Under the stewardship of Scott Ciungan, Burst Sound and Lighting has grown substantially since he took over the company in 2013.
But when the 23-year-old first started working at the Detroit, MI-based production firm in 2005, he was still in high school. It was a weekend gig where he played the role of “shop kid,” cleaning cables and anything else that needed it.
Soon enough, however, that changed as he became increasingly involved with the company, eventually serving as then-owner Brian Johnson’s right-hand man.
From its founding in 1996 through the 2000s, the original Burst was a production provider for the underground dance music scene, so when Cuingan got his start, he was primarily working raves in abandoned buildings located in and around Detroit. While that sounds like a recipe for some “sketchy” situations, it actually proved quite instructive.
“There was the 24-box (EAW) KF850 rig having to go up three flights of stairs, as well as dealing with bad power, but I was never involved in a police raid or anything like that,” he says. “Still, it was eye opening; going from never doing that before to standing in front of a system that’s the loudest thing you’ve ever heard with 1,000 people on hand, so you learn the ropes.”
Falling Upward
Born and raised roughly 30 minutes outside of downtown Detroit on an island in the Detroit River called Gros Ile, Ciungan has been hanging out in the city since his early teens. “So I basically got my troubled youth days out of the way pretty early on and now I’m able to focus on running a company,” he notes, adding that his work with audio came about as much by circumstance as anything else: “I just kind of fell into it, liked it and it progressed from there.”
By his senior year of high school, he was working at Burst full time. “It’s funny. I was actually answering client phone calls in the middle of math class. Then after high school, I moved downtown and got real busy.”
In addition to running Burst, Johnson was also serving as the theatre manager at the high school, which is where the connection of the two was made. And even though he was handling sound and lighting for plays and other events at the school, Cuingan still wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.
“It wasn’t like I went to shows and said, ‘I want to do this forever.’ I wouldn’t be here without Brian,” he expounds. “If I’d never met him I wouldn’t know anything about pro sound and lighting, or even have had an introduction to it.”
Ciungan’s education in production was completely hands on. “I was just thrown to the wolves,” he says, laughing. “Brian and Larry Palmer – who owned another sound company around here, LCP Audio – were good friends. I started working with Larry part time as well, and between him and Brian it was pretty much, ‘Here’s a mixing console. There’s the band. Make it happen.’ From there, through trial and error, I figured it out and went from surviving to it becoming more of an artistic pursuit.”
He continued learning the ropes, growing into a day-to-day role as Johnson’s health ultimately took a turn for the worse. “Brian had been doing this for 15 years, and after a 10-year battle with cancer he was ready to close the book on the whole thing, but I asked him to give me a shot to see what I could do.”
Burst served its first festival in the summer of 2011, the year Ciungan graduated high school. “I was actually advancing the festival through my finals,” he notes. By age 21, he acquired the company after negotiating an asset purchase agreement with Johnson’s family.
“Brian had been sick for a long time and the plan was for me to take over, but things happened quicker than we’d all hoped. He passed away in January 2013, and his family had no interest in the entertainment industry, so I bought Burst’s assets and contracts and started my own company, Burst Sound and Lighting LLC, later that year.”
