Set at the foot of Tal Moreeb, the UAE’s tallest dune, the LIWA International Festival is one of the most extreme and distinctive festival environments in the world. By day, it celebrates motorsport, heritage and desert culture. By night, the landscape itself becomes the stage. For the 2025–26 edition, the creative ambition was to take LIWA into the future. With a larger projection surface, extended laser coverage and additional layers of coloured light, the dunes of the Empty Quarter were transformed into a vast, living canvas for a series of bold, high-impact night-time moments.

Working alongside Artists In Motion, ON THE SLY was responsible for the music and sound design across a collection of 1 minute concept motion graphic films, designed to play as individual hits or connect into longer sequences across the festival. Each piece needed its own character and energy, while still feeling part of a unified creative world under the LIWA, Future Lit concept.

Designing sound for LIWA meant working at an unusual scale and within a loud, high-energy outdoor environment. The audio needed to cut through and command attention when required, but also know when to sit back and support the visuals. Across the programme, the sound shifted fluidly between subtle atmospheric accompaniment and driving, kinetic moments that pushed the action forward.

We created a cohesive audio world built from designed textures, sound effects and melodic elements, crafted to amplify the sense of power, motion and drama across the dunes. Lasers, light and projection were given personality through sound, with audio used to emphasise movement, reveal scale and heighten key visual moments.

In many cases, early visual concepts, stills and motion ideas informed the initial soundscapes. From there, the audio became an active part of the creative process, influencing pacing, intensity and structure as the visuals evolved. This back-and-forth helped shape each film into something that felt considered, playful and unmistakably LIWA.

The result was a future-lit desert environment where light, landscape, and sound worked together to deliver repeatable, high-impact moments night after night. An extreme playground of colour, energy and spectacle that could only exist at Tal Moreeb, and only at this scale.

Festival highlight video courtesy of Artists In Motion, included on this page to provide context for AIM’s work at LIWA International Festival.

This project forms part of ON THE SLY’s wider work delivering music and sound direction for live experiences, from projection mapping and architectural media to large-scale ceremonies and global public spectacles.