Pure Beamage: LD Marcus Jessup Deploys Claypaky Ultimo Sharpy For Playboi Carti's Tour

@LimeLightWired
4 days ago
3 min read

It’s been a massive year for lighting designer Marcus Jessup and Playboi Carti. We first caught up with Jessup, founder of Moving Through Space (MTS), this spring at Rolling Loud LA, where Carti headlined just days after releasing a new album and surprised fans with a guest appearance from The Weeknd. Not long after, Carti joined The Weeknd’s global tour as the opening act, bringing Jessup’s lighting design to some of the largest venues in the world. This fall, Carti is back out on his own headlining arena run with Jessup once again designing the show.

Playboi Carti Ultimo Sharpy Marcus Jessup

Playboi Carti might be the current chapter, but Marcus Jessup’s story is playing out on a global stage. Just this year, his firm MTS has also been behind designs for artists like Bad Bunny, J. Cole, and Quevedo, establishing himself as a globally recognized lighting designer known for bold, high-energy work.

Lighting Playboi Carti's ANTAGONIST Tour

For Carti’s show, Jessup faces a unique creative challenge: the artist wants no color. And there’s no key light either. Two of an LD’s most important storytelling tools.

Instead, all of the light is directed outward, into the audience. The result is a design that mirrors Carti’s high-octane, chaotic energy, where the crowd becomes part of the visual experience. Pods packed with an array of fixtures hang throughout the arena, pulsing and firing to the beat.

At first, this sounds like every LD’s dream, right? No key light, just unleash the rig on the crowd. But when that’s your only direction for an entire set, keeping things fresh becomes the real test.

With no color palette to lean on, the show’s identity lives in its geometry. Jessup relies on beam architecture to create new looks from song to song. Fixture choice becomes everything, and for a show defined by pure intensity, that meant one thing: beam quality.

Claypaky Ultimo Sharpy Workhorse Fixture

When your entire visual language lives inside a single beam, that beam better be perfect. When you think of beams, you think of Claypaky. The legendary Sharpy has long been synonymous with perfect pencil-thin light, and its latest evolution, the Ultimo Sharpy, brings that legacy into the modern era. For Carti’s current tour, Jessup deployed over 80 Claypaky Ultimo Sharpys across the rig.

“I wanted something with infinite pan that could also be a workhorse,” he explains. “The optics are unbeatable, and it keeps the show dynamic with that aggressive beam signature.”

When each pod of Ultimos hits the audience, the result is hypnotic and pushes the boundary of how minimalism can still feel massive.

Playboi Carti’s tour makes a strong case for the power of pure beamage, and the Ultimo Sharpy proves it’s built for that kind of fight. The same fixtures are set to appear again soon on Bad Bunny’s upcoming tour, designed by MTS. Production for Carti’s run was provided by Fuze Technical Group. To learn more, reach out to Inner Circle Distribution for North American sales, or visit Claypaky for global distributors.