Brief

Nike Football and the KNVB launched the Dutch national team's World Cup 2026 kit at the KNVB Campus in Zeist. The campaign ran under the line Voetbal op z'n felst, which works in two directions at once. Fel means fierce and it means bright, so the title reads as football at its hardest and football at its most luminous in the same breath.

Amsterdam Berlin built the activation around a single visual device. A laser cutting vertically into the sky above the campus, with orange light spreading outward through the exhibition space below it.

The sound brief followed the same double meaning. Warm harmonic resonance rising and widening, luminous and open rather than dramatic or threatening. Low frequency presence carrying scale without aggression. Something powerful that stays inherently positive. The audience should feel the light spread through sound the way it spread visually.

Amsterdam Berlin commissioned two pieces: a twenty minute score running through the physical space, and sound design for the launch film that rolled out globally on Nike Football channels.

Approach

Both pieces run on one source. We built the installation first as a self-contained sonic environment, then treated those recordings as the material library for the film. The room and the film share a single sound identity rather than referencing each other.

The tonal language stays inside the brief throughout. Slow harmonic expansion, shimmering upper detail tracking the movement of light, and a deep rounded sub layer holding the low end stable and warm.

The Installation

Twenty minutes, recorded on two machines. Elta Music Solar 42N and Oberheim TEO-5.

We recorded in several passes, building a different drone character on each machine before layering them, with chorus applied across the composite. Nothing in the chain is quantised. Neither the hardware modulation nor the effects run against a grid.

The Solar 42N carries the microtonal drone body. The TEO-5 supplies harmonic movement above it. Ableton served as recorder and effects host, with no sequencing and no clock.

The Loop Problem

A looped installation repeats. That part is fixed the moment the file is rendered. The design work sits in whether anyone in the room can detect it.

Recognition depends on landmarks. A downbeat, a sequence, a transient, anything the ear can file on the first pass and match on the second. Remove those and a listener has no reference point to compare against, even though the material is objectively identical.

We let the filter LFOs run free against each other and against the chorus. The result moves continuously and never arrives at a position you could point at. The score repeats every twenty minutes, and nobody standing in that space could have identified when.

The loop point required a crossfade for the same reason. Free running modulation means filter positions and chorus phase sit somewhere different at minute twenty than they did at zero, so butting the ends together produces a step. A step is precisely the landmark the entire session removed. Drone material tolerates a long fade, so we moved the crossfade until it stopped being audible.