Coldplay are launching an official immersive experience in London later this month

Somewhere between a theatre, a cinema and an art gallery, the Lightroom in King’s Cross has proven to be one of the more interesting venues to have opened in London in recent years.

While its first show – David Hockney’s Bigger & Closer – suggested it might end up as a posh version of one of those iffy pop-up immersive Van Gogh shows, subsequent work has been dominated by blockbuster immersive documentaries on the moon landings and Vogue magazine, with a big family friendly dinosaur show coming up this summer.

But before that: Coldplay! 

The prolific indie pop titans have been hinting at a visual project entitled A Film for the Future since 2019, and it’s finally due to arrive on January 22 with a special immersive run of 360 screenings at the Lightroom. 

In essence, last summer the Chris Martin-led band gave over 150 artists short clips of their then unreleased new album Moon Music, with their only direction being to create a visual response to whatever they heard.

The film is essentially all the art combined with a playback of the whole album, as overseen by Ben Mor, who directed the video for the band’s 2016 Beyoncé collab Hymn for the Weekend.

Mor has described it as ‘a kaleidoscopic patchwork quilt’ and clearly on one level the whole thing sounds kind of nuts. But there is little denying that it’s going to be outrageously visually stimulating, especially blown up to a gargantuan scale with the Lightroom’s weapons grade projectors and sound system (a 360° screening basiclly means surround sound and projected on all the walls). At £25 a go it’s obviously quite a lot for an album playback with bells on, but you will never hear or see Moon Music like this again (needless to say if you don’t like Coldplay you’d be pretty nuts to go).

For people who live in Manchester or, uh, Seoul there will be shorter 360° runs of the film at the former’s Aviva Studios (Jan 22-25) and the latter’s Lightroom Seoul (Jan 22-31). If you just want to see the film online, it’s not immediately clear what it entails, but a ‘remix project’ will launch at coldplay.com on Jan 22.

Coldplay’s A Film for the Future runs at Lightroom, Jan 22-Feb 21.

Coldplay play Wembley Stadium Aug 22-Sep 8 (sold out).

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