Legends of the Sun Pig

According to my last.fm history, I’ve been listening to 65daysofstatic since February 2014, but it feels a lot longer. I got goosebumps when I heard their song “Debutante” show up in one of the early trailers for the game No Man’s Sky, and I was excited to hear that they would be working with Hello Games to produce the score for the game. Not only did they produce a soundtrack, but they also worked with the developers to create procedurally generated music to match the procedurally generated universe of the game. Their new album No Man’s Sky: Music For An Infinite Universe is one of the outputs, and this is what they’re touring with now.

Two words I use to describe their music are “soaring” and “exultant”. I had thought that the best way to listen to their music was on headphones, turned up LOUD, but no. The best way to listen to them is live, with the bass and drums clawing their way through your resonating chest cavity, piercing guitars physically lifting you off the floor, and four guys on stage giving it their all. Their track “Unmake the Wild Light” contains moments where gentle keyboard and guitar patterns gradually build up a frenzy and erupt into dirty, squelchy bass drops. On the recordings they sound amazing, but when you’re standing right in front of a stack of amplifiers and the band all looks up from their instruments and stares defiantly into the audience while the moment crashes around you, the experience is unearthly.

Towards the end of the end of their set, guitarist Joe Shrewsbury talked about Leonard Cohen, who had died the previous night. With tears in his eyes, he said “he was my friend, even though I never met him.” The version of “Radio Protector” they then played seemed to have echoes of “Hallelujah” in it — just a few changes to the piano line here and there to pick up the melody. Or maybe it was my imagination.

I don’t have a set list for the gig. The names of instrumental tracks don’t tend to stick in my head very well, so although I knew the music, in many cases I couldn’t pin a name on the tracks. I know they started with “Monolith” from the new album, and ended their encore with “Debutante” (which was amazing). “Unmake the Wild Light” was in there, as were “Crash Tactics”, “Retreat! Retreat!”, “Prisms”, and “Supermoon”. (No “Tiger Girl”.)(Setlist.fm doesn’t have a record of the gig yet, either.)

Also, in the same week that I saw my first gig at the HMH, this was my first time at the Q-Factory. Nice little venue, capacity around 300.

Another Fiona-inspired concert. I got us tickets when they first went on sale earlier in the year, but it wasn’t until after the Passenger gig that I actually listened to The Lumineers at all. I had noticed that the Song Exploder podcast had an episode about their song Ophelia. Fiona and I listened to that while we were stuck in the queue trying to get out of the Arena car park after Passenger, and then we listened to the album Cleopatra on the rest of the way home. It’s really good, and it was stuck in my head for most of the following week when I was over in Glasgow.

This concert was the first time I had been to the Heineken Music Hall. It’s an impressive venue. What struck me most about it was how tall it is. We got ourselves a good spot about ten heads from the stage. From there the stage seemed really wide, but the ceiling was just miles away. Acoustics were great, too. The sound was big and rich, without being overwhelming.

Opening act was Bahamas. While I appreciated the effort, they are more of a cool-down than a warm-up band. Their music is gentle and mellow, and although there were a few songs where they let loose, they didn’t seem to put much effort into getting the audience excited.

The Lumineers themselves were splendid. More earnest and soulful than I usually go for, but undeniably powerful and engaging. Despite being an essentially acoustic band with low-key songs on a huge stage, they really filled the space with their presence. In a call-out to their years as a small band playing tiny venues, they migrated to a secondary stage right in the middle of the crowd for a few songs in the middle of their set. Nice thought, but I’m not sure if it was a particularly useful move – the smaller stage was lower down and less visible.

Set list at Setlist.fm, because although I have listened to Cleopatra quite a bit, I didn’t know enough of their older material to recognize the other songs. Great cover of “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, though.

Solo guitar and voice singer-songwriters aren’t generally my cup of tea, but Fiona was excited that Passenger was playing the Ziggo Dome, so I went along with her. Note to self: trust Fiona’s concert recommendations. He put on a great show. The Netherlands was one of the first countries where his breakthrough hit “Let Her Go” went big, and he clearly has a fondness for the country, as well as a huge following here. The Ziggo Dome holds about 17,000 people, and it was close to capacity. He told us that this was his biggest headline show to date, and the crowd lapped it up. (Apparently he’ll be releasing a DVD of the concert at some point, which is cool.)

On his new album, Young As The Morning, Old As The Sea the song “Beautiful Birds” is a duet with Birdy. He playfully teased the audience with the possibility of her joining him in a duet…but she wasn’t on tour with him, and so he did the number himself. Which meant that when he told the story of opening for Ed Sheeran at the Heineken Music Hall in 2012, the audience was primed for him to tease us again. Only this time he actually brought out Ed Sheeran on stage to sing “Heart’s On Fire” together, and the crowd went crazy. Ed Sheeran has been on a break for the last year or so, and this was the first time he had performed since 2015. It was kinda special.

Set list on Setlist.fm

(No chance of catching any decent photos with the iPhone 5 at that distance, though.)

For a much better quality view of the evening, Passenger uploaded video of his encore of “Home” and “Holes”:

On the weekend of 22/23 October Abi and I took an overnight trip to the Valk hotel De Witte Bergen, just outside Hilversum. It’s not far away form us at all — just a 45 minute drive away — but we always like these opportunities to get away and get out. We had dinner in the hotel on the Saturday evening (fine, but the service was curiously slow), and a leisurely breakfast the next morning. Then we parked the car a few kilometers to the south and took a walk through the Hooge and Lage Vuursche forests. I was still in a mood for photograhy, so I brought the big old lumpy DiMage A200 with me to play around with. After the walk we had some apple pie at Theehuis ‘t Hooge Erf.

Nice work on the lighting effects.

Also, good job Google Photos on the auto-enhance:

From my new Google account for shared photos, as part of my new photos workflow, Google selected that one for “auto-enhancement”.)

Our local landmark the Twiskemolen (Twiske windmill) was devastated the other day when a small tornado (yes, really) whipped through the area and ripped off its blades. I took a walk yesterday to see it for myself.

For reference, here’s what it looked like on 10th May 2015, when kids from the local schools had painted special decorative sails for the windmill’s anniversary celebrations:

I hope it can be repaired.