Try to picture four football fields worth of screens enveloping you while perfectly engineered sound is delivered right to your seat, which itself has haptic capabilities, rumbling and shaking with each build and drop.
For brands built on larger-than-life festival stages, the Sphere’s canvas was a new type of playground for creative expression. Among a sea of jaw-dropping moments, here are five that stood out the most from UNITY’s opening weekend at the Sphere.
Opening of UNITY
UNITY opened by emphasizing just how expansive the Sphere is. The screen slowly zoomed into an oil painting of a seascape at sunset. Then, the painting morphed into digital reality, overtaking the entire dome with a hyperrealistic world filled with rose-gold rippling water, a glowing sky, distant cliffs and a lighthouse on the horizon.
A dragon—an iconic symbol of Tomorrowland—flew over the landscape while the orchestra played a slow, haunting rendition of Kevin de Vries “Dance With Me.” There were no drums or drops, just pure melodic intensity as the audience took it all in.
Blossoming oculus
This sequence had us on the edge of our seats, a perfect match of music and visuals. Here, a gold, baroque filigree framed an oval oculus marking the entrance to Beyond Wonderland (one of Insomniac’s flagship festivals). As “Five Hours” played, each stab of the iconic Deorro anthem unfurled the filigree across the vast expanse of the Sphere while the aurora in the oculus morphed into Insomniac’s signature eye. As the drop approached, the eye swelled into a sea of electric colors.
Chase & Status play “Baddadan”
It was surreal to hear drum & bass roar through a venue like the Sphere. Chase & Status closed the first night of the opening weekend and hearing them drop “Baddadan” was a treat.
Tribute to Avicii
Hearing a live symphonic rendition of Avicii’s “Wake Me Up” was enough to make us tear up. But turning our heads up to see his face formed by a constellation of twinkling stars in the Sphere’s digital sky really pulled at our heart strings.
Alien invasion
This was perhaps one of the most over the top sequences of UNITY. Paying homage to Insomniac’s annual Countdown New Year’s “invasion” themed festival, sci-fi saucers took over the city of Las Vegas on screen.
They fired lime-green columns down to a ribbon of casinos and glittering street grids while the room fired actual lasers back up, creating a spectacular physical-virtual latticework of light. In cheeky and maximalist Insomniac fashion, Knife Party’s “Destroy Them With Lazers” accompanied the visuals.
UNITY shows will continue through the fall before closing in October with EDM.com Class of 2024 artist Sara Landry, the first female artist to headline the Sphere, and dubstep superstar Subtronics. You can find tickets here and see the full schedule below.
UNITY at the Sphere Schedule
Friday, September 19 – DJ Snake
Saturday, September 20 – Alan Walker
Friday, September 26 – MEDUZA & James Hype
Saturday, September 27 – SLANDER
Friday, October 17 – Sara Landry
Saturday, October 18 – Subtronics